Just when I thought I had witnessed the worst of the atrocities committed by Israel. Just when I imagined I could see nothing more horrific than the scenes of extreme suffering I have already watched during this year long genocide, in the early hours of Monday Oct 14th I saw people in hospital beds, still attached to IV drips, burning alive after an Israeli strike on Deir al Balah, a tent camp in which Palestinians had sought shelter in the grounds of Al Aqsa hospital.
We saw clearly a poor soul writhing in agony as the people outside screamed in torment, unable to reach him. His name was Sha’ban Al -Dalou, a 19 year old software engineering student at Al Azhar University of Gaza. I have taken the decision to show a still of what happened to him here only to expose the sickening barbarity of Israel. So often, the human cost of iniquitous western backed savagery is hidden from the public leading to the bolstering of public support for it.
I will never forget these images. They are seared into my heart and mind forever. No-one who saw it will ever be the same. Imagine then the indescribable pain of those in Gaza who witnessed this first hand, of those relatives of the victims dying in the inferno.
Volunteer surgeon Mohammad Tahir told Al Jazeera: ‘it’s a horror show here. Honestly, sometimes I feel like this is not real life, that this can go on, and this degree of suffering is allowed to happen in this world.’ Not only that, but the scale of the suffering is consistently minimised, justified, suppressed, or ignored by western mainstream media.
I watched Sky News yesterday morning as Kay Burley read out the names of four Israeli soldiers killed by a Hezbollah attack on a military base. Her tone was sorrowful as pictures of the soldiers were shown to the audience. Back to Kay, who looked at the camera and mournfully added, ‘as I said, all four of them just nineteen years old’. Headlines on this story on Sky News’s website prominently carried the word, ‘teenagers’, even as the same piece stated that ‘twenty-three Palestinians’, whose names we will never know, were killed.
I asked Burley on X why not one of the tens of thousands of Palestinian victims of Israel’s atrocities over the last year warranted this kind of deep humanisation? Not one Palestinian has been named by any mainstream media outlet! Not even as we have seen the lifeless bodies of children being carried by parents screaming in grief. Not even the child whose remains were carried by their stricken father in a plastic bag was deemed worthy of being made human for the viewer.
What are the names of the children who have had limbs amputated without anaesthetic, or who have had their horrific injuries treated on hospital floors? Who were the babies whose decomposing bodies were found still in their incubators after hospital staff were forced to leave them to die at the point of IDF guns? Who are the people buried in mass graves in Gaza? Who are the children who have starved to death? What are the names of those still missing under the rubble??
Social media erupted with outrage on Monday at the latest phase of utterly disgraceful reporting, many posts pointing out that a Sky News ‘expert’ explaining away the killing of a three year old Palestinian girl, described her as a ‘young lady’. Yes, within the warped corporate media landscape, nineteen year old combatants are ‘teenagers’ while a three year old child is a ‘young lady’, the ‘expert’ helpfully adding, ‘it looks like a stray bullet accidentally found its way’ into the vehicle carrying her. ‘accidentally’, ‘found its way’. The shameful manipulation of language here employed with the sole aim of diminishing the impact of Israel’s crimes for the audience, as well as reducing sympathy for any Palestinian victim, even a three year old child.
Sky News then compounded its disgrace by using an image of the burning hospital at Deir al Balah along with text misleading the public into believing it was a picture of Iran’s attack on Israel on Oct 1st:
Note how this blatant, and you can be sure deliberate, distortion departs from reality. Why has not Sky News, nor any other corporate news outlet, reported that last Thursday the United Nations released a report which found Israel ‘perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system’. The report concluded that Israel is ‘committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities’.
Do you remember this being headline news? Me neither. Perhaps if it had been then the routine lies spouted by Israeli officials after each atrocity which are then obediently parroted without challenge by the likes of Burley and her corporate media cohorts would strike the viewer as the depraved excuses for deliberate extermination they actually are.
Another glaring example of this twisted bias was the subject of social media outrage in the last few days when Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News posted this on X:
Is the modus operandi becoming clear? Did we really expect Israel to change its depraved policy of targeting hospitals when it turned its murderous spotlight on Lebanon? And here is Guru-Murthy providing us with another textbook example of a so-called ‘objective’ journalist clearly acting as a mouthpiece for official Israeli sources. Several people on X, including ex-British ambassador Craig Murray, responded with a photograph of a church bombed by Israel in Lebanon with variations of the caption: ‘will this be reported as a Hezbollah linked Catholic church?’
Sky News then compounded its disgrace by using an image of the burning hospital at Deir al Balah along with text misleading the public into believing it was a picture of Iran’s attack on Israel on Oct 1st:
Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, co-founder of Gaza Medic Voices who spent two weeks working in Gaza in March this year appeared on CNN recently where she movingly and articulately dismantled the entire corporate media warped edifice on Israel’s actions over the last year. She was asked by the anchor about the ‘humanitarian crisis’ in Gaza but Dr. Haj-Hassan, voice breaking, was not going to accept this distortion:
‘In all honesty Kate, a humanitarian crisis is what you deal with when you have a hurricane, an earthquake…this is different, this is not a humanitarian crisis. Kate, and I’m going to say this very clearly for your viewers to hear, this is genocide…
When 70 percent of the population who are killed are women and children, when the population is starved of food, of water, of medicine when you have repeated attacks on all the hospitals, clinics, aid distribution sites, the humanitarian aid agencies…churches, mosques, schools, and in the last 24 hours, a hospital… the hospital where I was personally working, and I can tell you they are working every second of every day to try and sustain life, when Israel’s strategy, when all evidence on the ground suggests they are doing the exact opposite. There was an orphanage targeted earlier this week…
These are the types of places being targeted, so it’s really hard to hear it over and over again being framed in the way it’s being framed in the media, which frankly Kate is very misleading. 365 days of this…history books will be written on this, and…media agencies will have to reckon with their major role in the genocide of an entire population, and in the destruction of humanitarian law and the rule of order.’
Dr. Haj-Hassan’s words would have caused panic in CNN’s backroom believe me. Words of truth like these are usually filtered from the public by a system which ensures only approved ‘experts’, such as the one Sky News platformed to ensure that the murder of the three year old child by the IOF was ‘correctly’ put in context, are the norm. If live guests ever do depart from the official narrative they usually are cut off abruptly by the anchor or some sudden ‘technical fault’ is blamed.
The track record of the corporate media in legitimising western perpetrated/backed wars and terrorism around the globe is sickeningly consistent; from Iraq to Afghanistan, from Libya to Syria, and many more, the ‘mainstream’ news – what an indictment that it is considered mainstream – has played the crucial role in selling it all to the British public. Why?
Why do the people who work within it operate in this way? Aren’t they highly trained journalists committed to objectivity as their overarching principle as they never tire of telling us? Aren’t they intelligent, respectable people? Do they not exemplify the integrity required for such a responsibility? How is it then that they have ended up whitewashing a genocide?
There is an answer to this. I first began writing about it over fifteen years ago when my anger at the obvious distortion I was witnessing every night on the TV news led me to investigate the situation and challenge individual corporate journalists. There is an answer to why seemingly decent people spend their days propagandising the British public in the service of quelling unease about murderous enterprises. I’ll tell you the answer in part 2.
Alison Banville is an independent journalist, co-editor of BSNews, a singer/songwriter, performance poet and activist.
