[News] UK journalists go to Gaza, but still cover up Israel’s genocide

[Anti-Imperialist News]

middleeasteye.net
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/even-gazas-ruins-uk-journalists-are-still-sanitising-genocide>
UK journalists go to Gaza, but still cover up Israel’s genocide
Hamza Yusuf
November 28, 2025
------------------------------

For more than two years, Israel
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/israel> has carried out a
remorseless campaign of erasure in Gaza
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/topics/israel-genocide-gaza>, reducing the
territory to rubble. Many Palestinians
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/palestine> in the enclave have
been turned into accidental journalists.

Amid Israel’s ban on foreign journalists, the only sources of information
have been the citizens living through and live-streaming the genocide
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/explainers/meaning-definition-what-genocide-israel-gaza>.
Even so, their courageous efforts were not widely appreciated.

“There are no journalists in Gaza,” David Lammy, then the British
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/uk> foreign secretary, asserted
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-david-lammy-blasted-claiming-no-journalists-gaza>
late last year. The same sentiment was expressed
<https://www.newarab.com/news/christiane-amanpour-says-there-are-no-journalists-gaza>
by prominent CNN presenter Christiane Amanpour.

The implication was that Palestinians could not be trusted to narrate their
reality accurately or objectively, and that only mainstream journalists
could serve as credible truth-tellers to aid public understanding.

Rooted in hubris, this theory has been put to the test and comprehensively
shattered, as journalists from Britain’s main broadcasters - including ITV,
Sky News and the BBC - recently entered Gaza, and characteristically
obscured the reality. They upheld the fiction that Gaza represents the site
of complex warfare, not meticulously orchestrated mass slaughter.

Or as some might say, business as usual.

Reporting from Gaza in early November, the BBC’s Lucy Williamson noted
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9ONnNFdNtQ>: “This is just a taste of
what two years of war has done to Gaza … Israel’s army says it’s still
fighting Hamas here almost every day.” The desolate landscape in Gaza is
framed as a byproduct of Israel’s violence, carefully directed exclusively
at Hamas.

An accompanying article <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rp4lrdv8ko>
persists with this characterisation of an intricate conflict. The headline
cites “total devastation after two years of war”, while the text reproduces
Israel’s usual robotic renditions of Hamas tunnels and terror
infrastructure, effectively whitewashing the sustained annihilation of
Palestinian life since October 2023, while justifying continued attacks.

An Israeli spokesperson is quoted directly as saying the level of
destruction was “not a goal”, and adding: “The goal is to combat
terrorists.” Above these quotes, the article features an image of the
pulverised and flattened neighbourhood of Shujaiya - highlighting the stark
contrast between the BBC’s framing and the inescapable truth.
Distorted picture

Although Israel’s brutality has not stopped, the BBC refers to the
ceasefire as leaving Gaza in a “tense limbo”. In reality, Israel has violated
the ceasefire
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-killed-over-300-palestinians-nearly-500-violations-gaza-ceasefire>
around 500 times since October, killing more than 300 Palestinians and
levelling
<https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/over-1-500-buildings-destroyed-by-israel-in-gaza-since-ceasefire-satellite-images-show/3742011>
hundreds of buildings.

The BBC’s reporting from Gaza capped off 25 months of distorted coverage,
painting a wildly inaccurate picture based on predetermined conclusions
about Israeli retaliation and “self-defence”, while ignoring the raw truth
of systematic ethnic cleansing. Doing that from the comfort of an office is
bad enough, but committing to it while standing amid the apocalypse in Gaza
is grotesque. What is long ingrained is not easily uprooted.

Days after the BBC’s report came a Sky News piece
<https://news.sky.com/story/patchwork-of-dust-and-misery-at-the-yellow-line-dividing-gaza-where-all-that-remains-are-skeletons-of-buildings-13472870>,
also from a Middle East correspondent embedded with the Israeli military.
It features similar descriptors about Gaza’s “devastation” and “wasteland”,
contextualised as the “scars of war”. An Israeli army spokesperson is
allowed to frame events: “We’re not staying here as a hobby. We’re staying
here to secure the people of Israel.”

Mainstream media in the UK have consistently told the wrong story about
Gaza. They have concealed, watered down and aimed to prevent the public
from connecting the dots

This positioning of Israel’s actions as solely reactive is preserved
throughout Sky’s reporting. When correspondent Adam Parsons mentions
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pep7YBW2xS0> hearing automatic gunfire
during his visit to Gaza, resulting in the deaths of Palestinians who were
allegedly crossing the “yellow line” that now divides the enclave, he
quickly inserts the Israeli version of events: “Israel says they were Hamas
terrorists.”

This bolsters the impression of Israeli soldiers engaging in violence only
to snuff out threats in a multifaceted war. “So long as Hamas still has
weapons, it is very hard to imagine Israel withdrawing from this blighted
land,” Parsons says.

Israel’s continued occupation
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/topics/occupation> of Gaza is illegal under
international law, yet mainstream media are all too eager to repackage it
as a military strategy rooted in necessity.

