“The first casualty of war is the truth.” The late Republican senator Hiram Johnson’s immortal observation has come to mind more than a few times with regard to the media’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
Actually, a more accurate rendering of the statement during this war would be, “most of the casualties of war are the truth.”
For the truth was not the first victim when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel on that morning on October 7; raping and kidnapping festival-goers as the sun rose in the sky and burning families alive in their homes within the formerly tranquil kibbutzim near the Gaza border.
In fact, the gruesome truth was there for everyone to bear horrified witness to as Hamas terrorists proudly documented their wicked actions using cell phones and body-worn cameras.
But truth has since taken a back seat in the reporting of Israel’s response to the attack, with several glaring lies still being peddled by the media, twisting the public’s understanding of the war. The media appears determined to paint Israel as a pariah state, eagerly spreading the most damaging misinformation and stubbornly refusing to correct themselves even when confronted with undeniable evidence to the contrary.
The ‘Genocide’ Ruling That Wasn’t
Perhaps the most damaging of all the mistruths still being promoted by the press is the International Court of Justice’s interim ruling in January on a case brought by South Africa that accused Israel of genocide.
As we pointed out at the time, organizations such as the United Nations and Human Rights Watch led the way in misinterpreting the ruling, falsely claiming that the court had decided that the allegation of genocide in Gaza by Israel was “plausible.”
Next to jump on the misinformation bandwagon was the international media, uncritically parroting the claims of politically-motivated human rights organizations instead of consulting legal experts to report the ruling accurately.
Months later, Joan Donoghue, head of the ICJ at the time, set the record straight.
Appearing on the BBC current affairs show HARDTalk in April, Donoghue expressed relief at the opportunity to explain the ruling’s effect and, in doing so, exposed months of media negligence, including by the editorial team of the very program on which she was being interviewed.
“The court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide and that South Africa had the right to present that claim in the court,” she clarified. “It then looked at the facts as well. But it did not decide – and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media – it didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.”
Despite Donoghue’s clear and public clarification, the “plausible genocide” lie continues to be promoted by numerous media outlets — demonstrating ignorance at best and naked bias by journalists at worst.
Just this week, The Guardian failed to remove the error from an opinion piece by a UK Member of Parliament, Zarah Sultana, which called on the UK’s newly-elected government to suspend arms sales to Israel.
No, MP Sultana and @guardian, the ICJ did NOT find Israel in breach of the genocide convention, as you can see the former ICJ president admit here: https://t.co/p36CTENXTO pic.twitter.com/I29DWHdXS0
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) July 17, 2024
The Famine That Never Happened
We recently addressed what can only be described as a campaign of disinformation surrounding the issue of food aid being delivered to the Gaza Strip.
But let’s go back to the beginning of this lie. Merely two weeks into the war, claims of starvation in the enclave were already being sounded. Oxfam, for example, alleged that “clean water has now virtually run out,” while stating that a “staggering 2.2 million people are now in urgent need of food.”
Since then, there have been almost daily headlines describing “catastrophic levels of hunger” in Gaza, with a population facing “imminent famine.”
Arab media outlets helped furnish this shaky narrative with questionable accounts of individual Palestinian children with preexisting and often life-threatening medical conditions supposedly dying from “malnutrition,” which are then reprinted wholesale by the Western media without editors or journalists ever bothering to probe a little deeper.
HonestReporting has repeatedly called out the media for continuing to allege a famine despite a paucity of evidence, and as further data is published that proves the opposite.
There is no famine in Gaza, and we have the receipts to prove it.🧵
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) June 6, 2024
Last month, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) walked back on a widely-publicized March briefing after uncovering several flaws in the original data, leading them to amend their initial claims. Ultimately, the IPC concluded that they cannot consider the situation in Gaza a “famine.”
The Beginning of a New Lie
HonestReporting launched a new fight this month to stop a fresh, equally damaging lie from taking root and eventually being reported as fact.
The discredited letter in The Lancet medical journal, which sensationally and without a shred of evidence, claims the Gaza death toll could be higher than 180,000, has been making the rounds.
This is how false info spreads:
1. @TheLancet publishes claims of 186,000 deaths in Gaza.
2. Media republish the false figure, ignoring the author’s prior justification of terrorism.
3. Israel is blamed for countless deaths that didn’t happen.https://t.co/rZmDKxjFP3 pic.twitter.com/Czc9daYP7m— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) July 8, 2024
Some media outlets jumped on the figure, producing sensationalist, click-bait headlines about the mass killing of Palestinians. However, the quick effort to counter The Lancet’s disinformation has had an impact.
The figure is not being quoted anymore in news articles in reputable mainstream media outlets, and HonestReporting is actively calling out the publications that do.
That’s how we’ll win the fight against media misinformation: by responding quickly and loudly across all platforms and publicly shaming news organizations that get it wrong.
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Photo: Majdi Fathi via TPS, Abdullah Asiran/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
