April 7, 2025
Jonathan Cook
Jonathan Cook
Once again the UK state broadcaster goes missing in action – this time at the discovery of a mass grave of emergency workers executed by Israel
The BBC’s news verification service, Verify, digitally reconstructed a residential tower block in Mandalay earlier this week to show how it had collapsed in a huge earthquake on March 28 in Myanmar, a country in Southeast Asia largely cut off from the outside world.
The broadcaster painstakingly pieced together damage to other parts of the city using a combination of phone videos, satellite imagery and Nasa heat detection images.
Verify dedicated much time and effort to this task for a simple reason: to expose as patently false the claims made by the ruling military junta that only 2,000 people were killed by Myanmar’s 7.7-magnitude earthquake.
The West sees the country’s generals as an official enemy, and the BBC wanted to show that the junta’s account of events could not be trusted. Myanmar’s rulers have an interest in undercounting the dead to protect the regime’s image.
The BBC’s determined effort to strip away these lies contrasted strongly with its coverage – or rather, lack of it – of another important story this week.
Israel has been caught in another horrifying war crime. Late last month, it executed 15 Palestinian first responders, and then secretly buried them in a mass grave, along with their crushed vehicles.
Israel is an official western ally, one that the United States, Britain and the rest of Europe have been arming and assisting in a spate of crimes against humanity being investigated by the world’s highest court. Fourteen months ago, the International Court of Justice ruled that it was “plausible” Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, is a fugitive from its sister court, the International Criminal Court. Judges there want to try him for crimes against humanity, including starving the 2.3 million people of Gaza by withholding food, water and aid.
Israel is known to have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them women and children, in its 18-month carpet bombing of the enclave. But there are likely to be far more deaths that have gone unreported.
This is because Israel has destroyed all of Gaza’s health and administrative bodies that could do the counting, and because it has created unmarked “kill zones” across much of the enclave, making it all but impossible for first responders to reach swaths of territory to locate the dead.
The latest crime scene in Gaza is shockingly illustrative of how Israel murders civilians, targets medics, and covers up its crimes – and of how western media collude in downplaying such atrocities, helping Israel to ensure that the extent of the death toll in Gaza will never be properly known.
Struck ‘one by one’
Last Sunday, United Nations officials were finally allowed by Israel to reach the site in southern Gaza where the Palestinian emergency crews had gone missing a week earlier, on 23 March. The bodies of 15 Palestinians were unearthed in a mass grave; another is still missing.
All were wearing their uniforms and some had their hands or legs zip-tied, according to eyewitnesses. Some had been shot in the head or chest. Their vehicles had been crushed before they were buried.
Two of the emergency workers were killed by Israeli fire while trying to aid people injured in an earlier air strike on Rafah. The other 13 were part of a convoy sent to retrieve the bodies of their colleagues, with the UN saying Israel had struck their ambulances “one by one”.
More details emerged during the week, with the doctor who examined five of the bodies reporting that all but one – who had been too badly mutilated by feral animals to assess – were shot from close range with multiple bullets.
Ahmad Dhaher, a forensic consultant working at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, said: “The bullets were aimed at one person’s head, another at their heart, and a third person had been shot with six or seven bullets in the torso.”
Bashar Murad, the Red Crescent’s director of health programmes, observed that one of the paramedics in the convoy was in contact with the ambulance station when Israeli forces started shooting: “During the call, we heard the sound of Israeli soldiers arriving at the location, speaking in Hebrew. The conversation was about gathering the [Palestinian] team, with statements like: ‘Gather them at the wall and bring some restraints to tie them.’ This indicated that a large number of the medical staff were still alive.”
Jonathan Whittall, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Palestine, reported that, on the journey to recover the bodies, he and his team witnessed Israeli soldiers firing on civilians fleeing the area. He saw a Palestinian woman shot in the back of the head, and a young man who tried to retrieve her body shot too.
Concealing slaughter
The difficulty for Israel with the discovery of the mass grave was that it could not easily fall back on any of the usual mendacious rationalizations for war crimes that it has fed the western media over the past year and a half, and which those outlets have been only too happy to regurgitate.
Since Israel unilaterally broke a US-backed ceasefire agreement with Hamas last month, its carpet bombing of the enclave has killed more than 1,000 Palestinians, taking the official death toll to more than 50,000. But Israel and its apologists, including western governments and media, always have a ready excuse at hand to mask the slaughter.
Israel disputes the casualty figures, saying they are inflated by Gaza’s health ministry, even though its figures in previous wars have always been highly reliable. It says most of those killed were Hamas “terrorists”, and most of the slain women and children were used by Hamas as “human shields”.
Israel has also destroyed Gaza’s hospitals, shot up large numbers of ambulances, killed hundreds of medical personnel and disappeared others into torture chambers, while denying the entry of medical supplies.
Israel implies that all of the 36 hospitals in Gaza it has targeted are Hamas-run “command and control centres”; that many of the doctors and nurses working in them are really covert Hamas operatives; and that Gaza’s ambulances are being used to transport Hamas fighters.
Even if these claims were vaguely plausible, the western media seems unwilling to ask the most obvious of questions: why would Hamas continue to use Gaza’s hospitals and ambulances, when Israel made clear from the outset of its 18-month genocidal killing rampage that it was going to treat them as targets?
Even if Hamas fighters did not care about protecting the health sector, which their parents, siblings, children and relatives desperately need to survive Israel’s carpet bombing, why would they make themselves so easy to locate?
Hamas has plenty of other places to hide in Gaza. Most of the enclave’s buildings are wrecked concrete structures, ideal for waging guerrilla warfare.
Israeli cover-up
Even the usual excuses, as preposterous as they are, simply won’t wash in the case of Israel’s latest atrocity – which is why it initially tried to black out the story.
Given that it has banned all western journalists from entering Gaza, killed unprecedented numbers of local journalists, and formally outlawed the UN refugee agency Unrwa, it might have hoped its crime would go undiscovered.
But as news of the atrocity started to appear on social media last week, and the mass grave was unearthed on Sunday, Israel was forced to concoct a cover story.
It claimed the convoy of five ambulances, a fire engine and a UN vehicle were “advancing suspiciously” towards Israeli soldiers. It also insinuated, without a shred of evidence, that the vehicles had been harbouring Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters.
Once again, we were supposed to accept not only an improbable Israeli claim, but an entirely nonsensical one. Why would Hamas fighters choose to become sitting ducks by hiding in the diminishing number of emergency vehicles still operating in Gaza?
Why would they approach an Israeli military position out in the open, where they were easy prey, rather than fighting their enemy from the shadows, like other guerrilla armies – using Gaza’s extensive concrete ruins and their underground tunnels as cover?
If the ambulance crews were killed in the middle of a firefight, why were some victims exhumed with their hands tied? How is it possible that they were all killed in a gun battle when the soldiers could be heard calling for the survivors to be zip-tied?
And if Israel was really the wronged party, why did it seek to hide the bodies and the crushed vehicles under sand?
‘Deeply disturbed’
All available evidence indicates that Israel killed all or most of the emergency crews in cold blood – a grave war crime.
But as the story broke last Monday, the BBC’s News at Ten gave over its schedule to a bin strike by workers in Birmingham; fears about the influence of social media prompted by a Netflix drama, Adolescence; bad weather on a Greek island; the return to Earth of stranded Nasa astronauts; and Britain’s fourth political party claiming it would do well in next month’s local elections.
All of that pushed out any mention of Israel’s latest war crime in Gaza.
Presumably under pressure from its ordinary journalists – who are known to be in near-revolt over the state broadcaster’s persistent failure to cover Israeli atrocities in Gaza – the next day’s half-hour evening news belatedly dedicated 30 seconds to the item, near the end of the running order.
The perfunctory report immediately undercut the UN’s statement that it was “deeply disturbed” by the deaths, with the newsreader announcing that Israel claimed nine “terrorists” were “among those killed”.
Where was the BBC Verify team in this instance? Too busy scouring Google maps of Myanmar, it would seem.
