For four decades, the West presented Iran’s regional strategy as the work of a rogue state exporting revolution and chaos. They never told you about the CIA coup that destroyed Iran’s democracy in 1953.

They never told you that America armed the man who gassed Iranian soldiers. They never showed you the map — the ring of American military bases on every border, the US Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf, the Israeli aircraft that bombed Iranian assets with impunity and assassinated Iranian scientists on Iranian soil.

Iran built the Axis of Resistance and the Mosaic Defence as its answer to that encirclement.

• READ MORE: ‘Technical’ talks under way in Doha as Tehran demands action
• Other Lim Tean articles

Now, with the 2026 war and its fragile ceasefire, we can assess the full doctrine — what it achieved, where it was tested to its limits, and what it tells us about the future of Iranian sovereignty.

This is the story they spent decades trying to prevent you from understanding.

The fortress and the forward shield: How Iran built the architecture of survival
Look at a map.

Not the map the Western press shows you — the one that marks Iran in the colour reserved for rogue states, surrounded by the clean borders of American allies and reasonable nations.

I want you to look at the real map. The strategic map below.

This is the map that every Iranian general, every Iranian strategic planner, every Iranian Supreme Leader has looked at every morning for the past four decades.

What the map shows is not an aggressive power projecting menace outward. It shows a nation under siege — encircled, threatened, and facing an existential choice that empires have always forced upon those they cannot fully control: submit, or build the architecture of survival.

Iran chose to build.

What follows is the story of how — and why. And now, in the wake of the 2026 war and its fragile ceasefire, we can assess that architecture under the most severe test it has ever faced.

1. The doctrine born from betrayal
To understand Iranian grand strategy, you must first understand what Iran learned — not from ideology, not from theology, but from history. From its own history, written in blood and betrayal.

Lesson One came in 1953. Iran had a democracy. A real one — a Parliament, a free press, a Prime Minister of genuine popular legitimacy who had committed the unforgivable act of returning Iran’s oil to its own people.

The West destroyed it. Not with armies, but with money, propaganda, and hired mobs. The CIA and MI6 removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and installed a pliant Shah who would keep Iranian oil flowing to London and Washington.

The lesson Iran drew was stark and permanent: the West does not want Iran strong, sovereign, or self-determining. It wants Iran “manageable”.

Lesson Two came in the 1980s. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980 with the tacit blessing of Washington, which viewed the chaos of revolutionary Iran in 1979 as a strategic opportunity.

For eight years, Iran bled. Perhaps one million lives. And when Iranian forces began pushing back, Washington made its choice. It provided Saddam with satellite intelligence on Iranian troop positions. It supplied the precursor chemicals for the weapons Saddam used to gas Iranian soldiers on the battlefield — mustard gas, tabun, sarin — in one of the most extensively documented war crimes of the modern era.

American officials knew. They continued regardless.

The lesson Iran drew from those eight years was equally stark: when your existence is threatened, no one will come. Not the United Nations. Not international law. Not the conventions against chemical weapons. No one.

These two lessons — the 1953 betrayal and the 1980s abandonment — are the foundation of everything that follows. They are not ideology. They are experience. And as Oliver Wendell Holmes observed: the life of the law — and we might add, the life of strategy — is not logic. It is experience.

Iran’s grand strategy is the experience of a nation that has been betrayed, encircled, and attacked — and has drawn the only rational conclusions available to a sovereign state determined to survive.

2. The encirclement — what Iran actually sees
Before we examine what Iran built, we must understand what Iran faces. Because the architecture of Iranian strategy makes no sense without the map — the real map, not the sanitised version.

To Iran’s east, American forces spent two decades in Afghanistan — on Iran’s longest land border. To Iran’s west, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 removed Saddam Hussein but replaced him with a country that became host to the largest American embassy on earth, a vast network of military bases, and tens of thousands of American troops — sitting on Iran’s western doorstep.

