"Israel’s" brutal three-day military aggression on the Gaza Strip left 49 Palestinians dead, including 17 children and four women. When "Tel Aviv" lied and claimed that misfired Palestinian rockets were responsible for the killing of the majority of kids in Gaza, the Western media didn’t question it. Even worse, the US government used "Israel’s" disinformation at the United Nations Security Council.

An Israeli strike that took place on August 7, inside the Jabalia refugee camp Al-Fallujah cemetery, killed five children, with the youngest Jamil Najim Al-Din Nejm being as young as three years old only. Despite the reports at the time from leading Palestinian human rights groups, such as Al-Mezan center, that held the Israeli military side responsible for the crime, "Tel Aviv" denied it, despite it being its own doing. Instead, the Zionist regime claimed that the massacre was the result of a misfired Palestinian Resistance rocket, a claim they also made for other massacres in Beit Hanoun and Al-Bureij camp, as well as the Jabalia camp the previous day. 

What was the response of Western media to this? You guessed it right. The Western mainstream media, which claim to be scrupulous in their fact-checking in terms of dispelling any possible “disinformation”, didn’t do any due diligence and instead refused to push back on the claims of the Israeli military. This happened despite the evident lies of the Israeli regime, on political, intelligence, police, and military levels, when it came to the assassination of veteran Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. In the case of Shireen’s murder - evidently perpetrated by the Israeli military - not only did the Western media initially echo the claims of "Israel", blaming what it called “Palestinian terrorists” at the time, but they also didn’t bother to apologize for their misleading headlines.

Even when the Israeli police were found to have doctored footage of Palestinian mourners in Al-Quds, who were attacked when carrying the coffin of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Western media, which blindly reiterated claims that Palestinians had thrown objects at Israeli forces to start a brawl, failed to apologize for spreading disinformation. The question is: If they know that Israelis lie constantly and still quote them, giving legitimacy to Israeli lies over the Palestinians who are eyewitnesses on the ground, are they not deemed complicit in "Israel’s" crimes? 

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Let’s be very clear: "Israel’s" advanced military technology allows it to know precisely what and where they are hitting and cancel many of its munitions up until the last few seconds. This means that Israeli forces were hiding miles away from Gaza in fortified areas like cowards. They clearly saw that they were striking a group of children in an open graveyard and decided to kill them intentionally. This is a war crime. There can be absolutely no dispute that the Israeli military knew about the timing of every strike conducted, yet they chose to claim for 9 days that they did not launch strikes at the time of the massacre. They lied, once again. Then, Haaretz news finally got an admission out of senior Israeli military sources that they were the ones who caused the massacre, not misfired Palestinian rockets.

Imagine that, once again, with the absence of irrefutable evidence, "Israel" claims that the people they are attacking are killing their own civilians, and the Western media outlets are copying it. The Associated Press, whose office in Gaza was blown to pieces based on false Israeli claims of Hamas military presence in the building in May of 2021, even published a piece attempting to corroborate Israeli claims that the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement was responsible for killing 15 children in Gaza. The AP piece, in its title, stated that “misfired rockets may have killed over a dozen in Gaza battle," which by the admission of Israeli military sources, as quoted by Haaretz, has already been discredited and proven as false. In Reuters news, the following headline appeared: “In Gaza, denial and doubt over misfiring rocket claims”, in which the writers quote Israeli sources and then provide no reasonable pushback, attempting to paint PIJ and Hamas in Gaza as working to cover up the facts. 

It doesn’t take a genius to tell that "Israel’s" claims make no sense, and any real journalist should have been skeptical, not only due to "Tel Aviv’s" long history of lies about such issues but also because the Palestinian Islamic Jihad rockets have never caused such massacres against anyone. There is not a single case that shows that Palestinian rockets have caused any such massacres. Even when no Israeli settlers were killed by the PIJ rockets, in this round, with not even any serious injuries reported, "Israel" still claimed that Palestinian rockets committed massacres in Gaza; isn’t that enough to raise skepticism? Suddenly, the rockets that never possessed such abilities, as per the Israelis themselves, became able to commit massacres consistent with what Israeli strikes do regularly. How does this make sense, and if it was to be true, is it not the job of a journalist to present irrefutable evidence in order to disprove Israeli claims? Well, for Western media, no, because they don’t do journalism; they do propaganda. The biggest problem, however, is that they claim to be “objective” and “unbiased” when they make their propaganda.

Why to single out AP and Reuters? Because these are the top-tier media outlets, amongst the most trusted; the distributors of information that set the tone for the rest of Western media and beyond. Both were appalling on this issue. They did not properly quote journalists on the ground, they did not properly assess the evidence, and they did not listen to the eyewitnesses; despite having full knowledge of "Israel’s" provable lies about “human shields” and the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, they published articles in support of "Israel’s" narrative. The United States government even went ahead and stated at a meeting with the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) that "Israel" had proven the misfired rockets theory, when they had released one video officially, but Israeli political figures shared another, proving that there were no misfired Palestinian rockets, something that nobody disputes. 

"Israel" is still sticking to its claims; that many Palestinians were killed by misfired PIJ rockets, other than the five children in Jabalia. What does this reflect, now that we have an admission of lying about the August 7 attack on the Jabalia camp? It means that "Israel’s" claims of not committing airstrikes at that time were proven false, as much as it means that the so-called “radar” evidence "Israel" presented was false too. So, other than an unclear video, what claimed "reasonable" evidence does "Israel" have right now? Should we just trust "Israel" that it only lied about the radar tracking and timing of its strikes, or is it not clear that they have been lying in more than one of those cases? It is clear that Israelis are liars; they just commit war crimes and then try to blame them on Palestinians for over a week.

These media outlets who repeat Israeli regime propaganda are not just mistaken, they are complicit in these crimes in so far as they provide "Israel" the cover to avoid accountability. All of these writers for Western media outlets should now be forced to face the families whose children they helped "Israel" lie about.