If ever there was a region where its forensic, open-source skills could be usefully deployed, it is Gaza. After all, Israel keeps out foreign journalists, and it has killed Palestinian journalists in greater numbers than all of the West’s major wars of the past 150 years combined.
This was the perfect opportunity for BBC Verify to do a real investigation, piecing together an atrocity Israel was so keen to conceal. It was a chance for the BBC to do actual journalism on Gaza.
Why was it necessary for the BBC to contest the narrative of an earthquake in a repressive Southeast Asian country whose rulers are opposed by the West, but not to contest the narrative of a major atrocity committed by a western ally?
Missing in action
This is not the first time BBC Verify has been missing in action at a crucial moment in Gaza.
Back in January 2024, Israeli soldiers shot up a car containing a six-year-old girl, Hind Rajab, and her relatives as they tried to flee an Israeli attack on Gaza City. All were killed, but before Hind died, she could be heard desperately pleading with emergency services for help. Two paramedics who tried to rescue her were also killed. It took two weeks for other emergency crews to reach the bodies.
It was certainly possible for BBC Verify to have done a forensic study of the incident – because another group did precisely that. Forensic Architecture, a research team based at the University of London, used available images of the scene to reconstruct the events.
It found the Israeli military had fired 335 bullets into the small car carrying Hind and her family. In an audio recording before she was killed, Hind’s cousin could be heard telling emergency services that an Israeli tank was near them.
The sound of the gunfire, most likely from the tank’s machine gun, indicates it was some 13 metres away – close enough for the crew to have seen the children inside.
Not only did BBC Verify ignore the story, but the BBC failed to report it until the bodies were recovered. As has happened so often before, the BBC dared not do any reporting until Israel was forced to confirm the incident because of physical evidence.
We know from a BBC journalist-turned-whistleblower, Karishma Patel, that she pushed editors to run the story as the recordings of Hind pleading for help first surfaced, but she was overruled.
When the BBC very belatedly covered Hind’s horrific killing online, in typical fashion, it did so in a way that minimised any pushback from Israel. Its headline, “Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help”, managed to remove Israel from the story.
Evidence buried
A clear pattern emerges. The BBC also tried to bury the massacre of the 15 Palestinian first responders – keeping it off its website’s main page – just as Israel had tried to bury the evidence of its crime in Gaza’s sand.
The story’s first headline was: “Red Cross outraged over killing of eight medics in Gaza”. Once again, Israel was removed from the crime scene.
Only later, amid massive backlash on social media and as the story refused to go away, did the BBC change the headline to attribute the killings to “Israeli forces”.
But subsequent stories have been keen to highlight the self-serving Israeli claim that its soldiers were entitled to execute the paramedics because the presence of emergency vehicles at the scene of much death and destruction was “suspicious”.
In one report, a BBC journalist managed to shoe-horn this same, patently ridiculous “defence” twice into her two-minute segment. She reduced the discovery of an Israeli massacre to mere “allegations”, while a clear war crime was soft-soaped as only an “apparent” one.
Notably, the BBC has on one solitary occasion managed to go beyond other media in reporting an attack on an ambulance crew. The footage incontrovertibly showed a US-supplied Apache helicopter firing on the crew and a young family they were trying to evacuate.
There was no possibility the ambulance contained “terrorists”, because the documentary team were filming inside the vehicle with paramedics they had been following for months. The video was included near the end of a documentary on the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, seen largely through the eyes of children.
But the BBC quickly pulled that film, titled Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, after the Israel lobby manufactured a controversy over one of its child narrators being the son of Gaza’s deputy agriculture minister, who served in the Hamas-run civilian government.
Wholesale destruction
The unmentionable truth, which has been evident since the earliest days of the 18-month genocide, is that Israel is intentionally dismantling and destroying Gaza’s health sector, piece by piece.
According to the UN, Israel’s war has killed at least 1,060 healthcare workers and 399 aid workers – those deaths it has been possible to identify – and wrecked Gaza’s health facilities. Israel has rounded up hundreds of medical staff and disappeared many of them into what Israeli human rights groups call torture chambers.
One doctor, Hussam Abu Safiya, director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, has been held by Israel since he was abducted in late December. During brief contacts with lawyers, he has revealed that he is being tortured. Other doctors have been killed in Israeli detention from their abuse, including one who was allegedly raped to death.
Why is Israel carrying out this wholesale destruction of Gaza’s health sector? There are two reasons. Firstly, Netanyahu recently reiterated his intent to carry out the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza. He presents this as “voluntary migration”, supposedly in accordance with US President Donald Trump’s plan to relocate the enclave’s population of 2.3 million Palestinians to other countries.
There can be nothing voluntary about Palestinians leaving Gaza when Israel has refused to allow any food or aid into Gaza for the past month, and is indiscriminately bombing the enclave. Israel’s ultimate intention has always been to terrify the population into flight.
Israel’s ambassador to Austria, David Roet, was secretly recorded last month stating that “there are no uninvolved in Gaza” – a constant theme from Israeli officials. He also suggested there should be a “death sentence” for anyone Israel accuses of holding a gun, including children.
Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has threatened the “total devastation” of Gaza’s civilian population should they fail to “remove Hamas” from the enclave, something they are in no position to do.
Not surprisingly, faced with the prospect of an intensification of the genocide and the imminent annihilation of themselves and their loved ones, ordinary people in Gaza have started organising protests against Hamas – marches readily reported by the BBC and others.
Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and execution of medical personnel is part of the same message: there is nowhere safe, no sanctuary, the laws of war no longer apply, and no one will come to your aid in your hour of need. You are alone against our snipers, drones, tanks and Apache helicopters.
Too much to bear
The second reason for Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health sector is that we in the West, or at least our governments and media, have consented to Israel’s savagery – and actively participated in it – every step of the way. Had there been any meaningful pushback at any stage, Israel would have been forced to take another course.
When David Lammy, Britain’s foreign secretary, let slip in parliament last month the advice he has been receiving from his officials since he took up the job last summer – that Israel is clearly violating international law by starving the population – he was immediately rebuked by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office.
Let us not forget that Starmer, when he was opposition leader, approved Israel’s genocidal blocking of food, water and electricity to Gaza, saying Israel “had that right”.
In response to Lammy’s comments, Starmer’s spokesperson restated the government’s view that Israel is only “at risk” of breaching international law – a position that allows the UK to continue arming Israel and providing it with intelligence from British spy flights over Gaza from a Royal Air Force base in Cyprus.
Our politicians have consented to everything Israel has done, and not just in Gaza over the past 18 months. This genocide has been decades in the making.
Three-quarters of a century ago, the West authorised the ethnic cleansing of most of Palestine to create a self-declared Jewish state there. The West consented, too, to the violent occupation of the last sections of Palestine in 1967, and to Israel’s gradual colonization of those newly seized territories by armed Jewish extremists.
The West nodded through waves of house demolitions carried out against Palestinian communities by Israel to “Judaise” the land. It backed the Israeli army creating extensive “firing zones” on Palestinian farmland to starve traditional agricultural communities of any means of subsistence.
The West ignored Jewish settlers and soldiers destroying Palestinian olive groves, beating up shepherds, torching homes, and murdering families. Even being an Oscar winner offers no immunity from the rampant settler violence.
The West agreed to Israel creating an apartheid road system and a network of checkpoints that kept Palestinians confined to ever-shrinking ghettoes, and building walls around Palestinian areas to permanently isolate them from the rest of the world. It allowed Israel to stop Palestinians from reaching one of their holiest sites, Al-Aqsa Mosque, on land that was supposed to be central to their future state.
The West kept quiet as Israel besieged the two million people of Gaza for 17 years, putting them on a tightly rationed diet so their children would grow ever-more malnourished. It did nothing – except supply more weapons – when the people of Gaza launched a series of non-violent protests at their prison walls around the enclave, and were greeted with Israeli sniper fire that left thousands dead or crippled.
The West only found a collective voice of protest on 7 October 2023, when Hamas managed to find a way to break out of Gaza’s choking isolation to wreak havoc in Israel for 24 hours. It has been raising its voice in horror at the events of that single day ever since, drowning out 18 months of screams from the children being starved and exterminated in Gaza.
