In a healthier media environment, where reporters could morally distinguish between an imperfect democracy and an antisemitic terror group, the main story now would be Hamas’s refusal to surrender nearly two years after they launched their unprovoked war of aggression, thus sacrificing countless Palestinian civilians in the service of their fanatical ideology.
Instead, news consumers are still being bombarded with variations of the narrative of Israel’s putatively disproportionate response to the mass murder, rape, torture and mutilation of men, women and children in southern Israel on Oct. 7th – a framing that took shape within days of the antisemitic massacre. With some notable exceptions, media outlets soon decided that Hamas wouldn’t be the story, as, to shine light on the decisions of their pogromists would require something that’s in rare supply in the media monoculture – self reflection and the ability to reconsider strongly held beliefs in light of new evidence.
Palestinian supporters, Shany Mor wrote early into the war, are dedicated to the proposition “that no Palestinian action is ever connected to any Palestinian outcome”. Hamas’s gruesome attack, he concluded, “poses a threat to this worldview” and, instead of triggering “a recoiling from the cause in whose name they were carried out”, they resolved the cognitive dissonance by “heightening Israel’s imagined malevolence”.
Hamas, since Oct. 7th, has largely escaped the media’s lens: The group’s cruel and illegal human shield/human sacrifice strategy has been ignored or framed as merely an ‘Israeli claim’. Their torture and killing of Palestinian dissenters has been buried. The crucial context of the group’s genocidal founding charter, and their annihilationist antisemitic ideology, has similarly been memory-holed by most British outlets.
Instead, the only story worth telling, in their collective view, has been alleged Israeli villainy.
The latest example of this myopic and distorting framing occurred on Sept. 16, when nearly all major UK outlets uncritically promoted genocide charges in a report by three entirely discredited commissioners, Navi Pillay, Miloon Kothari and Chris Sidoti, of the UN Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel. The members of the UNHRC, let’s recall, are Cuba, Qatar, China, Sudan, Algeria, Bolivia, Kuwait, Burundi, Vietnam, Kyrgyzstan, Bangladesh, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Since all the articles we reviewed ignored the thorough rebuttal by the UN Watch published the same day, with some characterising Pillay, Kothari and Sidoti as “experts” without background on their ideologies, views and biases, news consumers wouldn’t understand the unseriousness and propagandistic nature of the Commission’s report. They wouldn’t know that, for instance, the word “Hamas” isn’t used by the Commission until 32 paragraphs down in their report, and that terror group’s invasion of Israel is presented as an Israeli attack on Gaza.
Further, the 250 hostages taken by Hamas that day are erased, with the only mention of those abducted, tortured and starved in Hamas’s dungeons in the entire document appearing when citing Israeli claims.
Additionally, the systematic rape of Israeli women and girls by Hamas, as a weapon of war, is omitted from the Commission’s report.
Further, as John Spencer, the executive director of the Urban Warfare Institute, wrote yesterday, the report excludes any recognition of the “unprecedented humanitarian measures Israel has taken while fighting Hamas”. Israel, he notes, “has facilitated the delivery of over two million tons of aid into Gaza…provided more than two million vaccinations, supplied 14 million liters of water a day, kept electricity flowing to desalination plants, supported hospitals, and transferred patients for medical treatment”. “No other military in history”, he adds, “has waged war while simultaneously providing this level of aid to the enemy’s civilian population.
The commission, he concludes, “erases these facts because they undermine the claim of genocidal intent”.
The Commission of Inquiry report also, tellingly, recycles disproven claims about the percentage of those killed in Gaza who are civilians – a lie used to buttress their “genocide” accusation.
Here’s are the relevant sentences:
The Commission notes with alarm a report that finds, as of May 2025, Israeli intelligence officials have listed 8,900 militants from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza as dead or probably dead. Considering, at this point, 53,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli attacks, it means that 83 percent of those killed in Gaza were civilians.
This claim links to a Guardian report which, as we demonstrated at the time, is truly farcical.
The Aug. 21 article, described as a “joint investigation by the Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call”, was written by Emma Graham-Harrison, the Guardian’s chief Middle East correspondent, and Yuval Abraham from +972.
The claim in the headline, which was used as the cover story both in the print and online versions, alleges that Israeli data shows that “83% of Gaza war dead are civilians“, which is based on the text in the opening paragraphs:
Figures from a classified Israeli military intelligence database indicate five out of six Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza have been civilians, an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare.
As of May, 19 months into the war, Israeli intelligence officials listed 8,900 named fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as dead or “probably dead”
At that time 53,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli attacks, according to health authorities in Gaza, a toll that included combatants and civilians. Fighters named in the Israeli military intelligence database accounted for just 17% of the total, which indicates that 83% of the dead were civilians.
That apparent ratio of civilians to combatants among the dead is extremely high for modern warfare, even compared with conflicts notorious for indiscriminate killing, including the Syrian and Sudanese civil wars.
The “investigation”, replete with charts and other visuals purportedly illustrating that “the apparent ratio of civilians to combatants among the dead” is one of “the worst in modern warfare”, is based on a truly absurd calculation: asserting that the 8,900 listed names of terrorists killed necessarily represent every terrorist death. So, by subtracting 8,900 from the Hamas ministry’s tally in May, which was 53,000, the article insists, we learn that the ratio of civilians killed by Israel is at 83%.
The 8,900 figure, however, based on the language used in their own report, narrowly represents the terrorists whose names are known to the IDF – not, crucially, the total number of terrorists killed since Oct. 7, 2023.
In other words, their logic depends upon the bizarre premise that if a Palestinian killed in Gaza is not marked as dead on a particular IDF list of named terrorists killed, they are necessarily a civilian. The Guardian ignores the fact that thousands of other fighters from Hamas, PIJ and other armed groups of largely lower ranks who have NOT been named by the IDF have also been killed.
Tellingly, the Guardian omits a key paragraph from +972’s version of the story, which conveys this very point:
The intelligence sources explained that the total number of militants killed is likely higher than the number recorded in the internal database, since it does not include Hamas or PIJ operatives who were killed but could not be identified by name, Gazans who took part in fighting but were not officially members of Hamas or PIJ…
The Guardian version, by contrast, published a truncated version of that key information, writing that “Israeli military intelligence are not aware of all militant deaths or all new recruits”. However, even those fourteen words reveal a self-evident and intuitive admission which undermines the entire premise of their dramatic headline.
The outlet also omitted publicly available information which would contradict their desired take-away, such as reports a day before the Guardian article, that roughly 22,000 Gaza terrorists have been killed thus far. So, given that the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry (MOH) puts the total death toll at 62,000, that puts the civilian to combatant death ratio at roughly 2 to 1. This ratio would reportedly represent an unprecedentedly low civilian casualty rate for such dense, urban fighting.
Interestingly, even Hamas’s (MOH) detailed casualty figures show that most of those killed have been combat-aged males.
While the Guardian’s lie about civilian casualties is a case study in how to dress propaganda as “investigative journalism”, the Commission report on “genocide” which cites the outlet’s disinformation represents, to paraphrase Spencer, the dressing of such propaganda “in the language of law”, as well a broader “assault on critical thinking”.
