Why is the same western media obsessively reheating
five-month-old allegations against Hamas so reluctant to focus on
Israel’s current, horrifying atrocities?
[First published by Middle East Eye]
Hostages
tortured to death. Parents executed in front of their children. Doctors
beaten. Babies murdered. Sexual assault weaponised.
No, not Hamas
crimes. This is part of an ever-growing list of documented atrocities
committed by Israel in the five months since 7 October – quite separate
from the carpet bombing of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza and a famine
induced by Israel’s obstruction of aid.
Last week, an investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz disclosed
that some 27 Palestinians seized off Gaza’s streets over the past five
months are known to have died during interrogations inside Israel.
Some were denied medical treatment. But most are likely to have been tortured to death.
Three months ago, a Haaretz editorial warned that Israeli jails “must not become execution facilities for Palestinians”.
Israeli
TV channels have been excitedly taking viewers on tours of detention
centres, showing the appalling conditions Palestinians are kept in, as
well as the psychological and physical abuse they are subjected to.
An Israeli judge recently called the makeshift cages in which Palestinians are held “unsuitable for humans”.
Remember,
a large proportion of the 4,000 or so Palestinians taken hostage by
Israel since 7 October – probably the vast majority – are civilians,
like the men and boys paraded through Gaza’s streets or held in a stadium stripped of clothing before being dragged off to a dark cell in Israel.
Presumably, Israel has wished to avoid undermining its careful messaging that only Hamas weaponises violence against women.
But
according to United Nations legal experts, Palestinian women are
suffering the most degrading forms of abuse at the hands of the Israeli
military.
The experts observed
that Palestinian women and girls in detention were reportedly being
subjected to “multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped
naked and searched by male Israeli army officers.
"At least
two female Palestinian detainees were reportedly raped while others
were reportedly threatened with rape and sexual violence."
Soldiers are also believed to have taken photos of female detainees in degrading circumstances and then uploaded them online.
Palestinian
women and girls in Gaza are also reported by their families to have
gone missing after contact with the Israeli army.
“There are
disturbing reports of at least one female infant forcibly transferred by
the Israeli army into Israel, and of children being separated from
their parents, whose whereabouts remain unknown,” they said.
Those confessions were cited by western allies as the grounds – in fact, the only known grounds – for cutting off funding
to the UN relief agency UNRWA, the last lifeline for Gaza’s starving
population. It was these claims, extracted through torture, that helped
Israel rationalise its imposing of a famine on Gaza.
Of the 1,000 detainees
subsequently released, 29 were children, one as young as six, and 80
women. Some were reported to have cancer and chronic illnesses such as
Alzheimer’s.
According to the UN investigation,
Palestinians reported severe punishment beatings, being caged with
attack dogs, and suffering sexual assault. Physical evidence – such as
broken ribs, dislocated shoulders, bite marks, and burns – was still
visible many weeks later.
Israeli snipers have fired into Gaza’s hospitals, killing medical staff and patients there.
The
Israeli military has used Palestinians as human shields, including one
man sent into a hospital, his hands bound, to announce an Israeli order
to evacuate the premises. Israeli forces executed him on his return.
Those trying to follow such evacuation orders, waving white flags, have been shot at.
Medical
facilities have been repeatedly invaded by the Israeli military in
stark violation of international law. Those who could not be evacuated,
such as premature babies, have been left to die unattended, even while Israeli soldiers were occupying the building.
This
week, the BBC interviewed medical staff who reported being tortured,
savagely beaten and having attack dogs set on them inside the Nasser
hospital in Khan Younis after Israeli soldiers stormed it.
One, Dr Ahmed Abu Sabha, had his hands broken. He told the BBC: “They put me on a chair and it was like a gallows. I heard sounds of ropes, so I thought I was going to be executed.”
At
another stage, he and other detainees were beaten in the back of a
truck, while only in their underwear. They were taken to a gravel pit,
where they were made to kneel blindfolded. They believed they were about
to be executed.
During his eight days as hostage, Sabha was never questioned.
Dozens more medics are believed missing, presumed to still be in Israeli detention.
Photographs
published by the BBC also show patients in the grounds of Nasser
hospital in beds with their hands bound tightly above their heads.
Those
who died were left to decompose by Israeli soldiers. A doctor there, Dr
Hatim Rabaa, told the BBC: “Patients were screaming, ‘Please remove
them [the corpses] from here'. I was telling them, 'It isn't in my
hands'."
Other examples of murderous cruelty are documented daily. Unarmed Palestinians, including those waving white flags, have been shot dead by Israeli soldiers. Palestinian parents have been executed in cold blood in front of their children. There have been repeated episodes of Israeli forces gunning down en masse desperate Palestinians trying to reach aid, as happened yet again this week.
Even Israeli hostages trying to escape their captors have been killed by the very Israeli soldiers they were trying to surrender to.
These
are just some of the cases of Israeli sadism and barbarity that have
surfaced briefly in western media coverage, soon to be forgotten.
The
western establishment media has been chock full of the most lurid
allegations of savagery directed against Hamas, sometimes with little or
no supporting evidence. Claims that Hamas beheaded babies or put them
in ovens – emblazoned on front pages – were later found to be nonsense.