The murder of 15 Palestinian medics and aid workers is a tiny drop in an ocean of Israeli criminality – a barbarism rewarded by western capitals decade after decade.
This genocide was made in the West. Israel is our progeny, our ugly reflection in the mirror – which is why western leaders and establishment media are so desperate to make us look the other way. That reflection is too much for anyone with a soul to bear.
The broadcaster painstakingly pieced together damage to other parts of the city using a combination of phone videos, satellite imagery and Nasa heat detection images.
Verify dedicated much time and effort to this task for a simple reason: to expose as patently false the claims made by the ruling military junta that only 2,000 people were killed by Myanmar’s 7.7-magnitude earthquake.
The West sees the country’s generals as an official enemy, and the BBC wanted to show that the junta’s account of events could not be trusted. Myanmar’s rulers have an interest in undercounting the dead to protect the regime’s image.
The BBC’s determined effort to strip away these lies contrasted strongly with its coverage – or rather, lack of it – of another important story this week.
Israel has been caught in another horrifying war crime. Late last month, it executed 15 Palestinian first responders, and then secretly buried them in a mass grave, along with their crushed vehicles.
Israel is an official western ally, one that the United States, Britain and the rest of Europe have been arming and assisting in a spate of crimes against humanity being investigated by the world’s highest court. Fourteen months ago, the International Court of Justice ruled that it was “plausible” Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, is a fugitive from its sister court, the International Criminal Court. Judges there want to try him for crimes against humanity, including starving the 2.3 million people of Gaza by withholding food, water and aid.
Israel is known to have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them women and children, in its 18-month carpet bombing of the enclave. But there are likely to be far more deaths that have gone unreported.
This is because Israel has destroyed all of Gaza’s health and administrative bodies that could do the counting, and because it has created unmarked “kill zones” across much of the enclave, making it all but impossible for first responders to reach swaths of territory to locate the dead.
The latest crime scene in Gaza is shockingly illustrative of how Israel murders civilians, targets medics, and covers up its crimes – and of how western media collude in downplaying such atrocities, helping Israel to ensure that the extent of the death toll in Gaza will never be properly known.
Struck ‘one by one’
Last Sunday, United Nations officials were finally allowed by Israel to reach the site in southern Gaza where the Palestinian emergency crews had gone missing a week earlier, on 23 March. The bodies of 15 Palestinians were unearthed in a mass grave; another is still missing.
All were wearing their uniforms and some had their hands or legs zip-tied, according to eyewitnesses. Some had been shot in the head or chest. Their vehicles had been crushed before they were buried.
Two of the emergency workers were killed by Israeli fire while trying to aid people injured in an earlier air strike on Rafah. The other 13 were part of a convoy sent to retrieve the bodies of their colleagues, with the UN saying Israel had struck their ambulances “one by one”.
More details emerged during the week, with the doctor who examined five of the bodies reporting that all but one – who had been too badly mutilated by feral animals to assess – were shot from close range with multiple bullets.
Ahmad Dhaher, a forensic consultant working at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, said: “The bullets were aimed at one person’s head, another at their heart, and a third person had been shot with six or seven bullets in the torso.”
Bashar Murad, the Red Crescent’s director of health programmes, observed that one of the paramedics in the convoy was in contact with the ambulance station when Israeli forces started shooting: “During the call, we heard the sound of Israeli soldiers arriving at the location, speaking in Hebrew. The conversation was about gathering the [Palestinian] team, with statements like: ‘Gather them at the wall and bring some restraints to tie them.’ This indicated that a large number of the medical staff were still alive.”
Jonathan Whittall, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Palestine, reported that, on the journey to recover the bodies, he and his team witnessed Israeli soldiers firing on civilians fleeing the area. He saw a Palestinian woman shot in the back of the head, and a young man who tried to retrieve her body shot too.
Concealing slaughter
The difficulty for Israel with the discovery of the mass grave was that it could not easily fall back on any of the usual mendacious rationalizations for war crimes that it has fed the western media over the past year and a half, and which those outlets have been only too happy to regurgitate.
Since Israel unilaterally broke a US-backed ceasefire agreement with Hamas last month, its carpet bombing of the enclave has killed more than 1,000 Palestinians, taking the official death toll to more than 50,000. But Israel and its apologists, including western governments and media, always have a ready excuse at hand to mask the slaughter.
Israel disputes the casualty figures, saying they are inflated by Gaza’s health ministry, even though its figures in previous wars have always been highly reliable. It says most of those killed were Hamas “terrorists”, and most of the slain women and children were used by Hamas as “human shields”.
Israel has also destroyed Gaza’s hospitals, shot up large numbers of ambulances, killed hundreds of medical personnel and disappeared others into torture chambers, while denying the entry of medical supplies.
Israel implies that all of the 36 hospitals in Gaza it has targeted are Hamas-run “command and control centres”; that many of the doctors and nurses working in them are really covert Hamas operatives; and that Gaza’s ambulances are being used to transport Hamas fighters.
Even if these claims were vaguely plausible, the western media seems unwilling to ask the most obvious of questions: why would Hamas continue to use Gaza’s hospitals and ambulances, when Israel made clear from the outset of its 18-month genocidal killing rampage that it was going to treat them as targets?
Even if Hamas fighters did not care about protecting the health sector, which their parents, siblings, children and relatives desperately need to survive Israel’s carpet bombing, why would they make themselves so easy to locate?
Hamas has plenty of other places to hide in Gaza. Most of the enclave’s buildings are wrecked concrete structures, ideal for waging guerrilla warfare.
Israeli cover-up
Even the usual excuses, as preposterous as they are, simply won’t wash in the case of Israel’s latest atrocity – which is why it initially tried to black out the story.
Given that it has banned all western journalists from entering Gaza, killed unprecedented numbers of local journalists, and formally outlawed the UN refugee agency Unrwa, it might have hoped its crime would go undiscovered.
But as news of the atrocity started to appear on social media last week, and the mass grave was unearthed on Sunday, Israel was forced to concoct a cover story.
It claimed the convoy of five ambulances, a fire engine and a UN vehicle were “advancing suspiciously” towards Israeli soldiers. It also insinuated, without a shred of evidence, that the vehicles had been harbouring Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters.
Once again, we were supposed to accept not only an improbable Israeli claim, but an entirely nonsensical one. Why would Hamas fighters choose to become sitting ducks by hiding in the diminishing number of emergency vehicles still operating in Gaza?
Why would they approach an Israeli military position out in the open, where they were easy prey, rather than fighting their enemy from the shadows, like other guerrilla armies – using Gaza’s extensive concrete ruins and their underground tunnels as cover?
If the ambulance crews were killed in the middle of a firefight, why were some victims exhumed with their hands tied? How is it possible that they were all killed in a gun battle when the soldiers could be heard calling for the survivors to be zip-tied?
And if Israel was really the wronged party, why did it seek to hide the bodies and the crushed vehicles under sand?
‘Deeply disturbed’
All available evidence indicates that Israel killed all or most of the emergency crews in cold blood – a grave war crime.
But as the story broke last Monday, the BBC’s News at Ten gave over its schedule to a bin strike by workers in Birmingham; fears about the influence of social media prompted by a Netflix drama, Adolescence; bad weather on a Greek island; the return to Earth of stranded Nasa astronauts; and Britain’s fourth political party claiming it would do well in next month’s local elections.
All of that pushed out any mention of Israel’s latest war crime in Gaza.
Presumably under pressure from its ordinary journalists – who are known to be in near-revolt over the state broadcaster’s persistent failure to cover Israeli atrocities in Gaza – the next day’s half-hour evening news belatedly dedicated 30 seconds to the item, near the end of the running order.
The perfunctory report immediately undercut the UN’s statement that it was “deeply disturbed” by the deaths, with the newsreader announcing that Israel claimed nine “terrorists” were “among those killed”.