In the Persian Gulf — Iran’s southern maritime frontier — the United States Fifth Fleet operates from Bahrain, a permanent naval presence of carrier groups, destroyers, and the full apparatus of American maritime power.

At Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, America maintained the largest US air installation in the entire Middle East — a facility capable of projecting devastating airpower across the region within hours.

In Kuwait. In the UAE. Across the Arabian Peninsula, American bases formed a constellation of military power that, viewed from Tehran, looked less like a defensive alliance and more like a slowly tightening noose.

This is not Iranian paranoia. This is Iranian geography.

Any strategic planner in any country — American, British, Chinese, Indian — looking at that map would draw the same conclusion. Iran had been encircled with a precision that left nothing to chance.

The message was unambiguous: the United States had positioned itself to strangle Iran economically through Gulf control, to strike Iran from multiple directions simultaneously, and to do so from bases close enough to minimise warning time and maximise devastation.

Iran looked at this map. And Iran made a decision.

If the Americans intend to make the Persian Gulf an American lake, Iran will ensure that lake has a price. If American power is to sit on every border, every border will become a potential front. If encirclement is the American strategy, Iran’s answer will be to make that encirclement so costly to act upon that it becomes, in practice, a cage with open bars — present but unusable.

The Axis of Resistance was not born of religious fervour or ideological ambition. It was born of that map.

3. The Israeli dimension — the undeclared nuclear power that bombs its neighbours
And then there is Israel.

The Western framing of the Iran-Israel confrontation presents it as Iranian aggression against a peaceful democratic state. This is such a complete inversion of the actual sequence of events that it requires dismantling with some care.

Israel is, by the near-universal assessment of the international intelligence community, a nuclear power. It possesses an estimated 90 nuclear warheads. It has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has never submitted to international inspection.

It maintains what is called a policy of “nuclear ambiguity” — neither confirming nor denying what the entire world knows to be true. And it directs its considerable diplomatic energy toward ensuring that no other state in its region acquires the same deterrent capability it has quietly accumulated for itself.

This is the context in which Iran’s nuclear programme must be understood. Iran is a signatory to the NPT. Its programme operated under international scrutiny that Israel’s never has.

And yet it was Iran that was presented as the existential threat, Iran that was sanctioned, Iran that was threatened with military strikes — and ultimately, Iran that was bombed.

But the nuclear dimension was only the beginning. Israeli planes repeatedly struck Iranian assets in Syria — military installations, weapons convoys, advisers — hundreds of strikes over a decade, conducted with complete impunity.

Israeli intelligence assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists on Iranian soil. In April 2024, Israel struck the Iranian consulate in Damascus — sovereign Iranian territory under the Vienna Convention — killing senior commanders.

In July 2024, Israeli intelligence assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, in Tehran itself.

In June 2025, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion and America followed with Operation Midnight Hammer — the first direct US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, targeting Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.

Then, on February 28, 2026, came the full assault: Operation Epic Fury, a joint US-Israeli campaign of nearly 900 strikes in 12 hours targeting Iran’s missiles, air defences, military infrastructure, and leadership. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed. Dozens of senior officials perished. Iran’s nuclear programme was severely degraded.

The doctrine that Iran had constructed across four decades — forward defence through the Axis of Resistance, interior resilience through the Mosaic Defence — was now facing its ultimate test.

Hezbollah had served as Iran’s most elegant strategic instrument — a deterrent positioned on Israel’s northern border, ensuring that any strike on Iran carried automatic, unavoidable cost.

For 30 years, it worked. Every Israeli military planner understood that attacking Natanz meant absorbing tens of thousands of Hezbollah rockets into northern Israel simultaneously. That deterrent logic held — until 2024, when Israel called the bluff.

Yet even after Nasrallah’s assassination and the degradation of Hezbollah’s arsenal, the organisation demonstrated remarkable residual fighting capacity. When IDF ground forces attempted to push into southern Lebanon, Hezbollah gave them a drubbing — inflicting casualties, destroying armoured vehicles, and forcing repeated tactical withdrawals that exposed the limits of Israeli conventional military power on the ground.

