Israel’s ‘Flour Massacre’ – When A Crime Becomes A ‘Tragedy’

Media Lens

(...) Far from jumping through hoops ‘to be balanced and impartial,’ the BBC seems embarrassed even to associate Israel with its own crimes. A typical BBC headline read:

‘World Food Programme says northern Gaza aid convoy blocked’

Was there a landslide? Was Hamas playing politics with food aid? The headline should have read:

‘Israel blocks northern Gaza aid convoy’

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Or consider the damning words of the Director-General of The World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who reported this month:

‘Grim findings during @WHO visits to Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals in northern #Gaza: severe levels of malnutrition, children dying of starvation, serious shortages of fuel, food and medical supplies, hospital buildings destroyed…

‘The situation at Al-Awda Hospital is particularly appalling, as one of the buildings is destroyed.

‘Kamal Adwan Hospital is the only paediatrics hospital in the north of Gaza, and is overwhelmed with patients. The lack of food resulted in the deaths of 10 children.’

The BBC headline reporting this story read:

‘Children starving to death in northern Gaza – WHO’

Did the crops fail? If Russia had caused child starvation in Ukraine, we can be confident the words ‘Putin’ and ‘Russia’ would have appeared front and centre in BBC reporting. (...)

On 29 February, a New York Times comment piece was titled:

‘Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children’

Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook commented:

‘Israel is choosing to starve Gaza’s children by blocking aid.’

On 5 March, a Reuters headline read:

‘As Gaza’s hunger crisis worsens, emaciated children seen at hospitals’

Author Assal Rad responded:

‘Gaza’s “hunger crisis” is not a natural phenomenon. Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians in Gaza as a weapon of war, which is an act of collective punishment and a war crime.’ (...)

At least 118 Palestinian civilians were killed and at least 760 were injured after Israeli tanks opened fire on civilians seeking food from aid trucks on al-Rashid street to the west of Gaza City. The BBC’s immediate headline reactions were full of mystery:

‘Israel-Gaza war latest: More than 100 reported killed as crowd waits for Gaza aid’ (...)

Clearly, then, it was a massacre; so why the lack of clarity? Why was the word ‘massacre’ not used to describe a textbook example of a massacre in a report supposed to verify and clarify the truth?

As we noted recently, the Glasgow Media Group examined four weeks (7 October – 4 November, 2023) of BBC One daytime coverage of Gaza to identify which terms were used by journalists themselves – i.e. not in direct or reported statements – to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths. They found that ‘murder’, ‘murderous’, ‘mass murder’, ‘brutal murder’ and ‘merciless murder’ were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. The group noted that:

‘The same pattern could be seen in relation to “massacre”, “brutal massacre” and “horrific massacre” (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths); “atrocity”, “horrific atrocity” and “appalling atrocity” (22 times for Israeli deaths, once for Palestinian deaths); and “slaughter” (five times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths).’ (...)

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Tags: #media #media_bias #news #journalism #journalist #bbc #the_guardian #reuters #new_york_times #israel #gaza #palestine #palestinians #war #war_crimes #starvation #massacre #aid #humanitarian_aid #weapons