Where was the BBC Verify team in this instance? Too busy scouring Google maps of Myanmar, it would seem.
If ever there was a region where its forensic, open-source skills could be usefully deployed, it is Gaza. After all, Israel keeps out foreign journalists, and it has killed Palestinian journalists in greater numbers than all of the West’s major wars of the past 150 years combined.
This was the perfect opportunity for BBC Verify to do a real investigation, piecing together an atrocity Israel was so keen to conceal. It was a chance for the BBC to do actual journalism on Gaza.
Why was it necessary for the BBC to contest the narrative of an earthquake in a repressive Southeast Asian country whose rulers are opposed by the West, but not to contest the narrative of a major atrocity committed by a western ally?
Missing in action
This is not the first time BBC Verify has been missing in action at a crucial moment in Gaza.
Back in January 2024, Israeli soldiers shot up a car containing a six-year-old girl, Hind Rajab, and her relatives as they tried to flee an Israeli attack on Gaza City. All were killed, but before Hind died, she could be heard desperately pleading with emergency services for help. Two paramedics who tried to rescue her were also killed. It took two weeks for other emergency crews to reach the bodies.
It was certainly possible for BBC Verify to have done a forensic study of the incident – because another group did precisely that. Forensic Architecture, a research team based at the University of London, used available images of the scene to reconstruct the events.
It found the Israeli military had fired 335 bullets into the small car carrying Hind and her family. In an audio recording before she was killed, Hind’s cousin could be heard telling emergency services that an Israeli tank was near them.
The sound of the gunfire, most likely from the tank’s machine gun, indicates it was some 13 metres away – close enough for the crew to have seen the children inside.
Not only did BBC Verify ignore the story, but the BBC failed to report it until the bodies were recovered. As has happened so often before, the BBC dared not do any reporting until Israel was forced to confirm the incident because of physical evidence.
We know from a BBC journalist-turned-whistleblower, Karishma Patel, that she pushed editors to run the story as the recordings of Hind pleading for help first surfaced, but she was overruled.
When the BBC very belatedly covered Hind’s horrific killing online, in typical fashion, it did so in a way that minimised any pushback from Israel. Its headline, “Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help”, managed to remove Israel from the story.
Evidence buried
A clear pattern emerges. The BBC also tried to bury the massacre of the 15 Palestinian first responders – keeping it off its website’s main page – just as Israel had tried to bury the evidence of its crime in Gaza’s sand.
The story’s first headline was: “Red Cross outraged over killing of eight medics in Gaza”. Once again, Israel was removed from the crime scene.
Only later, amid massive backlash on social media and as the story refused to go away, did the BBC change the headline to attribute the killings to “Israeli forces”.
But subsequent stories have been keen to highlight the self-serving Israeli claim that its soldiers were entitled to execute the paramedics because the presence of emergency vehicles at the scene of much death and destruction was “suspicious”.
In one report, a BBC journalist managed to shoe-horn this same, patently ridiculous “defence” twice into her two-minute segment. She reduced the discovery of an Israeli massacre to mere “allegations”, while a clear war crime was soft-soaped as only an “apparent” one.
Notably, the BBC has on one solitary occasion managed to go beyond other media in reporting an attack on an ambulance crew. The footage incontrovertibly showed a US-supplied Apache helicopter firing on the crew and a young family they were trying to evacuate.
There was no possibility the ambulance contained “terrorists”, because the documentary team were filming inside the vehicle with paramedics they had been following for months. The video was included near the end of a documentary on the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, seen largely through the eyes of children.
But the BBC quickly pulled that film, titled Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, after the Israel lobby manufactured a controversy over one of its child narrators being the son of Gaza’s deputy agriculture minister, who served in the Hamas-run civilian government.
Wholesale destruction
The unmentionable truth, which has been evident since the earliest days of the 18-month genocide, is that Israel is intentionally dismantling and destroying Gaza’s health sector, piece by piece.
According to the UN, Israel’s war has killed at least 1,060 healthcare workers and 399 aid workers – those deaths it has been possible to identify – and wrecked Gaza’s health facilities. Israel has rounded up hundreds of medical staff and disappeared many of them into what Israeli human rights groups call torture chambers.
One doctor, Hussam Abu Safiya, director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, has been held by Israel since he was abducted in late December. During brief contacts with lawyers, he has revealed that he is being tortured. Other doctors have been killed in Israeli detention from their abuse, including one who was allegedly raped to death.
Why is Israel carrying out this wholesale destruction of Gaza’s health sector? There are two reasons. Firstly, Netanyahu recently reiterated his intent to carry out the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza. He presents this as “voluntary migration”, supposedly in accordance with US President Donald Trump’s plan to relocate the enclave’s population of 2.3 million Palestinians to other countries.
There can be nothing voluntary about Palestinians leaving Gaza when Israel has refused to allow any food or aid into Gaza for the past month, and is indiscriminately bombing the enclave. Israel’s ultimate intention has always been to terrify the population into flight.
Israel’s ambassador to Austria, David Roet, was secretly recorded last month stating that “there are no uninvolved in Gaza” – a constant theme from Israeli officials. He also suggested there should be a “death sentence” for anyone Israel accuses of holding a gun, including children.
Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has threatened the “total devastation” of Gaza’s civilian population should they fail to “remove Hamas” from the enclave, something they are in no position to do.
Not surprisingly, faced with the prospect of an intensification of the genocide and the imminent annihilation of themselves and their loved ones, ordinary people in Gaza have started organising protests against Hamas – marches readily reported by the BBC and others.
Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and execution of medical personnel is part of the same message: there is nowhere safe, no sanctuary, the laws of war no longer apply, and no one will come to your aid in your hour of need. You are alone against our snipers, drones, tanks and Apache helicopters.
Too much to bear
The second reason for Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health sector is that we in the West, or at least our governments and media, have consented to Israel’s savagery – and actively participated in it – every step of the way. Had there been any meaningful pushback at any stage, Israel would have been forced to take another course.
When David Lammy, Britain’s foreign secretary, let slip in parliament last month the advice he has been receiving from his officials since he took up the job last summer – that Israel is clearly violating international law by starving the population – he was immediately rebuked by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office.
Let us not forget that Starmer, when he was opposition leader, approved Israel’s genocidal blocking of food, water and electricity to Gaza, saying Israel “had that right”.
In response to Lammy’s comments, Starmer’s spokesperson restated the government’s view that Israel is only “at risk” of breaching international law – a position that allows the UK to continue arming Israel and providing it with intelligence from British spy flights over Gaza from a Royal Air Force base in Cyprus.
Our politicians have consented to everything Israel has done, and not just in Gaza over the past 18 months. This genocide has been decades in the making.
Three-quarters of a century ago, the West authorised the ethnic cleansing of most of Palestine to create a self-declared Jewish state there. The West consented, too, to the violent occupation of the last sections of Palestine in 1967, and to Israel’s gradual colonization of those newly seized territories by armed Jewish extremists.
The West nodded through waves of house demolitions carried out against Palestinian communities by Israel to “Judaise” the land. It backed the Israeli army creating extensive “firing zones” on Palestinian farmland to starve traditional agricultural communities of any means of subsistence.
The West ignored Jewish settlers and soldiers destroying Palestinian olive groves, beating up shepherds, torching homes, and murdering families. Even being an Oscar winner offers no immunity from the rampant settler violence.
The West agreed to Israel creating an apartheid road system and a network of checkpoints that kept Palestinians confined to ever-shrinking ghettoes, and building walls around Palestinian areas to permanently isolate them from the rest of the world. It allowed Israel to stop Palestinians from reaching one of their holiest sites, Al-Aqsa Mosque, on land that was supposed to be central to their future state.
The West kept quiet as Israel besieged the two million people of Gaza for 17 years, putting them on a tightly rationed diet so their children would grow ever-more malnourished. It did nothing – except supply more weapons – when the people of Gaza launched a series of non-violent protests at their prison walls around the enclave, and were greeted with Israeli sniper fire that left thousands dead or crippled.