The shield had been damaged. It had not been broken.

4. The Axis of Resistance — architecture of Forward Defence
With the American encirclement and Israeli threat understood, the Axis of Resistance reveals itself not as an Iranian imperial project but as a coherent strategic architecture built on a single organising principle: make the cost of attacking Iran prohibitive, by ensuring that any attack triggers consequences across the entire region simultaneously.

The components of that architecture were distinct in character but unified in purpose.

Hezbollah was Iran’s most sophisticated instrument — battle-hardened, institutionally deep, politically embedded in Lebanese society, and at its peak possessing an arsenal of more than 150,000 rockets and missiles.

It is not a militia in the casual sense. It is a military organisation with combat experience forged across four decades, in Lebanon’s civil war, the Syrian conflict, and multiple wars against one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world.

Despite the severe degradation it suffered in 2024 and 2025, Hezbollah remains a potent force — as the IDF discovered when its ground forces pushed into southern Lebanon and were met with fierce resistance, tactical ambushes, and anti-armour fire that forced repeated withdrawals.

Iran’s first line of forward defence has been bloodied but not destroyed.

Hamas was a different and more complicated case — Palestinian in origin, rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood tradition rather than Shia political theology. But Iran adopted the Palestinian cause with strategic intelligence, recognising that support for Palestinian resistance gave Tehran something invaluable: moral legitimacy across the entire Muslim world, Sunni and Shia alike.

Supporting Hamas cost Iran relatively little. It purchased Iran enormous influence and the one thing that money and missiles cannot buy — the genuine sympathy of the Arab street.

The Houthis of Yemen were the most recent and surprising component. Not originally an Iranian creation, they were driven into Tehran’s strategic embrace by the Saudi-led war in Yemen — backed by American weapons, logistics, and political cover.

The Houthis’ capacity to threaten Red Sea shipping and strike deep into the Gulf transformed them from a local insurgency into a regional strategic asset of considerable importance. Their intervention following October 7, 2023 demonstrated reach that surprised even optimistic Iranian planners — and their continued operations through the 2026 war demonstrated a resilience that confounded repeated predictions of their swift neutralisation.

The Iraqi militias — the Popular Mobilisation Forces and their various components — completed the architecture. Born from the chaos of the American invasion and consolidated during the fight against ISIS, these forces represented Iran’s most direct penetration of a neighbouring state’s security structure, giving Tehran influence over the country on its western border through which any American ground offensive would necessarily pass.

Together, these components formed what Iranian strategists called the “ring of fire” — a constellation of armed, motivated, battle-tested forces positioned around Iran’s primary adversaries. Not an empire. A defensive perimeter, constructed outside Iran’s borders precisely because Iran’s borders had proven, twice in living memory, to be insufficient protection against the ambitions of external powers.

5. The Mosaic Defence — making Iran unconquerable
Forward defence alone — however sophisticated — was always only half of Iran’s strategic architecture. Iranian planners understood that the outer ring could be degraded. Proxies could be weakened. Forward positions could be overrun. The question that preoccupied Iran’s military establishment for four decades was this: if the forward shield fails, what then?

The answer was the Mosaic Defence.

The concept is as elegant as it is ruthless. Iran deliberately, systematically, and over decades decentralised its entire military infrastructure across all 31 of its provinces. Missile arsenals were not concentrated in single facilities but dispersed across hundreds of sites — underground, mountainside, desert — spread across a country the size of Western Europe.

Command and control was distributed rather than centralised, designed to survive the decapitation strikes that destroyed Iraq’s military capacity in 1991 and Libya’s in 2011. Defence industries were deliberately dispersed so that no single strike, however precise, could eliminate Iran’s capacity to produce and deploy weapons.

The underground dimension was particularly significant. Iran invested enormously in what it called its “missile cities” — vast subterranean complexes buried deep enough to survive all but the most specialised munitions. The 2026 campaign tested this directly.

