Misreporting Gaza is a sign that journos need to read up and grow up

Al Ahli hospital in Gaza, the day after a mis-fired rocket landed there in October.

Fascinating about the more than 300 journalists who have signed a statement on reporting the war in Gaza is how little the statement reflects actual reporting here.

Most mainstream media have for almost two months treated information from the Israel Defence Forces with extreme scepticism while publishing, without qualification, statements from various Gazan health and education spokespeople, all members of Hamas.

Either the media signatories have not been following the coverage or they want reporting exclusively from a Palestinian perspective. Point 1 of the statement calls on newsrooms to reject “bothsidesism” in favour of truth in reporting, suggesting the signatories can see only one legitimate perspective on Gaza?

How else to explain the statement’s failure to condemn the bestial murder, rape and defiling of dead Israeli citizens minding their own business in their own homes in their own country on October 7. Point 5 of the statement asserts, against all the evidence, “The conflict did not start on October 7”.

Really? Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, and Gazan workers entered Israel to work daily inside Israel right up until last October 6. That’s now down the memory hole of a profession charged with providing society’s institutional memory.

No wonder so many Australian Jews feel uncomfortable about what they see as a rise in anti-Semitism: much television and radio reporting here is informed by a clear view all Palestinians – but no Jews – are victims in this war. An early example on October 17 was ABC 7.30 where host Sarah Ferguson has in fact been a rare beacon of professionalism on the Gaza issue.

Ferguson interviewed Hamas international relations head Basem Naim who claimed it never planned to attack Israeli civilians on October 7. Nor had it planned to take hostages. All its targets were military so other groups must have infiltrated Hamas.

Luckily for local Palestine barrackers in journalism and teaching, the interview landed with what editors call “a dead cat bounce”. No one followed the story. If they had they might have learnt that civilian Gazans followed the terrorists that morning and some looted the homes and bodies of dead Israelis.

Truth about the journalists’ “open letter to Australian media outlets” is most Jews and supporters of Israel feel empathy for the Palestinians. It’s all over the Israeli media, yet here most news has been dominated by “onesideism” with scenes of devastation in northern Gaza and reports and video from Gazan journalists interviewing doctors and Gazan citizens who have lost homes and loved ones.

ABC 7.30 presenter Sarah Ferguson.

What the signatories have missed – and what has been largely absent from coverage here until the start of the hostage releases last week – has been reporting that “humanises” the Israeli captives being held in Gaza. Few local media have even reported that 200,000 Israelis have been internally displaced, leaving behind their homes in southern Israel.

Most have failed to report some released Israeli hostages were hidden in the homes of UN teachers and health workers who were also Hamas members. This is the media’s unconscious anti-Semitism: the turning of a blind eye to the suffering of Jews.

Some journalists on the political left have been duped on the Palestine issue since the former Soviet Union began consorting with the PLO in the early 1960s. How can reporters who support a range of social policies here back a terror organisation in Gaza that allows the mistreatment of women, the execution of homosexuals, the rape and murder of Jews and the Islamisation of its citizens?

Like “teachers for Palestine”, these journalists are making common cause with a death cult supported by the anti-Semitism of Iran and the long history of Jew hatred fostered by Hamas’s ideological parent, the Muslim Brotherhood. These journalists and teachers do not understand the complexities of the Middle East.

Even the journalists’ support for media colleagues killed in Gaza is not a simple matter. Of course Gazan journalists support the people of Gaza, but many also support Hamas and some even followed the terrorists into Israel on October 7, filming Hamas’s crimes and uploading the footage to social media.

Journalists doing their jobs do not deserve to lose their lives. They are bearing witness in the only way possible since Hamas controls what is published by Palestinians from within Gaza.

Much has been made in this column and elsewhere of the false reporting, fake death numbers and concocted pictures from the October 17 rocket fired by Hamas into the carpark of the Al-Ahli hospital. The BBC even reported the hospital, largely undamaged, had been flattened in the friendly fire rocket blast. Gazan journalists took immediately to social media to create a global storm about something that never happened.

Another hospital, the Turkish Al-Sadaqa hospital in northern Gaza, was allegedly hit by the IDF on October 30. Footage aired by Gazan journalists on social media was proven in a Reuters fact check to be of an attack in 2016 on the Omar bin Abdul Aziz Hospital in Aleppo, Syria. The footage was part of a clip published by the Aleppo Medical Centre in July 2016.

Basem Naim, a Hamas leader who is a former Gaza health minister.

Reporting about the IDF’s takeover of the Al-Shifa hospital has been just as inaccurate. Tablet magazine in 2014 outlined why the IDF and Israeli media knew about the Hamas control centre and tunnel network under Al-Shifa. Yet here several senior journalists on social media wrongly maintained as late as last week that the IDF had found nothing under the hospital.

Tablet on July 30, 2014 reported, “The Israelis are so sure about the Hamas bunker … because they built it back in 1983, when Israel still ruled Gaza. They built a secure underground operating room and tunnel network beneath Al-Shifa.”

It’s not just Gazan journalists spreading misinformation. The US news site Axios reported on October 25 that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had asked the Qatar prime minister to tone down Al Jazeera’s war reporting. Funded by the Qatar government, Al Jazeera has long faced criticism for its ties to Hamas.

Lest readers fear this is just US or Israeli bias against Al Jazeera, Memri on November 22 published a series of quotes criticising the damage done to the Middle East by Al Jazeera. Journalists from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen accuse the network of fostering terror and profiting from it.

The New York Sun on November 27 criticised The New York Times for its reporting of Palestinian casualties in Gaza. It said, “they cite the total number of deaths reported by the Hamas-controlled Gaza health authorities as gospel, and then hide in a one-sentence disclaimer that these Hamas-generated figures do not purport to ‘separate the deaths of civilians and combatants’. Nor do they identify how many of those counted as ‘civilians’ are actually Hamas collaborators who allow their homes to be used to hide rockets, tunnels or terrorists”.

Hamas’s guidelines for activists and journalists, published by Memri on July 17, 2014 make clear how the group plays the Western media.

Hamas’s Interior Ministry guidelines specify, “ Anyone killed or martyred is to be called a civilian from Gaza or Palestine … Don’t forget to always add ‘innocent civilian’ or ‘innocent citizen’ in your description of those killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza. Be sure to always perpetuate the principle of ‘the role of occupation is attack, and we in Palestine are fulfilling [the role of] reaction’.”

Note to Australian journalists and their union: grow up. Perhaps start by reading the history of the Arab world’s attacks on Israel in 1948, 1967 and 1973 to get the “context” your published statement says is needed.