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Last Thursday, just a few days after ordering strikes in Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood in front of the Soroka Hospital in Beersheba and talked about his outrage that the building had been affected in an Iranian counter-state.
“They are targeting civilians because they are a criminal regime. They are the world’s arch-terrorists,” he said about the Iranian government.
Similar accusations have been leveled by other Israeli leaders, notably the president, Isaac Herzog, and the opposition chief Yair Lapid, during the conflict with Iran, which ended with a cease-fire negotiated by US President Donald Trump on Monday.
However, what was missing to these leaders was a recognition that Israel himself attacked almost all Hospital in GazaWhere more than 56,000 people were killed, or that the band’s health system has been pushed to a total collapse.
It was a visible omission in a large part of the Israeli press reporting on the attack on Beersheba hospital, with few parallel mentions between it and the own attacks of Israel against hospitals in Gaza. Instead, a large part of the Israeli media supported these attacks, either seeking to minimize them, either by justifying them by regularly affirming that Hamas’ command centers are under hospitals, an accusation never been able to prove.
Armament suffering
According to analysts who spoke in Al Jazeera, a media ecosystem exists in Israel which, with a few exceptions, both amplifies that its leaders call for war while simultaneously strengthening their victim claims, while protecting the Israeli public to see the suffering Israeli forces inflicted on Gaza and the fiancée,
An Israeli journalist, the Haaretz media correspondent, Ido David Cohen, written this month That “journalists and publishers in the main media of Israel have admitted more than once, especially in private conversations, that their employers have not allowed them to present the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the suffering of the population there”.
“Israeli media … sees his work as not to educate, it is to shape and shape an audience ready to support war and assault,” said journalist Orly Noy in Al Jazeera of Western Jerusalem. “He really considers himself having a special role on this subject.”
“I saw (interviews with) people who lived near areas where Iranian missiles had struck,” added Noy. “They had a lot of space to speak and explain the impact, but as soon as they started criticizing war, they were closed, roughly.”
Last September, a complaint filed by three organizations of Israeli civil society against Channel 14, one of the most watched television networks in Israel, cited 265 host quotes that they claimed to encourage war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide. Among them, concerning Gaza, there were the sentences “it must really be a total annihilation” and “there are no innocent”.
A few months earlier, in April, the channel was again criticized in the Israeli media, this time for a live counter labeled “the terrorists that we eliminated”, which made no distinction between civilians and killed fighters, the media surveillance magazine The 7th eye stressed.
Analysts and observers described how the media and politicians of Israel armed the horrors of the past suffering of the Jewish people and have shaped it into a victimization story which can be intended for any geopolitical adversary that circumstances allow – with Iran which is looming among them.
“It is not only this war,” said Noy, publisher of the Local Call website in the Hebrew language. “The Israeli media are justifying each war, telling people that this war is essential for their very existence. It is an ecosystem. Whatever authority is absolutely right. There is no margin of doubt, without room for criticisms of the interior. To see it, you must be outside. “
“The world has enabled Israel to act as a kind of crazy intimidator to do what he wants when he wants,” added Noy. “They can send their troops to Syria and Lebanon, no matter with impunity. Israel is fine. Israel is the balloon. And why wouldn’t they think that? The world permits, then people are shocked when Iran retreats. ”
The Israeli media serve as a large tool to make consent to the actions of Israel against the Palestinians and in neighboring countries, while protecting the Israeli public from the suffering that his victims endure.
Exceptions exist. Israeli titles such as the local magazine of Noy and the +972 magazine often present a very critical coverage of the War of Israel against Gaza, and have carried out in -depth investigations on the actions of Israel, by discovering scandals which are not reported until months later by the international media. Joint reports of the local call and the +972 magazine revealed that the Israeli army used an AI system To generate target bombing lists based on planned civilian victims. Another report revealed that the Israeli army had Wrongly declared from the Gaza districts as evacuatedThis then led to the bombing of civil houses in still inhabited areas.
A more famous example is the Liberal daily Haaretz, which regularly criticizes Israel’s actions in Gaza. Haaretz faced a Government boycott on its coverage of war.
“It’s not new,” said Dina Matar, professor of political communication and Arab media at Soas University in London. “The Israeli media has long been pushing the idea that they (Israel) are the victims while calling for actions that will allow them to present greater victimization (such as the attack of Iran). They often use emotional language to describe a strike on an Israeli hospital which they will never use to describe an Israeli strike in a hospital in Gaza. ”
Take the Israeli media coverage at the headquarters of the last functional health establishment in the Northern Gaza, Kamal Adwan Hospital in December.
While the descriptions of attacks against the hospital of special rapporteurs of the United Nations spoke of their “horror” To strikes, those of the Israeli press, in points of sale such as Be intended Or The era of Israel, Instead, is almost exclusively focused on Israeli army’s claims on the number of “terrorists” seized.
Among the people seized of the hospital was the medical staff, including the director of Kamal Adwan, Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, who since has been tortured in an Israeli military prisonHis lawyer has already declared to Al Jazeera.
On the other hand, the Israeli coverage of the attack at Soroka hospital in Beersheba has almost universally framed the blow as a “direct strike” and led the experience of evacuated patients and health workers.
In this environment, Matar said, the representation of Netanyahu of Israel as “a subjugated people” has strengthened the opinion that the Israelis have long been encouraged to be held, even in the middle of the occupation of the Palestinian lands for decades.
“No one wonders what Netanyahu says because the implications of his speech have meaning within the framework of this broader historical account; the one that allows no other (story), like the Nakba or suffering in Gaza, “said the academic.