Despite nearly 900 strikes in the opening 12 hours and CENTCOM ultimately claiming over 11,000 targets struck across the entire war, a preliminary US Defense Intelligence Agency assessment — leaked and characterised by the Trump administration as “political” — concluded that Iran had moved much of its enriched uranium stockpile before the strikes began and that the underground facilities had not been collapsed.

The CIA subsequently disputed this, claiming severe damage that would take years to rebuild. The truth, as is so often the case in the fog of war, likely lies somewhere between these assessments.

What is beyond dispute is this: the logic Iran applied — the logic of a student of history who had watched what happened to states that presented centralised targets — proved partially vindicated. The 31-province dispersal model meant that even 11,000 strikes could not deliver a clean, decisive blow. Iran was damaged. Iran was not defeated.

Centralisation is a vulnerability. Dispersal is survival.

The Mosaic Defence and the Axis of Resistance were never separate strategies. They were two halves of a single, integrated doctrine. Attack Iran’s periphery — and the Axis activates. Penetrate to the interior — and the Mosaic ensures there is no clean, decisive blow to be struck. The 2026 war demonstrated both the power and the limits of that doctrine.

6. The 2026 War — the ultimate test
Intellectual honesty requires confronting what Operation Epic Fury achieved — and what it did not.

What it achieved was substantial. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening strikes — a decapitation of the Islamic Republic’s leadership of historic proportions. Dozens of senior IRGC commanders, nuclear scientists, and regime officials perished. Iran’s nuclear enrichment infrastructure was severely degraded. Its air defences were systematically dismantled. Its navy was effectively destroyed.

The Iranian economy, already strangled by decades of sanctions, went into free fall. Its currency collapsed. Protests that had begun in December 2025 spread across the country as the regime’s authority visibly cracked.

What it did not achieve is equally instructive.

Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile — the IAEA had confirmed 440 kilograms enriched to 60 percent purity before the war, sufficient for multiple weapons if further enriched — could not be fully accounted for.

Two military campaigns left that stockpile harder, not easier, to locate. Iran had anticipated decapitation. Within 30 minutes of the opening strikes, Iranian forces launched simultaneous retaliatory attacks across multiple fronts without waiting for centralised authorisation — precisely the pre-delegated response architecture that the Mosaic Defence doctrine had prescribed.

The regime was headless. The military machine kept fighting.

Iran’s response was devastating to the American strategic position in the region. It closed the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly 20 percent of global oil supply passes — triggering a global energy shock and fuel crises across Asia.

It struck American bases across the Gulf simultaneously: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE. It bombarded Israel with over 525 ballistic missiles. It struck oil infrastructure across the Arabian Peninsula. Thirteen American service members were killed. The regional war that Iran’s forward defence doctrine had always promised to trigger — the promise that had deterred attack for thirty years — was fulfilled.

The ceasefire that followed told its own story. After 40 days of sustained combat, with both sides exhausted and the global economy convulsing, Pakistan brokered a conditional truce on April 8, 2026.

The highest-level direct US-Iran engagement since the 1979 revolution followed — JD Vance meeting Iranian counterparts in Islamabad. On June 17, 2026, Trump and Iranian President Pezeshkian signed the Islamabad Memorandum, with Trump signing at the Palace of Versailles, establishing a 60-day framework for further negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme, sanctions relief, the unfreezing of Iranian assets, and the future of the Strait of Hormuz.

Read that again. The United States of America — which had launched nearly 900 strikes in 12 hours against Iran, killed its Supreme Leader, and declared regime change as its explicit objective — ended up negotiating. Not dictating. Negotiating. With the Islamic Republic it had sought to destroy.

The new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei — son of Ali — approved the memorandum, noting he had “a different view” but accepted it in the national interest. Iran committed to reaffirming it would not develop nuclear weapons. The US committed to lifting sanctions and removing forces from Iran’s proximity after a final deal.