The West only found a collective voice of protest on 7 October 2023, when Hamas managed to find a way to break out of Gaza’s choking isolation to wreak havoc in Israel for 24 hours. It has been raising its voice in horror at the events of that single day ever since, drowning out 18 months of screams from the children being starved and exterminated in Gaza.
The murder of 15 Palestinian medics and aid workers is a tiny drop in an ocean of Israeli criminality – a barbarism rewarded by western capitals decade after decade.
This genocide was made in the West. Israel is our progeny, our ugly reflection in the mirror – which is why western leaders and establishment media are so desperate to make us look the other way. That reflection is too much for anyone with a soul to bear.
January 8, 2025
Israel isn't eradicating 'the terrorists'. It's turning Gaza into a wasteland, a hellscape, where doctors no longer exist, aid workers are a memory, and compassion a liability
If there was an image from 2024 that captured the year’s news, it was this one: Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, in a white lab coat, picking his way through the wreckage of the Kamal Adwan hospital he ran – the last surviving major medical facility in northern Gaza – towards two Israeli tanks, their gun barrels aimed at him.
The past year has been dominated by the death and destruction Israel has wrought throughout the tiny enclave.
It has been marked by the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians – the deaths we know about – and the maiming of at least 100,000 more; the starvation of the entire population; the levelling of the urban and agricultural landscape; and the systematic erasure of Gaza’s hospitals and health sector, including the killing, mass arrest and torture of Palestinian medics.
2024 was dominated, too, by a growing consensus from international legal and human rights authorities that all this amounts to genocide.
Here was an image, from the very final days of the year, that said it all. It showed a lone doctor – one who had risked his life to keep his hospital operational as it was besieged by Israeli forces, battered by Israeli shells and drones, and had its staff picked off by Israeli snipers – bravely heading towards his, and his people’s, exterminators.
He had paid a personal price, just as much as his patients and staff. In October, his 15-year-old son, Ibrahim, was executed during an Israeli raid on the hospital. A month later, he himself was wounded by shrapnel from an Israeli strike on the building.
By 27 December, the hospital could no longer withstand Israel’s savage onslaught. When a loudspeaker demanded that Abu Safiya come towards the tanks, he set off grimly across the rubble.
It was the moment that the Kamal Adwan hospital’s fight to protect life was brought to a sudden end; when the genocidal Israeli war machine notched an inevitable victory against the last outpost of humanity in northern Gaza.
Held in torture camp
The image was also the last known one of Abu Safiya, taken minutes before his so-called “arrest” – his abduction – by Israeli soldiers, and his disappearance into Israel’s system of torture camps.
After days of claiming it had no knowledge of his whereabouts, the Israeli military finally confirmed it was holding him incommunicado. The admission appears to have come only because of a petition to the Israeli courts from a local medical rights group.
According to a growing number of reports, Abu Safiya is now in the most notorious of Israel’s torture facilities, Sde Teiman, where soldiers were caught on video last year raping a Palestinian inmate with a baton until his insides ruptured.
The hope is that Abu Safiya will not suffer the fate of his colleague, Dr Adnan al-Bursh, the former head of orthopaedics at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital. After four months of abuse at Ofer prison, Bursh was dumped by guards in its yard, naked from the waist down, bleeding and unable to stand. He died a short time later.
Reports by human rights agencies and the United Nations – as well as testimonies from whistleblowing camp guards – tell of the systematic beating, starvation, sexual abuse and rape of Palestinian prisoners.
Israel has accused Abu Safiya, Gaza’s best-known paediatrician, of being a Hamas “terrorist”. It has abducted a further 240 people from Kamal Adwan Hospital who it claims are “terror suspects” – presumably chiefly among them patients and medical staff – and they are being held in similarly horrifying conditions.
Psychotic logic
According to Israel’s psychotic logic, anyone who works for Gaza’s Hamas government – meaning anyone like Abu Safiya employed in one of the enclave’s major institutions, such as a hospital – counts as a terrorist.
By extension, any hospital – because it falls under the Hamas government’s authority – can be treated as a “Hamas terrorist stronghold”, as Israel has termed Kamal Adwan. Ergo, all medical facilities should be destroyed, all doctors “arrested” and tortured, and all patients forcibly “evacuated”.
In Kamal Adwan’s case, the wounded, the seriously ill and those about to give birth were allowed 15 minutes to unhook their drips, get out of their sickbeds and make their way into the wrecked courtyard. Then the Israeli army set the hospital on fire.
An “evacuation” of this kind means only one thing: patients being left to die of their wounds, illnesses or malnourishment – and increasingly from the cold, too.
A growing number of babies have been dying of hypothermia as their families huddle through winter nights under canvas, without blankets or proper clothing, in the tent encampments that have become home to most of Gaza’s population.
The photograph of Abu Safiya’s surrender made it only too clear who is David and who Goliath; who is the humanitarian and who the terrorist.
Most of all, it demonstrated how the West’s political and media classes have spent the past 15 months promoting a grand lie about Gaza. They have not been seeking to end the bloodshed, but to cover it up – to excuse it.
This might explain why the most defining image of 2024 was barely visible in establishment media outlets, let alone on their front pages, as Abu Safiya was abducted by Israel and his hospital destroyed.
Most foreign editors and picture editors – dependent on salaries from their billionaire owners – appeared to prefer to pass on the news photograph of the year. Social media, however, did not. Ordinary users spread it far and wide. They understood what it showed and what it meant.
'Consciousness warfare'
Late last month, Israel announced that this coming year, it would be spending an extra $150m on what it has termed “consciousness warfare”.
That is, Israel is upping its budget 20-fold to improve its media disinformation campaigns – to whitewash its image as the slaughter in Gaza continues.
Israel has killed many of Gaza’s journalists and barred foreign correspondents from its undeclared “kill zones”. But in an era of live-streaming on phones, concealing a genocide is proving far harder than Israel imagined. It is not enough, it seems, to have the western establishment peddling your disinformation.
Israel is particularly concerned about young people – such as students on campuses – who do not consume news filtered through the BBC or CNN, and thus have a much clearer grasp of what is happening. Their senses and sensibilities have not been dulled by years of western corporate propaganda.
They are much less likely, for example, to fall for the Israeli fake news – recycled and given credence by western media – that has justified over the past 15 months the complete destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, or the kind of disinformation that entertains the idea that an esteemed physician like Abu Safiya is secretly a terrorist.
The genesis of Israel’s campaign to erase Gaza’s health sector started within days of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack. Less than two weeks later, Israel fired a powerful missile at the courtyard of Gaza City’s al-Ahli hospital; dozens of Palestinian families who had fled there, seeking protection from Israel’s military rampage, were caught in the explosion.
But the media laundered this opening shot in the war on Gaza’s hospitals by credulously echoing Israel’s preposterous assertion that a misfired Palestinian rocket, rather than an Israeli missile, had done the damage.
The attack on al-Ahli set out Israel’s blueprint for genocide, one it has followed closely over the past 15 months. It made clear to Palestinians that nowhere would be safe from Israel’s onslaught, not even established sites of sanctuary such as hospitals, mosques and churches. There would be no place to escape its wrath.
And it made clear to western leaders and media that Israel was ready to breach every known precept of international humanitarian law. There was no atrocity, no war crime it would not commit, including destroying Gaza’s medical system. Israel’s patrons were expected to give their full backing to the war, however far Israel went.
And that is exactly what they did.
Red herrings
Looking back, the brief furore over whether Israel was responsible for the attack on al-Ahli seems nightmarishly quaint now. With the lack of any pushback, Israel intensified its “consciousness warfare”, creating a bubble of fake news to connect Gaza’s hospitals to Hamas terrorism.
Within weeks, Israel was claiming to have discovered a Hamas terrorist base under Gaza’s al-Rantisi children’s hospital, with weapons stashes and a guard duty rota in Arabic for the Israeli hostages – except the rota was quickly shown to be nothing more than an innocuous calendar.
Israel’s biggest target was al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s most important medical facility. Israel released a CGI-generated video showing it sitting atop an underground “Hamas command and control centre”. The claims were once again credulously aired by western media, though the Hamas bunker was never found.
