The silent partnership: How western media whitewash Gaza crimes

Israel’s justification for the mass killing of Gaza’s people and the imposition of starvation—now officially recognized by the UN as engineered famine—was from the outset built on a series of discredited lies.

It comes as no surprise that the Israeli regime has continued with such shameful fabrications—just as all genocidal regimes do—in order to destroy Gaza’s most basic means of survival.

This regime cut off humanitarian aid provided by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) and demolished hospitals in the Strip, while massacring, imprisoning, and torturing its medical staff.

The regime claimed it had documents proving the UN was a front for the Palestinian resistance, yet it never produced any evidence. Attacks on all 36 of Gaza’s hospitals were carried out on that pretext, but no alleged “military command centers” were ever found.

By pushing this narrative, Israel arrested and imprisoned Gaza’s leading doctors, who had been working day and night to treat the endless wave of disabled, wounded, sick, and traumatized civilians. And, as every genocidal regime does—especially one that pretends to be “a democracy with the most moral army in the world”—it has cloaked its crimes in darkness.

Israel barred foreign journalists, including Western correspondents, from entering Gaza, and then systematically assassinated Palestinian journalists trapped inside the besieged territory. According to the latest figures, more than 200 journalists in Gaza have been killed; 11, including Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye reporters, were killed in just the past few weeks.

For most of the past 22 months of genocide, Western media outlets shrugged off the fact that their colleagues in Gaza were being killed one after another, and claimed there was “nothing to see here.”

This continued until this month, when Israel’s airstrike killed six Palestinian journalists, including Al Jazeera’s entire five-member Gaza City team.

The attack came as Israel recalled 60,000 troops for a final assault on the ruins of Gaza City, where around one million Palestinians—including 500,000 children—remain trapped in hunger.

Gaza’s people are either massacred or herded into what Israel cynically calls a “humanitarian city” near the Egyptian border—essentially a forced-labor camp—where, under Israel’s grim plan, they await final expulsion, potentially to South Sudan, a country Israel has armed and fueled with violence.

Smear campaign

Israel justified the killing of Al Jazeera staff by claiming that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anas Al-Sharif was a member of the resistance. This was as absurd as Israel’s other baseless excuses for depriving aid workers and imprisoning hundreds of Gaza’s medical staff.

Gaza’s doctors—who for nearly two years, deprived of basic medicine and equipment, faced daily casualty numbers comparable to natural disasters—have long been targets of Israel’s smear campaigns.

Anas Al-Sharif, the slain Al Jazeera reporter, was among the main targets. For 22 months, he appeared on camera around the clock, broadcasting Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe under Israeli war to the world. This alone exposes the emptiness of Israel’s claims to discredit him.

The name of the secret unit responsible for such campaigns was never meant to be revealed. But a +972 Magazine report, days after Al-Sharif’s assassination, disclosed that Israel’s so-called “Legitimacy Unit” was tasked with justifying crimes through storytelling and victim-blaming, so that Israeli and Western audiences would find the genocide acceptable.

According to +972’s exposé, the “Legitimacy Unit” was created in October 2023 to help Israel fabricate narratives against journalists, doctors, and others in Gaza for Western media.

Fabricated evidence

+972, citing three Israeli intelligence sources, reported that the unit was not about security but propaganda—what in Israel is known as Hasbara, the regime’s public-relations campaign to justify actions against Palestinians.

The unit worked aggressively to justify the killing of Gaza’s journalists to prevent their reports from exposing Israeli crimes. Intelligence officials admitted that its mission was to “allow Israel to prolong the war” by delaying Western public opposition strong enough to pressure governments to halt support for Israel’s killing machine.

Another source explained: “The idea was to let the IDF operate without pressure, so countries like the U.S. wouldn’t stop supplying weapons.”

In their eagerness to push talking points to Western audiences, Israeli officials resorted to ridiculous fabrications. After assassinating Al Jazeera reporter Ismail Al-Ghoul and his cameraman in July 2024, Israel released fake documents claiming he had been a Palestinian resistance commander at age 10.

