Israel was forced to go to war on Saturday following an unprecedented surprise attack by Hamas in which the terrorist group launched ground, air and sea invasions, slaughtering Israeli civilians and kidnapping others who are being held hostage in the Gaza Strip.
As the Jewish state was placed on a wartime footing, which included the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of reserve soldiers and counterstrikes in Gaza to eliminate terrorist infrastructure, this was how the English-language international media responded in the newspaper print editions over the past 48 hours:
The majority of front pages in both the United States, United Kingdom and Australia focused on the savagery of the Hamas’ rampage through Israeli communities in the south of the country.
There were, however, some disappointing examples of coverage.
The Guardian, for example, completely ignored the attack on Israel on the splash of its international edition on Sunday — approximately 24 hours after the first massacres of Israeli civilians — to instead focus on the election of a new House speaker in the United States.
Meanwhile, several outlets, including the Boston Globe and the Washington Post opted to flip the narrative and focus on Israel’s precision counterstrikes in Gaza, which involved the IDF forewarning civilians in residential areas to evacuate buildings that might be affected.
Finally, a handful of media outlets, such as the Wall Street Journal, sanitized their front page headlines and subheadings to gloss over Hamas atrocities to merely report that Israel and Hamas are “at war” and lumping the death count together, meaning Hamas terrorists and Israeli civilians were included in its official toll.
HonestReporting will be monitoring all of the international media — as we always do — during this period of crisis and holding the press to account for their coverage of these events.
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