Iran’s nuclear programme — battered but not eliminated — remained. Its missile programme was explicitly declared off the table for negotiations by Tehran. And critically, Iran extracted from the world’s most powerful military the one concession that no amount of technical language could conceal: America negotiated.

That fact is irreversible. And every adversary of American power on earth has filed it carefully for future reference.

7. The Strategic Verdict — doctrine under fire
Here is what four decades of Iranian grand strategy achieved, assessed without sentiment.
The Axis of Resistance was degraded — Hamas devastated in Gaza, Hezbollah bloodied in Lebanon, Iranian assets struck across Syria. The Mosaic Defence was tested as never before — 11,000 targets struck, nuclear facilities damaged, leadership decapitated.

The forward shield failed to deter the ultimate assault it was designed to prevent.
And yet. Iran survived.

The Islamic Republic — written off by analysts for decades, subjected to the most comprehensive sanctions in modern history, struck by two rounds of devastating military campaigns — survived. Its military kept fighting after its Supreme Leader was killed. Its enriched uranium could not be fully accounted for. Its proxies continued operating. The Strait of Hormuz became a weapon that brought the global economy to its knees.

And ultimately, America came to the table.

This is not the outcome of a state that built the wrong strategic doctrine. This is the outcome of a state that built remarkable strategic resilience — imperfect, costly, and tested to its absolute limits — but resilience nonetheless.

The Mosaic Defence’s dispersal across 31 provinces meant no clean killing blow. The pre-delegated command authority meant no paralysis after decapitation. The Houthis’ continued Red Sea operations meant the economic pressure never relented. The Iraqi militias provided Iran with leverage in negotiations.

And the nuclear stockpile — unaccounted for, potentially dispersed before the strikes — remained the ultimate trump card that no military campaign could eliminate with certainty.
What Iran demonstrated in 2026 was not the invincibility its doctrine promised. What it demonstrated was something perhaps more important: the cost of attacking Iran is catastrophic, even in victory.

America got its strikes. It killed Khamenei. It damaged the nuclear programme. It triggered regime change of a kind — though Mojtaba Khamenei is hardly the pro-Western successor Washington imagined.

And what did it get for all of that? A fragile ceasefire, a 60-day negotiating framework, an unaccounted nuclear stockpile, a Strait of Hormuz that remains contested, a global energy shock, thirteen dead Americans, and a region convulsed by war.

Mosaddegh was destroyed because Iran was weak — because it had no forward shield, no interior fortress, no capacity to make its destruction costly. The Iran of 2026 is not that Iran.

The wound of 1953 was the education. The architecture of survival — tested, battered, partially broken — was the graduation.

The lesson of Iran’s grand strategy is ultimately this: a nation that cannot be cheaply destroyed cannot be permanently dominated. Even after the most severe bombings, Iran extracted a negotiation. Even after decapitation, its military kept fighting. Even after 11,000 strikes, its nuclear stockpile remained unaccounted for.

That is not the record of a doctrine that failed. It is the record of a doctrine that made Iran’s destruction more costly than any power was ultimately willing to pay.

In a future article, I will examine Iran’s nuclear programme — not through the lens of Western proliferation anxiety, but through the strategic logic of a state that watched what happened to countries that disarmed, and has now watched what happened to itself when it did not yet possess the ultimate deterrent.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

When the Strait of Hormuz closes, you don’t need to be a military analyst to understand what just happened. You only need to understand what the world runs on.

Oil. Gas. Shipping lanes. Insurance rates. Container schedules. Energy prices that decide whether factories hum or go dark, whether households heat or freeze, whether governments fall or survive.

This is why serious analysts have been saying for years that Hormuz is not a “threat” Iran invented for propaganda; it is a structural red line that the US and its allies kept treating like a bluff because they could not imagine a regional actor actually pulling the lever that exposes a vulnerability — dependence.

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And this is why what we are watching now is a massive US miscalculation that will be studied later the way the Iraq invasion is studied today, with the same disbelief that decision-makers could be so arrogant, so blind, and so certain that the other side would fold.

