Before the ceasefire this week, the genocide in Gaza was on display for the world to see. Most of the world, that is. The Israeli public largely did not witness the atrocities committed by their government. Moran Barkai and Paul Tullis describe an unprecedented campaign by the country’s media to censor the news, distort reality, and undermine the work of foreign and Palestinian journalists:
The downplaying of deaths in Israeli coverage of the war on Gaza exceeds anything seen in democratic countries in half a century or more, observers say. “What we are seeing now is different,” Panievsky told us. The dissonance was “never [as] big” as in Israel today.
When civilian deaths have come up in Israeli news reports, they are usually invoked to examine how foreign media coverage is harming Israel. A July Channel 13 newscast ignored the realities of starvation in Gaza in favor of discussing the coverage of starvation by London’s Daily Express—while blurring an image the paper had published showing a child suffering from severe malnutrition. Photos and footage from Gaza are typically dismissed as Hamas propaganda or fictional creations of “Pallywood.”
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