Accusations
against Hamas have been endlessly reheated to paint a picture of a
supremely dangerous and bestial militant group, in turn rationalising
the carpet bombing and starvation of Gaza’s population to “eradicate” it
as a terrorist organisation.
But equally barbarous atrocities
committed by Israel – not in the heat of battle, but in cold blood – are
treated as unfortunate, isolated incidents that cannot be connected,
that paint no picture, that reveal nothing of import about the military
that carried them out.
If Hamas’ crimes were so savage and
sadistic they still need to be reported months after they took place,
why does the establishment media never feel the need to express equal
horror and indignation at the acts of cruelty and sadism being inflicted
by Israel on Gaza – not five months ago, but right now?
This is
part of a pattern of behaviour by the western media that leads to only
one possible deduction: Israel’s five-month-long attack on Gaza is not
being reported. Rather, it is being selectively narrated – and for the
most obscene of purposes.
Through consistent and glaring failures
in their coverage, establishment media – including supposedly liberal
outlets, from the BBC and CNN to the Guardian and New York Times – have
smoothed the way for Israel to carry out mass slaughter in Gaza, what
the World Court has assessed as plausibly a genocide.
The
role of the media has not been to keep us, their audiences, informed
about one of the greatest crimes in living memory. It has been to buy
time for US President Joe Biden to keep arming his most useful of client
states in the oil-rich Middle East, and to do so without damaging his
prospects for re-election in November’s US presidential vote.
If Russian President Vladimir Putin was a madman
and a barbarous war criminal for invading Ukraine, as every western
media outlet agrees, what does that make Israeli officials, when every
one of them supports far worse atrocities in Gaza, directed
overwhelmingly at civilians?
And more to the point, what
does that make Biden and the US political class for materially backing
Israel to the hilt: sending bombs, vetoing demands for a ceasefire at
the United Nations, and freezing desperately needed aid?
Worrying about the optics, the president expresses his discomfort, but he carries on helping Israel regardless.
While
western politicians and commentators worry about some imaginary
existential threat those brief events of five months ago pose to the
nuclear-armed state of Israel, Israel is quite literally wiping Gaza off
the map day by day, quite undisturbed.
One is the argument that Hamas “started it” –
insinuated in the endless claim that, in destroying Gaza, Israel has
been “responding” or “retaliating” to the violence of 7 October.
This
is a justification for killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and
starving two million more that should never have been let out of the
playground. But worse, it is patent nonsense. Hamas did not initiate
anything on 7 October, except for handing Israel a pretext to wreck
Gaza.
The enclave has been under a crushing siege for 17 years, in
which its land, sea and air were patrolled constantly by Israel. Its
population was denied the essentials of life. They had no freedom of
movement apart from inside their cage.
Long before the current Israeli-induced famine, Israel’s trade restrictions had ensured high levels of malnutrition among Gaza’s children. Most exhibited too the scars of deep psychological trauma from constant and massive attacks by Israel on Gaza.
Biden crows about building a “temporary pier” – weeks or months
down the road – to bring aid into Gaza that is desperately needed now.
But there is a reason the enclave lacks a seaport and airport. Israel bombed
the only airport back in 2001, long before Hamas took charge of Gaza.
It has been attacking and killing fishermen trawling just off Gaza's
coast for years.
Israel has refused to allow Gaza to connect to the world – and break free of Israeli control – ever since.
Hamas
started nothing on 7 October. It was simply a new, and particularly
gruesome phase in what has been decades of Palestinian resistance to
Israel’s belligerent occupation of Gaza.
Hamas
supposedly demonstrated a degree of sadism in its killing spree on 7
October inside Israel that marks it out from Israel’s far larger killing
spree in Gaza.
That has been the basis for every media interview that requires guests to “condemn” Hamas before they are allowed to express concern about the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. No one is asked to condemn Israel.
It
is the basis too for permitting Israeli spokespeople to claim
unchallenged that Israel targets only Hamas, not civilians, even while
some three-quarters of Gaza’s dead are women and children.
On the
BBC’s evening news last weekend, presenter Clive Myrie made precisely
this preposterous assertion as he intoned that since 7 October, “Israel
launched a relentless bombing campaign targeting members of Hamas.”
But
the latest revelations of the 27 reported deaths in Israeli torture
centres and the testimonies of beaten medics from Nasser Hospital
confirm how bogus this entire narrative framing by the western media is –
one intended to mislead and misinform audiences.
Israel claims
it is targeting Hamas, but its actions tell an entirely different story.
Famine will kill off the sick and vulnerable long before it does Hamas
fighters.
The truth is, Israel is not primarily eradicating
Hamas. It is eradicating Gaza. Its crimes are at least as cruel and
savage as anything Hamas did on 7 October – and its atrocities have been
carried out on a far larger scale and for far longer.
Western
establishments and their media have been waging a giant campaign of
misdirection for the past five months, as they have against Palestinians
over previous years and decades. Western publics have been encouraged
to look in the wrong direction
Until that changes, the men, women
and children of Gaza will continue to pay the heaviest of prices at the
hands of a vengeful, sadistic Israeli military.
[Many thanks to Dr Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]