Because Washington didn’t only miscalculate Iran’s will. It miscalculated geography, logistics, and blowback. It miscalculated the fact that the US empire in the Middle East is not a fortress; it is a web of exposed arteries: bases scattered across Gulf monarchies, troops housed in predictable locations, air defenses that are expensive and finite, radars and communications nodes that can be degraded, and a regional order that can be shaken with one choke point.

You can see the arrogance in the assumptions. For years, Iran warned that if its survival is threatened — if the US and Israel push the conflict into an existential zone — Hormuz becomes part of the battlefield. Washington heard that and filed it under “Iranian theatrics,” because the American political class is addicted to the idea that their enemies always bluff, while they alone possess the right to act.

But Iran was not bluffing. Iran was describing the rules of an environment where deterrence is the only language that keeps you alive.

Hormuz was always the red line
The Strait of Hormuz is the world economy’s pressure point, and the fact that it remained open for years was not proof of Western strength. It was proof that Iran understood escalation control, because keeping Hormuz open — even while under sanctions, sabotage, assassinations, and constant threats — was Iran’s way of signaling restraint.

The West interpreted that restraint as weakness.

That’s the miscalculation.

Washington assumed Iran would keep absorbing blows, keep taking “limited strikes,” keep responding in contained ways, because Washington has lived for decades inside a fantasy where escalation is something the US controls.

But in a real war environment, you don’t get to decide the boundaries alone. The other side gets a vote. And Iran’s vote is written in the geography of the Gulf.

Iran’s ‘Samson option’
I used the phrase “Samson option” not to be dramatic, but to describe the logic of a state pushed into a corner: if the enemy wants you neutralised, disarmed, and humiliated, you don’t respond only with missiles; you respond with the full spectrum of leverage you possess — military, diplomatic, economic, and psychological.

Iran’s leverage is not limited to striking targets. It includes making the war economically unbearable for everyone who enabled it. It includes turning a regional conflict into a global cost spiral. It includes demonstrating that the “free flow of energy” is not a natural law; it is a contingent privilege that can evaporate when a state is pushed past its red lines.

This is what the West still struggles to internalise. It thinks deterrence is only about bombs and bases. Iran thinks deterrence is about making aggression unaffordable.

And Hormuz is how you make it unaffordable.

The three “solutions” don’t solve anything
Once Hormuz becomes the choke point, you immediately hear the same three proposals recycled through Western media.

First: “military escorts”: The idea that you can escort tankers through the most militarised, most surveilled, most missile-saturated corridor on earth as if this is a piracy problem. But escorts do not remove risk; they merely concentrate it.

They turn commercial shipping into military convoys, and that increases the probability of a clash that escalates further. You can escort 10 ships. Can you escort everything, every day, indefinitely, under constant threat? And at what cost in interceptors, drones, naval assets, and insurance panic?

Second: “ceasefire”: The idea that Washington can call a pause and re-freeze the conflict after crossing lines that Iran considers existential. But a ceasefire is not a magic reset button; it is a negotiation outcome.

And Iran is no longer interested in ceasefires that reproduce the same cycle: war, negotiations, pause, then war again. Iran has learned — painfully — that diplomacy has been weaponised against it.

Third: “capitulation”: The fantasy that Iran will disarm itself and accept a future where it is strategically naked. This is the most delusional solution of all, because it assumes Iranians are incapable of reading the regional record.

Iraq disarmed and was invaded. Libya dismantled its programme and was destroyed. Syria gave up its chemical file and was still ripped apart. In that record, capitulation is not peace. Capitulation is an invitation.

So no, none of the three “solutions” solves the crisis. They only reveal the empire’s problem: it assumed it could impose costs without paying them.

Even The New York Times admits miscalculation
One of the most interesting developments is how even mainstream reporting — carefully framed, carefully sourced — has begun to concede what was obvious from day one: the Trump administration and its advisers miscalculated Iran’s response.