Similar baseless justifications were made for the targeted killings of Anas Al-Sharif, Hossam Shabat, and other Palestinian journalists.

Beyond Gaza

The smear campaign did not stop at Gaza. Netanyahu himself accused Al Jazeera of collaborating with Palestinian resistance, providing cover to outlaw the network and raid its West Bank office.

This strategy mirrored Israel’s campaign against UNRWA, in which it used outrageous lies to expel the agency and expose Palestinians to Israeli troops and a U.S.-backed mercenary group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

The GHF’s so-called “aid centers” became sites of lethal shootings—paradoxically advancing Israel’s starvation campaign, for which Netanyahu is now pursued by the International Criminal Court.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) had already warned in July that Al-Sharif’s life was in imminent danger, describing him as the target of an Israeli military smear campaign meant to pave the way for his assassination.

Those warnings seemed justified when IDF spokesperson Avichay Adraee accused Al-Sharif last month of “tarnishing Israel’s image” by reporting on its starvation campaign. This, while the UN, WHO, and major rights groups were warning of famine, and the IPC food security index placed Gaza at the highest level of famine.

Just as Israel engineered Gaza’s famine by discrediting and dismantling UN aid agencies, it seeks to silence coverage of that famine by smearing and assassinating Palestinian journalists.

Disproportion and war crimes

Even if Israel’s baseless claims about journalists were taken at face value—which, given its history of lies, is highly implausible—the killings remain grossly disproportionate. Journalists targeted in hospitals and tents were civilians, making the strikes clear war crimes.

While Israeli deceit is expected, the complicity of Western media in amplifying its lies is shocking. Despite being barred from Gaza, Western outlets—German, British, and others—have echoed Israel’s talking points, and barely covered +972’s revelations about the “Legitimacy Unit.”

Western media have effectively taken on some of that unit’s tasks. Piers Morgan’s online show Uncensored has starkly illustrated how Western journalists willingly embrace racist assumptions about non-Western reporters.

Devaluing lives

What Western coverage has omitted is this: Israel has killed over 240 Palestinian journalists in Gaza over the past two years—more than the total number killed in both world wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav wars, and Afghanistan combined.

The UN Special Rapporteur on free expression recently stated: “Israel is executing a highly targeted program to eliminate any independent reporting from Gaza.”

By accepting Israel’s obvious lies, Western media are not only abandoning journalistic ethics but also endangering the few journalists still reporting in Gaza—signaling that their lives are disposable.

Worse still, Western journalists themselves are normalizing a precedent that poses grave risks to their own safety in future conflicts.

Pattern of lies

The false narratives of Israel’s “Legitimacy Unit” only succeed because Western journalists accept them, preparing their audiences to swallow similar distortions in the future.

Israel established this unit precisely because it knows how easily Western fears can be exploited. It channels its narrative through Western spokespeople fluent in native languages, who play on deep colonial anxieties of a “threat to civilization.”

But as Israel’s genocide drags on, month after month, Western audiences are finding it harder to accept these stories. With Gaza’s mass bombardment and engineered famine laid bare, it is increasingly impossible to conceal the bigger picture: not “self-defense,” but genocidal ambition.

The emaciated bodies of Gaza’s children now speak more powerfully than any UN statement.

Last week, +972 revealed that, contrary to months of Israeli claims that most Gaza casualties were fighters, the army’s own figures show that more than four out of five victims are civilians.

This is deliberate. In a leaked audio file aired on Israel’s Channel 12, IDF intelligence chief Aharon Haliva is heard saying that killing tens of thousands of Palestinians is “necessary for future generations.”

In other words, from the outset, the IDF’s goal in Gaza has been indiscriminate slaughter to enforce permanent silence.

As images of Gaza’s destruction and engineered famine spread, audiences cannot ignore the growing death toll.

Western media have played an undeniable role in legitimizing Israel’s massacres and genocide in Gaza. They have proven to be wholly unreliable arbiters of truth.

And yet, this genocide reveals a broader lesson: the obscuring of Gaza’s annihilation—and the West’s complicity in it—lays bare a high-definition picture of racist and colonial agendas.