Nor did most outlets in Australia bother to report the lowering of Hamas Health Ministry casualty figures, even though they had been reporting incorrect death tolls for more than 18 months.
Then-US president Joe Biden had warned only days after Hamas’s incursion on October 7, 2023, that journalists should not trust casualty numbers produced by Hamas.
This newspaper’s Anne Barrowclough on April 3 wrote: “Hamas has quietly dropped thousands of deaths from its Gaza war casualty figures, including those of women and children.”
The Jerusalem Post said while Hamas has claimed 70 per cent of its casualties were women and children it was now clear “72 per cent of fatalities between the ages of 13-55 are men — the demographic category aligns with Hamas combatants”.
This column and this newspaper have been publishing pieces based on academic statistical analysis for more than a year, challenging the inflated numbers of deaths of women and children in Hamas’s figures.
Turns out, as suspected, Hamas was including many deaths of natural causes, was artificially inflating women and children numbers, and had identified as dead many people who are in fact alive.
The updated numbers were produced by HonestReporting, a group sympathetic to Israel. But, the numbers are based on unbiased comparisons with Hamas-supplied names Hamas itself has now updated, removing 3400 deaths that didn’t happen.
Probably worse than media ignoring revisions to Hamas’s own casualty numbers were the largely ignored Gaza protests in late March and Hamas’s murder of at least six young Palestinian protesters.
How would editors who have been publishing uncorroborated stories alleging deliberate civilian massacres by Israel not think it newsworthy that hundreds of protesters were on the street demanding Hamas free the remaining Israeli hostages and leave the Gaza Strip permanently?
HonestReporting on March 26 asked why photojournalists working for Associated Press and Reuters in Gaza, usually quick to pump out pictures of any alleged Israeli atrocity, were absent from the protest late in the afternoon of March 25 when hundreds of Gazans took to the streets to demand Hamas leave.
Nothing appeared on the Reuters and AP platforms until the next day, and those stories quoted social media reports.
“And so news organisations that rely on Reuters and AP for Gaza coverage, and pay big bucks for it, had nothing to work with. Outlets like The New York Times, BBC, CNN, The Guardian and others had to rely on posts from X (formerly Twitter) as sources because the world’s biggest news agencies suddenly went AWOL,” HonestReporting said
In Australia, relentless anti-Israel social media campaigners Antoinette Lattouf and Randa Abdel-Fattah on X ignored both the protests and the revised casualty numbers while continuing to amplify social media posts by Hamas militants from within Gaza.
Neither showed any interest in Hamas’s murder of 22-year-old Palestinian protester Oday Nasser Al Rabay, whose badly beaten body was dragged through the streets and dumped on his parents’ doorstep.
Hundreds turned up for his funeral but few mainstream media covered his death and that of five others, apart from The Telegraph in London. Yet it was all there in detail in the Israeli media for Western correspondents to pick up.
HonestReporting commented on March 31: “AP wrote about … Gaza bakeries shutting down, Reuters reported on Netanyahu vowing to pressure Hamas, and The Guardian ran a story about Gazans in Israeli jails.”
The media class has fallen hard for the cause of radical Islamism and Israel hatred driven by the Qatar-backed government media broadcaster Al Jazeera.
Camera (the Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting and Analysis) has extracted apologies from CBS, Rolling Stone and others for claiming the war started when Israel attacked Gaza, forgetting the strike by Israel was part of an effort to rescue hostages.
Perhaps the biggest media failure on Gaza this year has been the withdrawal of a BBC documentary (Gaza: How to survive a war) and promotional material for it purporting to show the effects of Israel’s campaign on four young people trying to survive the conflict.
Independent British investigative journalist David Collier exposed the connections of those involved in making the documentary.
This column quoted Collier on February 18, 2024, in a report exposing the Hamas links of journalists who the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists had claimed were deliberately murdered by the Israel Defence Forces. Many of the journalists worked for either Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Collier revealed one child protagonist in the BBC film is the son of a senior Hamas minister. He also found one of the films’ cameramen had tweeted in support of October 7.
The BBC on February 27 was forced to admit the family of the Hamas Deputy Minister for Agriculture was paid for the role of his son in narrating the independently produced film.
Later, Collier exposed the true identity of another participant in the film — the director of a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-linked anti-Israeli propaganda NGO called Al Dameer.
All this by one of the world’s biggest media organisations with 21,000 employees.
Apart from turning a blind eye to Hamas, most Western media don’t bother reporting the anti-Semitism which emanates from Gaza.
The Middle East Media Research Institute on March 20 published video aired by Al Jazeera of Gaza Islamic scholar Sheikh Bilal Al-Ghalban.
From Khan Yunis he tells viewers: “Allah has gathered the Jews to Palestine from all parts of the world and brought them to their mass grave.”
The ignoring by Western journalists of debates about Hamas being conducted in Middle East media is worse. In Egypt and many Gulf States, senior political analysts in daily newspapers have for more than a year been calling for the removal of Hamas from Gaza and the return of the Palestinian Authority.
But, in Qatar, home of Al Jazeera and the regime which helps finance Hamas, journalists celebrated the legacy of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin on the 21st anniversary of his death.
MEMRI quotes Qatar daily Al-Sharq declaring: “Yassin’s memory lives on among the Palestinian people, that the path of Jihad, which he blazed and embarked upon, is still alive in Gaza and the procession of the martyrs will not stop until Palestine and Jerusalem are liberated.”
In Palestinian media the picture is very different. In his regular column in the Al-Ayyam daily, former PA minister for prisoners affairs Ashraf Al-Ajrami on March 3 wrote: “Hamas must acknowledge its terrible mistakes … Gaza cannot be reconstructed as long as its rule and its military wing exists.”
On March 26, he wrote Hamas must “strive for a deal in which it will give up all the Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners and an end to the war”.
Crickets from the Western journalists covering the conflict.
More Coverage
‘Not interested’: Media Watch refused to look into Myf ‘hit job’
ABC star Myf Warhurst’s fence-feuding neighbour’s plea that Media Watch investigate claims of a ‘cover-up’ involving the Spicks and Specks star fell on deaf ears. WATCH the confronting videos.
Sam Gazal, media investor and Sydney deal-maker, dies
Gazal, 87, who rode the corporate boom of the 1980s with a string of high-profile food and media deals, passed away on Wednesday.
The media has lost its way when major electronic news outlets fail to report demonstrations by Palestinians in Gaza demanding the Hamas Islamist terror organisation leave the enclave and release all Israeli hostages.