The New York Times, in the sections I cited, points to something the propaganda refuses to admit: Iran is not acting like a decapitated regime. Iran is adapting. It is learning. It is targeting vulnerabilities, not staging symbolic retaliation.

It is degrading key radar and air defence systems, hitting communications infrastructure, and shifting the battlefield away from the tidy “Israel–Iran” framing into a wider map that includes US assets and allies across the Gulf.

That matters because for years the West comforted itself with the idea that the Iranian response would be predictable and containable. The NYT reporting suggests the opposite: Iran is adjusting its tactics as the campaign evolves, hitting systems that matter to US coordination and defence, and doing so without the old “ample warning” pattern that allowed the US to frame everything as controlled.

In other words, Iran is making the environment less manageable for the US, which is exactly what deterrence looks like when you cannot match the empire symmetrically.

The miscalculation wasn’t only military
There is another layer that people avoid saying out loud, but it’s central: the US and Israel did not only miscalculate Iran’s missiles; they miscalculated Iran’s society.

Even Iranians who dislike the Islamic nature of their political system can still connect a basic dot: wherever America and Israel intervene, the country becomes worse.

People don’t need to love their government to recognise a foreign assault on their nation. This is why the fantasy of “decapitation + instant uprising” is so dangerous: it projects Western wishful thinking onto a society that is being attacked and then expects the society to celebrate its attacker.

That is not how national psychology works under bombardment.

‘They want Iran’s energy’ is the quiet part out loud
Now we come to the part that explains the deeper imperial logic behind all this: energy.

I referenced the mindset openly circulating among the empire-adjacent influencer class: the idea that “we need Iran’s energy for AI projects,” that the AI race with China will be decided by securing energy inputs, and that therefore this war is not only Israel’s war, but “our war”.

This is imperial logic in its purest form. It doesn’t even bother to hide behind democracy or human rights. It says: we need your resources for our future, and if you will not give them to us under cooperative terms, we will take them under coercive terms.

And here is the thing these people cannot understand, because their mindset is trapped in a 19th-century colonial reflex: cooperation is possible.

China shows that cooperation is possible. China buys resources, builds infrastructure, creates contracts, offers development pathways, and yes, does it for its own interests, but it does it through exchange, not through looting. The US model, by contrast, is too often: bully, sanction, destabilise, bomb, then pretend it’s about “order”.

So when I say this war has gone “too wrong” for Washington even to benefit from Iranian energy later, I mean something very simple: you do not kill people, destroy families, and then expect business as usual. You don’t kill children and then expect Iranian society to say, “Sure, let’s partner with you.”

This is where imperial arrogance collides with a proud, dignified Iranian society.

How Trump miscalculated                            Video: Syriana Analysis

Iran’s demands are not cosmetic
Now the crucial point: why Iran won’t stop now.

Iran is not continuing this because it “loves war”. It is continuing because the war created leverage, and Iran’s leadership understands that if you stop now, you waste the leverage you paid for in blood and risk.

This is why Iran’s demands are emerging with clarity.

First: deterrence restored. Not just for Iran, but for the wider deterrence ecosystem that includes Hezbollah. Iran wants to punish its enemy to a degree that makes future attacks psychologically and strategically unthinkable.

Second: US bases constrained or removed. Iran is not naïve; it knows it may not expel the US from the region overnight. But it can force a new reality where US installations become purely defensive or are reconfigured in ways that reduce their offensive utility against Iran.

In plain language: if Gulf monarchies host bases that are used to strike Iran, those bases become part of the battlefield, and Iran is signaling it wants to break that model permanently.

This is why the Iranian foreign minister’s tone matters, and why voices like professor Marandi’s matter: the message is no longer “we can negotiate and return to normal.” The message is “normal is what created this war, and we need a new security architecture.”

‘Deterrence or nothing’ framework
This is where Amal Saad’s analysis captures the logic cleanly: deterrence or nothing; total war or total ceasefire.