These lies served their purpose, nonetheless. Even as Israel wrecked Gaza’s hospitals and denied entry to medical aid, leaving Gaza without any way to treat the men, women and children maimed by Israel’s relentless bombing, the media turned its focus away from these all-too-obvious crimes against humanity.
Instead, as Israel hoped, journalists expended their energies chasing after red herrings, trying to verify each individual lie.
The media’s working premise appeared to be that, should the faintest hint of complicity between Hamas and a single hospital, or doctor, in Gaza be confirmed, Israel’s campaign to erase all medical facilities in the enclave and deny healthcare to 2.3 million people caught in its killing fields would be justified.
Mass graves
Notably, none of the stream of senior western doctors who volunteered in Gaza reported upon their return home having seen any sign of the armed “Hamas terrorists” who were supposedly crawling all over the hospitals in which they had worked.
These western doctors were rarely interviewed by the media as a counterpoint to Israel’s endless disinformation, which created the rationalisation for Israel to lay waste to Gaza’s hospitals and medical centres with utter abandon.
Soldiers invaded the hospitals one after another, destroying the wards, operating rooms and intensive care units.
Each forcible “evacuation” created its own trail of misery. Premature babies were left to starve or freeze to death inside their incubators. The critically ill were forced from their beds. Ambulances that tried to collect them were blown up. And each time, Gaza’s medical staff were rounded up, stripped of their clothing and disappeared.
Western journalists showed little interest, too, in the discovery of unidentified corpses in makeshift mass graves on hospital grounds after Israeli soldiers had finished their assaults – bodies that had been decapitated or mutilated, or showed indications of having been buried alive.
For these reasons and more, the UN Human Rights Office concluded last week that Gaza’s hospitals, “the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe, in fact, became a death trap”.
Similarly, a World Health Organisation official, Rik Pepperkorn, observed: "The health sector is being systematically dismantled." The WHO is seeking urgent, life-saving treatment abroad for more than 12,000 people, he added. "At the current rate, it would take five to 10 years to evacuate all these critically ill patients."
In another statement last week, two UN experts warned that Abu Safiya’s arbitrary detention was “part of a pattern by Israel to continuously bombard, destroy and fully annihilate the realization of the right to health in Gaza”.
They noted that, in addition to the mass round-ups, at least 1,057 Palestinian health and medical professionals had been killed so far.
Trajectory to genocide
The truth is that Israel’s new, better-funded disinformation campaign will prove no more effective than its existing ones.
Avi Cohen-Scali, the head of Israel’s ministry for combating antisemitism, said a decade of such programmes against what Israel calls its “delegitimisation” – that is, the exposure of its apartheid and now genocidal character – had yielded “nearly zero results”.
He told Israeli media: “This activity has failed by every conceivable parameter.”
The reality of a genocide will be impossible to airbrush away. Over the coming months, more Israeli atrocities – new and historic – will come to light. More legal and human rights organisations and scholars will conclude that Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) will issue more arrest warrants for war crimes, following those against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant.
At the weekend, an Israeli soldier on holiday in Brazil was forced to flee the country after he was warned he was under investigation.
But there is more. Leading rights organisations and scholars will have to reformulate their historical understanding of both Israel and its founding ideology of Zionism. They will need to acknowledge that this genocide did not come out of nowhere.
The trajectory began when Zionism was established as a settler-colonial movement more than a century ago. It continued when Israel was created through a mass ethnic cleansing operation against the native Palestinian population in 1948. And it gathered speed in 1967 as Israel formalised its apartheid system, engineering separate rights for Jews and Palestinians, and forcing Palestinians into ever-shrinking ghettoes.
Unchecked, Israel’s ultimate destination was always towards genocide. It is an ideological compulsion embedded in Israel’s notions of ethnic supremacy and chosen-ness.
Mad Max vision
Even after the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant in November, Israeli leaders continued their explicit incitement to genocide.
Last week, eight legislators from the Israeli parliament’s foreign affairs and defence committee wrote to the new defence minister, Israel Katz, demanding that he order the destruction of the last sources of water, food and energy in northern Gaza.
It was precisely Israel’s current starvation of Gaza’s population that led to Netanyahu and Gallant being charged with crimes against humanity.
Meanwhile, the destruction of Kamal Adwan Hospital clears the ground for a new policy in northern Gaza: what Israel is chillingly calling “Chernobylisation”.
Named after the Soviet nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, the policy views the Palestinian presence in Gaza as a comparable threat to the 1986 radioactive leak. The military’s goal is to erase all Palestinian infrastructure above and below ground, echoing Soviet emergency efforts to contain Chernobyl’s radiation.
Where does this lead?
Louise Wateridge, the senior emergency officer for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, noted at the weekend that Israel was accelerating Gaza’s complete social collapse by driving Unrwa out of the enclave.
Israeli legislation coming into effect at the end of this month will bar the refugee agency from operating in Gaza to provide families with what little food and shelter is available, given Israel’s aid blockade.
It will also, in the absence of hospitals, deprive Gaza of its last meaningful health services. Wateridge noted: “Unrwa does something like 17,000 health consultations a day in the Gaza Strip. It’s impossible for another agency to replace that.”
The danger she underscores is that Gaza will become completely lawless. Families will face not only Israel’s bombs, assassination drones and starvation programme, but also the dystopian rule of criminal gangs.
This is exactly what Israel intends for Gaza. As a report in Haaretz last week revealed, following the “Chernobylisation” of northern Gaza, Israel is mulling plans to let two big Palestinian crime families rule the south. These are likely to be the same gangs that are looting the few aid trucks that Israel allows into Gaza, assisting Israel in depriving the population of food and water.
Israel’s vision for Gaza’s future is a post-apocalyptic cross between the Mad Max film franchise and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road.
Cover story
The trajectory to genocide might have been hardwired into Zionism’s coding, but it has been the task of western leaders, media outlets, academia, think tanks and even human rights organisations to pretend otherwise.
They have spent decades holding the line on what should long ago have been a thoroughly discredited western narrative: that Israel was only ever a sanctuary for Jews from antisemitism, that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East”, that its occupation is largely benign and its illegal settlements a necessary security measure, and that the Israeli army is “the most moral in the world”.
Those fictions are unravelling faster than Israel’s disinformation can ever hope to stitch them back together.
So why do more of it? Because Israel’s “consciousness warfare” is not primarily directed at you and me. It is directed at western leaders. This is not to persuade them of anything; British Prime Minister Keir Starmer knows full well there is a genocide going on in Gaza, as does Donald Trump, the incoming US president.
They simply do not care – not least because you cannot reach the summit of a western political system unless you are prepared to think sociopathically about the world. There is a western military industrial complex to placate, and western corporations to service that expect to maintain their dominion over global resource extraction.
This is why in the dying days of his presidency, with no votes to win, Joe Biden has dropped the pretence of “tirelessly working for a ceasefire” or demanding that Israel send in at least 350 aid trucks a day. Instead, he has announced as a parting gift to Israel a further $8bn in arms, including munitions for fighter jets and attack helicopters.
No, the goal of Israel’s disinformation campaign is to provide a cover story. It is to muddy the waters just enough to obscure western leaders’ support for genocide; to give them an excuse for continuing to send weapons, and to help them evade a war crimes trial at The Hague.
The goal is “plausible deniability”: to be able to claim that what was obvious was not too obvious, that what was known to ordinary onlookers was unclear to those directly participating.
Western leaders know that Israel has dragged off Abu Safiya – one of Gaza’s great healers – to one of its torture camps, where he is almost certainly being starved, intermittently beaten, humiliated and terrorised, like the other inmates.
Israel’s work now is to weaken and destroy his physical and mental resilience, just as it has dismantled Gaza’s hospitals.
Israel’s goal is not to eradicate “the terrorists”. It is to turn Gaza into a wasteland, a hellscape, in which no one good, no one who cares, no one trying to cling on to their humanity can survive. A place where doctors do not exist, aid workers are a memory, and compassion is a liability; a place where tanks and criminal gangs rule.