To its credit, unlike the BBC, the Sky News package included the
perspective of a Palestinian civilian in Gaza. While the Israeli military
did not allow embedded journalists to speak directly with Palestinians, the
interview was arranged through a colleague in the territory. “I’m giving
up,” said Iman Hasoneh
<https://news.sky.com/story/patchwork-of-dust-and-misery-at-the-yellow-line-dividing-gaza-where-all-that-remains-are-skeletons-of-buildings-13472870>,
a mother from Shujaiya. “One day they will just announce that we have all
been killed.”

What should have been a perspective supplementing the story of a population
subjected to two years of unparalleled horror, is presented merely as an
allegation countering a plethora of Israeli claims. Such framing reinforces
the illusion of a complicated war defined by two irreconcilable narratives
and unfortunate casualties, far removed from the conditions on the ground,
where indiscriminate bombardment has killed tens of thousands of people. More
than 80 percent
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/21/israeli-data-shows-83-percent-of-gaza-war-dead-are-civilians-report>
of Gaza’s war dead were reportedly civilians.
Deceptive framing

It’s worth reflecting upon what Gaza has endured during Israel’s merciless
carpet bombing over the past two years. A recent UN report
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/25/rebuilding-human-made-abyss-gaza-un?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other>
noted that Israel has created a “human-made abyss” in Gaza, and
“significantly undermined every pillar of survival”.

The executive director of Unicef noted in July that an average of 28
children
<https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/unicef-executive-director-catherine-russells-remarks-humanitarian-situation-children?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template>
were killed daily in Gaza - the equivalent of “a whole classroom of
children killed, every day for nearly two years”. The International
Committee of the Red Cross diagnosed it
<https://www.ft.com/content/a9c1267a-2aaf-4e87-9ecf-3104be792394> as “worse
than hell on earth”. Human Rights Watch
<https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/12/19/israels-crime-extermination-acts-genocide-gaza>,
Amnesty International <https://amnesty.ca/gazagenocide/> and UN experts
<https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds>
have all concluded that Israel is committing genocide.

Israel’s killing on an industrial scale is nothing like the portrait
composed by UK broadcasters. It would be almost impossible to arrive at
that conclusion from watching and reading their coverage, which portrays
Israeli violence as inevitable retaliation with regrettable collateral
damage.

<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/why-gaza-genocide-ranks-among-gravest-horrors-human-history>

Why Gaza's genocide ranks among the gravest horrors of human history

Read More »
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/why-gaza-genocide-ranks-among-gravest-horrors-human-history>

The problem is not limited to their diluted, deceptive framing of the Gaza
slaughter. It’s also what is omitted: no mention that Israel is on trial
for genocide at the International Court of Justice, nor that the
International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants
<https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-icc-pre-trial-chamber-i-rejects-state-israels-challenges>
for crimes against humanity against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and
his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant.

The countless nuggets of information that could be used to rebut Israeli
narratives, or to bring into sharp focus what the camera lens is showing,
are peculiarly left out.

It could be argued that when journalists are embedded with the Israeli
military, their coverage is naturally suppressed - but both the BBC and Sky
News emphasized repeatedly that they maintained editorial control. The
reporting can thus be reasonably interpreted as a deliberate construction
of an alternative reality.

An ITV News journalist also entered Gaza recently, and produced arguably
the most forthright coverage
<https://www.itv.com/news/2025-11-19/itv-news-shown-devastated-ruins-of-most-fought-over-part-of-gaza>.
John Irvine states plainly and unambiguously: "I was in both Mosul and
Raqqa as the Islamic State was being demolished, but the level of the
obliteration here puts both those pummeled places in the shade." He also
clearly and accurately refers to the territory Israel is controlling within
the yellow line as “occupied”.

But the report still contains military jargon, using terms like "fought
over" and "warfare" to consolidate the perception of two warring sides. And
in the segment with the Israeli military spokesperson, when asked if the
destruction was "a military necessity", the answer given is yes,
unchallenged.

What makes this particularly striking is that ITV’s own documentary
<https://www.itv.com/watch/breaking-ranks-inside-israels-war/10a7329a0001B/10a7329a0001>
recently exposed  both genocidal intent among Israeli soldiers and the
licenses to vengefully and freely kill civilians in Gaza, material that
could have been put directly to the spokesperson. Instead, like Sky News
and the BBC, the untold brutality was left framed as the remnants of a
convoluted military campaign, not sinister state policy.

Mainstream media in the UK have consistently told the wrong story about
Gaza. They have concealed, watered down and aimed to prevent the public
from connecting the dots. But what we’re seeing today from inside Gaza may
be the most serious offence yet, allowing the perpetrators of the genocide
to narrate the story - despite these reporters seeing the reality with
their own eyes.

What the UK media class lacks in journalistic integrity, it compensates for
in generosity - supplying the very evidence that will indict it when the
reckoning comes.

*The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not
necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.*
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