ITV News abandons professional journalism in report on Gaza

A three minute ITV News video report (“Aerial footage filmed by ITV News shows the scale of Gaza’s destruction”, Aug. 4), by their international editor Emma Murphy, is a perfect illustration of the British media’s continued slouch towards advocacy journalism when covering Hamas’s Oct. 7th war. The modifier “advocacy” before “journalism” erases the traditional meaning of the latter word, at least within the democratic West.

As you’ll see if you watch the video, filmed by ITV News on-board a Jordanian plane dropping aid into Gaza, during the entire segment, in which ruins in the territory are shown, viewers are only told that what they are seeing is the aftermath of “the war that Israel is waging here”, while never mentioning, or even alluding to, Hamas.

The word “Hamas”, to be clear, isn’t mentioned once in the entire report.

So, viewers would never know that a large percentage of all Gaza structures have reportedly been rigged with explosives by Hamas or PIJ. So, a lot – if not most – of the partially or fully destroyed structures shown by ITV News were damaged as the result of having been booby-trapped, or because of combat between Hamas fighters (positioned inside these buildings) and the IDF.

Other civilian buildings had weapons, ammunition and or fighters inside of them. Viewers also weren’t told that much of the roughly 400 miles of Hamas terror tunnels were cynically built under civilian structures, meaning that when these military tunnels were destroyed, many civilian buildings on top were also badly damaged or demolished.

This is the vital context erased by Murphy.

At fifty-eight seconds into the report, Murphy shows a short clip of a thriving Gaza City before, as she put it, “the [Israeli] bombs began falling”, while failing to mention, or even allude to, the Hamas’s Oct. 7th massacre that started the war.

The most intuitive take-away from the pre-Oct. 7th clip would be that Hamas’s decision to invade southern Israel was, in addition to its antisemitic barbarity, suicidal – the actions of a death cult willing to sacrifice the lives of its own citizens in order to realise their dark fantasy of a world without Israel.

Murphy then pivots to the plight of Palestinian children, interviewing this mother, Amna Mahra, who talks about her two sons’ malnutrition.

However, ITV viewers aren’t told that both children suffer from cerebral palsy, a condition which causes digestive issues often resulting in weight loss. (See the caption of this AP photo.)

Murphy then shows what is claimed to be an IDF-caused explosion at the Turkish-Palestine Friendship hospital in central Gaza, which she describes as the only cancer specialist hospital in the territory.

However, the ITV editor fails to inform viewers that, according to the military, the building hadn’t been in use as a hospital in over a year, and that, at the time of the attack, it was being used by Hamas operatives.

Murphy then shows the remains of the El-Wafaa Rehabilitation Hospital, adding that it’s unknown “what’s become of its residents”

However, the journalist omits two pieces of information: first, reports in the mainstream media noted IDF statements that the Dec. 29, 2024 strike (on a small part of the hospital) targeted Hamas fighters who were “using the building as a command and control centre”; second, that the medical facility is evidently still in operation, though at a limited capacity.

Here’s the April, 2025 report from the Meir Amit Intelligence and Information Centre:

Dr. Wael Khalifa, medical director of the al-Wafaa Rehabilitation Hospital in Gaza, said the hospital had reopened two months previously after being damaged in an aerial attack which destroyed 30%-40% of its ability to function. Despite the damage, the staff continued to provide basic care, especially to those injured in aerial attacks who had spinal, brain and limb injuries. He claimed the institution had a severe shortage of wheelchairs, crutches, medications and basic medical supplies because of the blockade and ongoing conflict (Shehab Telegram channel, April 16, 2025).

Murphy then tells ITV viewers that, under international law, “it is a war crime to target hospitals, schools, homes and other civilian sites”, while failing to note that, international humanitarian law is clear that such civilian buildings can lose their protection if “used for military purposes”. However, as we observed earlier, the ITV editor doesn’t even hint at the existence of terror groups in Gaza, yet alone acknowledge that the destruction she described was likely the result of their cynical and illegal use of homes, schools and hospitals to conduct military operations.

Murphy ends the report warning that “The landscape of destruction here looks other-wordly. Yet, it is not. It is in this world, and what is happening in it may come to define one of its darkest eras – one that casts a stain on humanity which will endure for generations”.

Given that the bloodthirsty pogromists who started the war by carrying out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, which led to Gaza’s destruction, were erased from the story, it’s clear that Murphy is accusing Israel of engaging in brutality that “may come to define” one of our “darkest eras”, and one that “cast a stain on humanity which will endure for generations”.

Though we’ve written quite a bit over the last twenty-two months about British media outlets’ abuse of Oct. 7th memory, Murphy’s propaganda represents a master-class in the use of video to promote such hideous moral inversions.

Finally, when the soul-less ghouls of Hamas launched their massacre in southern Israel, it seems clear they counted on three things occurring:

1) That the rest of Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ would aggressively join the fight to finally annihilate the ‘Zionist entity’.

2) That Israel was, at heart, a weak and artificial country, and would eventually succumb to their onslaught.

3) That their human shield, and human sacrifice, strategy would play well in a West no longer confident in the righteousness of its cause, and confused about the moral distinction between democracies and death cults, thus providing their movement important diplomatic capital by which to sustain their fight.

Murphy’s agitprop is another reminder that the terror group’s leaders were only right about their third assumption.