The job of the western political and media class is to make all this appear as routine and normal as possible. Their job is to deaden us inside, to hollow out our ability to care or resist, to leave us numb. We must prove them wrong – for Dr Abu Safiya’s sake, and for our own.
Israel isn't eradicating 'the terrorists'. It's turning Gaza into a wasteland, a hellscape, where doctors no longer exist, aid workers are a memory, and compassion a liability
If there was an image from 2024 that captured the year’s news, it was this one: Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, in a white lab coat, picking his way through the wreckage of the Kamal Adwan hospital he ran – the last surviving major medical facility in northern Gaza – towards two Israeli tanks, their gun barrels aimed at him.
The past year has been dominated by the death and destruction Israel has wrought throughout the tiny enclave.
It has been marked by the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians – the deaths we know about – and the maiming of at least 100,000 more; the starvation of the entire population; the levelling of the urban and agricultural landscape; and the systematic erasure of Gaza’s hospitals and health sector, including the killing, mass arrest and torture of Palestinian medics.
2024 was dominated, too, by a growing consensus from international legal and human rights authorities that all this amounts to genocide.
Here was an image, from the very final days of the year, that said it all. It showed a lone doctor – one who had risked his life to keep his hospital operational as it was besieged by Israeli forces, battered by Israeli shells and drones, and had its staff picked off by Israeli snipers – bravely heading towards his, and his people’s, exterminators.
He had paid a personal price, just as much as his patients and staff. In October, his 15-year-old son, Ibrahim, was executed during an Israeli raid on the hospital. A month later, he himself was wounded by shrapnel from an Israeli strike on the building.
By 27 December, the hospital could no longer withstand Israel’s savage onslaught. When a loudspeaker demanded that Abu Safiya come towards the tanks, he set off grimly across the rubble.
It was the moment that the Kamal Adwan hospital’s fight to protect life was brought to a sudden end; when the genocidal Israeli war machine notched an inevitable victory against the last outpost of humanity in northern Gaza.
Held in torture camp
The image was also the last known one of Abu Safiya, taken minutes before his so-called “arrest” – his abduction – by Israeli soldiers, and his disappearance into Israel’s system of torture camps.
After days of claiming it had no knowledge of his whereabouts, the Israeli military finally confirmed it was holding him incommunicado. The admission appears to have come only because of a petition to the Israeli courts from a local medical rights group.
According to a growing number of reports, Abu Safiya is now in the most notorious of Israel’s torture facilities, Sde Teiman, where soldiers were caught on video last year raping a Palestinian inmate with a baton until his insides ruptured.
The hope is that Abu Safiya will not suffer the fate of his colleague, Dr Adnan al-Bursh, the former head of orthopaedics at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital. After four months of abuse at Ofer prison, Bursh was dumped by guards in its yard, naked from the waist down, bleeding and unable to stand. He died a short time later.
Reports by human rights agencies and the United Nations – as well as testimonies from whistleblowing camp guards – tell of the systematic beating, starvation, sexual abuse and rape of Palestinian prisoners.
Israel has accused Abu Safiya, Gaza’s best-known paediatrician, of being a Hamas “terrorist”. It has abducted a further 240 people from Kamal Adwan Hospital who it claims are “terror suspects” – presumably chiefly among them patients and medical staff – and they are being held in similarly horrifying conditions.
Psychotic logic
According to Israel’s psychotic logic, anyone who works for Gaza’s Hamas government – meaning anyone like Abu Safiya employed in one of the enclave’s major institutions, such as a hospital – counts as a terrorist.
By extension, any hospital – because it falls under the Hamas government’s authority – can be treated as a “Hamas terrorist stronghold”, as Israel has termed Kamal Adwan. Ergo, all medical facilities should be destroyed, all doctors “arrested” and tortured, and all patients forcibly “evacuated”.
In Kamal Adwan’s case, the wounded, the seriously ill and those about to give birth were allowed 15 minutes to unhook their drips, get out of their sickbeds and make their way into the wrecked courtyard. Then the Israeli army set the hospital on fire.
An “evacuation” of this kind means only one thing: patients being left to die of their wounds, illnesses or malnourishment – and increasingly from the cold, too.
A growing number of babies have been dying of hypothermia as their families huddle through winter nights under canvas, without blankets or proper clothing, in the tent encampments that have become home to most of Gaza’s population.
The photograph of Abu Safiya’s surrender made it only too clear who is David and who Goliath; who is the humanitarian and who the terrorist.
Most of all, it demonstrated how the West’s political and media classes have spent the past 15 months promoting a grand lie about Gaza. They have not been seeking to end the bloodshed, but to cover it up – to excuse it.
This might explain why the most defining image of 2024 was barely visible in establishment media outlets, let alone on their front pages, as Abu Safiya was abducted by Israel and his hospital destroyed.
Most foreign editors and picture editors – dependent on salaries from their billionaire owners – appeared to prefer to pass on the news photograph of the year. Social media, however, did not. Ordinary users spread it far and wide. They understood what it showed and what it meant.
'Consciousness warfare'
Late last month, Israel announced that this coming year, it would be spending an extra $150m on what it has termed “consciousness warfare”.
That is, Israel is upping its budget 20-fold to improve its media disinformation campaigns – to whitewash its image as the slaughter in Gaza continues.
Israel has killed many of Gaza’s journalists and barred foreign correspondents from its undeclared “kill zones”. But in an era of live-streaming on phones, concealing a genocide is proving far harder than Israel imagined. It is not enough, it seems, to have the western establishment peddling your disinformation.
Israel is particularly concerned about young people – such as students on campuses – who do not consume news filtered through the BBC or CNN, and thus have a much clearer grasp of what is happening. Their senses and sensibilities have not been dulled by years of western corporate propaganda.
They are much less likely, for example, to fall for the Israeli fake news – recycled and given credence by western media – that has justified over the past 15 months the complete destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, or the kind of disinformation that entertains the idea that an esteemed physician like Abu Safiya is secretly a terrorist.
The genesis of Israel’s campaign to erase Gaza’s health sector started within days of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack. Less than two weeks later, Israel fired a powerful missile at the courtyard of Gaza City’s al-Ahli hospital; dozens of Palestinian families who had fled there, seeking protection from Israel’s military rampage, were caught in the explosion.
But the media laundered this opening shot in the war on Gaza’s hospitals by credulously echoing Israel’s preposterous assertion that a misfired Palestinian rocket, rather than an Israeli missile, had done the damage.
The attack on al-Ahli set out Israel’s blueprint for genocide, one it has followed closely over the past 15 months. It made clear to Palestinians that nowhere would be safe from Israel’s onslaught, not even established sites of sanctuary such as hospitals, mosques and churches. There would be no place to escape its wrath.
And it made clear to western leaders and media that Israel was ready to breach every known precept of international humanitarian law. There was no atrocity, no war crime it would not commit, including destroying Gaza’s medical system. Israel’s patrons were expected to give their full backing to the war, however far Israel went.
And that is exactly what they did.
Red herrings
Looking back, the brief furore over whether Israel was responsible for the attack on al-Ahli seems nightmarishly quaint now. With the lack of any pushback, Israel intensified its “consciousness warfare”, creating a bubble of fake news to connect Gaza’s hospitals to Hamas terrorism.
Within weeks, Israel was claiming to have discovered a Hamas terrorist base under Gaza’s al-Rantisi children’s hospital, with weapons stashes and a guard duty rota in Arabic for the Israeli hostages – except the rota was quickly shown to be nothing more than an innocuous calendar.
Israel’s biggest target was al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s most important medical facility. Israel released a CGI-generated video showing it sitting atop an underground “Hamas command and control centre”. The claims were once again credulously aired by western media, though the Hamas bunker was never found.
These lies served their purpose, nonetheless. Even as Israel wrecked Gaza’s hospitals and denied entry to medical aid, leaving Gaza without any way to treat the men, women and children maimed by Israel’s relentless bombing, the media turned its focus away from these all-too-obvious crimes against humanity.
Instead, as Israel hoped, journalists expended their energies chasing after red herrings, trying to verify each individual lie.
The media’s working premise appeared to be that, should the faintest hint of complicity between Hamas and a single hospital, or doctor, in Gaza be confirmed, Israel’s campaign to erase all medical facilities in the enclave and deny healthcare to 2.3 million people caught in its killing fields would be justified.
Mass graves
Notably, none of the stream of senior western doctors who volunteered in Gaza reported upon their return home having seen any sign of the armed “Hamas terrorists” who were supposedly crawling all over the hospitals in which they had worked.
These western doctors were rarely interviewed by the media as a counterpoint to Israel’s endless disinformation, which created the rationalisation for Israel to lay waste to Gaza’s hospitals and medical centres with utter abandon.
Soldiers invaded the hospitals one after another, destroying the wards, operating rooms and intensive care units.
Each forcible “evacuation” created its own trail of misery. Premature babies were left to starve or freeze to death inside their incubators. The critically ill were forced from their beds. Ambulances that tried to collect them were blown up. And each time, Gaza’s medical staff were rounded up, stripped of their clothing and disappeared.
Western journalists showed little interest, too, in the discovery of unidentified corpses in makeshift mass graves on hospital grounds after Israeli soldiers had finished their assaults – bodies that had been decapitated or mutilated, or showed indications of having been buried alive.
For these reasons and more, the UN Human Rights Office concluded last week that Gaza’s hospitals, “the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe, in fact, became a death trap”.
Similarly, a World Health Organisation official, Rik Pepperkorn, observed: "The health sector is being systematically dismantled." The WHO is seeking urgent, life-saving treatment abroad for more than 12,000 people, he added. "At the current rate, it would take five to 10 years to evacuate all these critically ill patients."
In another statement last week, two UN experts warned that Abu Safiya’s arbitrary detention was “part of a pattern by Israel to continuously bombard, destroy and fully annihilate the realization of the right to health in Gaza”.
They noted that, in addition to the mass round-ups, at least 1,057 Palestinian health and medical professionals had been killed so far.
Trajectory to genocide
The truth is that Israel’s new, better-funded disinformation campaign will prove no more effective than its existing ones.
Avi Cohen-Scali, the head of Israel’s ministry for combating antisemitism, said a decade of such programmes against what Israel calls its “delegitimisation” – that is, the exposure of its apartheid and now genocidal character – had yielded “nearly zero results”.
He told Israeli media: “This activity has failed by every conceivable parameter.”
The reality of a genocide will be impossible to airbrush away. Over the coming months, more Israeli atrocities – new and historic – will come to light. More legal and human rights organisations and scholars will conclude that Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) will issue more arrest warrants for war crimes, following those against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant.
At the weekend, an Israeli soldier on holiday in Brazil was forced to flee the country after he was warned he was under investigation.
But there is more. Leading rights organisations and scholars will have to reformulate their historical understanding of both Israel and its founding ideology of Zionism. They will need to acknowledge that this genocide did not come out of nowhere.
The trajectory began when Zionism was established as a settler-colonial movement more than a century ago. It continued when Israel was created through a mass ethnic cleansing operation against the native Palestinian population in 1948. And it gathered speed in 1967 as Israel formalised its apartheid system, engineering separate rights for Jews and Palestinians, and forcing Palestinians into ever-shrinking ghettoes.
Unchecked, Israel’s ultimate destination was always towards genocide. It is an ideological compulsion embedded in Israel’s notions of ethnic supremacy and chosen-ness.
Mad Max vision
Even after the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant in November, Israeli leaders continued their explicit incitement to genocide.
Last week, eight legislators from the Israeli parliament’s foreign affairs and defence committee wrote to the new defence minister, Israel Katz, demanding that he order the destruction of the last sources of water, food and energy in northern Gaza.
It was precisely Israel’s current starvation of Gaza’s population that led to Netanyahu and Gallant being charged with crimes against humanity.
Meanwhile, the destruction of Kamal Adwan Hospital clears the ground for a new policy in northern Gaza: what Israel is chillingly calling “Chernobylisation”.
Named after the Soviet nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, the policy views the Palestinian presence in Gaza as a comparable threat to the 1986 radioactive leak. The military’s goal is to erase all Palestinian infrastructure above and below ground, echoing Soviet emergency efforts to contain Chernobyl’s radiation.
Where does this lead?
Louise Wateridge, the senior emergency officer for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, noted at the weekend that Israel was accelerating Gaza’s complete social collapse by driving Unrwa out of the enclave.
Israeli legislation coming into effect at the end of this month will bar the refugee agency from operating in Gaza to provide families with what little food and shelter is available, given Israel’s aid blockade.
It will also, in the absence of hospitals, deprive Gaza of its last meaningful health services. Wateridge noted: “Unrwa does something like 17,000 health consultations a day in the Gaza Strip. It’s impossible for another agency to replace that.”
The danger she underscores is that Gaza will become completely lawless. Families will face not only Israel’s bombs, assassination drones and starvation programme, but also the dystopian rule of criminal gangs.
This is exactly what Israel intends for Gaza. As a report in Haaretz last week revealed, following the “Chernobylisation” of northern Gaza, Israel is mulling plans to let two big Palestinian crime families rule the south. These are likely to be the same gangs that are looting the few aid trucks that Israel allows into Gaza, assisting Israel in depriving the population of food and water.
Israel’s vision for Gaza’s future is a post-apocalyptic cross between the Mad Max film franchise and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road.
Cover story
The trajectory to genocide might have been hardwired into Zionism’s coding, but it has been the task of western leaders, media outlets, academia, think tanks and even human rights organisations to pretend otherwise.
They have spent decades holding the line on what should long ago have been a thoroughly discredited western narrative: that Israel was only ever a sanctuary for Jews from antisemitism, that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East”, that its occupation is largely benign and its illegal settlements a necessary security measure, and that the Israeli army is “the most moral in the world”.
Those fictions are unravelling faster than Israel’s disinformation can ever hope to stitch them back together.
So why do more of it? Because Israel’s “consciousness warfare” is not primarily directed at you and me. It is directed at western leaders. This is not to persuade them of anything; British Prime Minister Keir Starmer knows full well there is a genocide going on in Gaza, as does Donald Trump, the incoming US president.
They simply do not care – not least because you cannot reach the summit of a western political system unless you are prepared to think sociopathically about the world. There is a western military industrial complex to placate, and western corporations to service that expect to maintain their dominion over global resource extraction.
This is why in the dying days of his presidency, with no votes to win, Joe Biden has dropped the pretence of “tirelessly working for a ceasefire” or demanding that Israel send in at least 350 aid trucks a day. Instead, he has announced as a parting gift to Israel a further $8bn in arms, including munitions for fighter jets and attack helicopters.
No, the goal of Israel’s disinformation campaign is to provide a cover story. It is to muddy the waters just enough to obscure western leaders’ support for genocide; to give them an excuse for continuing to send weapons, and to help them evade a war crimes trial at The Hague.
The goal is “plausible deniability”: to be able to claim that what was obvious was not too obvious, that what was known to ordinary onlookers was unclear to those directly participating.
Western leaders know that Israel has dragged off Abu Safiya – one of Gaza’s great healers – to one of its torture camps, where he is almost certainly being starved, intermittently beaten, humiliated and terrorised, like the other inmates.
Israel’s work now is to weaken and destroy his physical and mental resilience, just as it has dismantled Gaza’s hospitals.
Israel’s goal is not to eradicate “the terrorists”. It is to turn Gaza into a wasteland, a hellscape, in which no one good, no one who cares, no one trying to cling on to their humanity can survive. A place where doctors do not exist, aid workers are a memory, and compassion is a liability; a place where tanks and criminal gangs rule.
The job of the western political and media class is to make all this appear as routine and normal as possible. Their job is to deaden us inside, to hollow out our ability to care or resist, to leave us numb. We must prove them wrong – for Dr Abu Safiya’s sake, and for our own.
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