Her point is that the old conflict-resolution framework doesn’t apply, because Iran is not seeking a temporary suspension of hostilities; it is seeking to alter the bargaining space itself. Tehran rejects the framework in which negotiations are essentially arms control over Iran, and insists instead that the real issue is US-Israeli aggression and the regional order that enables it.

That is why Iran refuses a ceasefire that simply resets the cycle.

And that is why the US miscalculation is so profound: Washington thought it could strike under a cover of “diplomacy,” then return to negotiation as if diplomacy were a neutral channel. Iran now treats that as subterfuge, and it wants to make the weaponisation of diplomacy costly enough that it cannot be repeated.

Why Iran won’t stop now
So we return to the simple truth: Iran won’t stop now because stopping now would mean relinquishing the leverage it has finally acquired — militarily, economically, psychologically — at the very moment when the US and Europe are feeling pain they cannot hide.

Trump was elected on promises of prosperity. Now energy prices surge, markets shake, global supply lines tighten, and allies panic. From Tehran’s point of view, this is the rare moment when the empire is vulnerable enough that Iran can increase its demands instead of being forced to accept humiliating ones.

And when you understand that, you understand why this isn’t ending with a tidy “ceasefire” press release. Iran believes that if it accepts another temporary arrangement, it will simply be attacked again when the West finds a better moment.

So the choice Iran is presenting is brutal but clear: a settlement that restores deterrence and rewires the regional security order, or continued pressure through the one lever that forces the world to pay attention.

Hormuz.

Washington assumed it was a bluff.

Now the world is learning what happens when a red line is real.

Kevork Almassian is a Syrian geopolitical analyst and the founder of Syriana Analysis. This article was first published on his Substack Kevork’s Newsletter and shared via Collective Evolution.

In an era when images can circle the globe in seconds and newsrooms claim to uphold universal humanitarian principles; one might expect the killing of 165 schoolgirls inside a primary school to dominate international headlines.

One would expect emergency debates, moral outrage, and relentless coverage.

Yet in the southeastern Iranian city of Minab — where Israeli-American strikes obliterated classrooms filled with children — the world’s most influential media institutions have responded with something far more revealing than condemnation: they have responded with silence.

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These were not combatants. They were not militants. They were children seated at their desks, pens in their hands, notebooks open before them, studying, whispering to classmates, and imagining futures that stretched decades ahead.

In seconds, that ordinary school day turned into a massacre. Desks became splintered wreckage, classrooms collapsed into dust, and rows of coffins replaced rows of pupils.

Yet the names of these girls — 165 lives extinguished before they truly began — barely entered the global conversation.

This omission is not the product of oversight. It reflects something far more structural: the hierarchy of victims that governs much of the contemporary information order.

In theory, modern Western media institutions present themselves as defenders of human rights and guardians of moral accountability. In practice, their editorial priorities often mirror geopolitical interests with striking precision.

Human rights losing integrity
When the deaths of children generate outrage in one context but indifference in another, the moral language surrounding human rights begins to lose its integrity.

When tragedies reinforce established narratives about adversarial states, they are amplified, dramatised, and transformed into global moral spectacles.

But when tragedies expose the human cost of the military actions carried out by Western powers or their closest allies, they are quietly displaced from the front page —if they appear at all.

The massacre in Minab illustrates this logic with devastating clarity.

The deaths of 165 Iranian schoolgirls do not fit comfortably within the dominant geopolitical storyline that portrays Israel and its strategic partners as defenders of stability and order in a turbulent region.

Acknowledging such an atrocity would inevitably raise difficult questions: about the legality of strikes on civilian infrastructure, about the ethics of military escalation, and about the widening humanitarian toll of ongoing Israeli-American attacks across the region.

It is therefore far easier to look away.

Minab not isolated tragedy
But Minab is not an isolated tragedy. Across Lebanon, relentless bombardments have repeatedly struck civilian neighbourhoods, reducing homes and streets to rubble.

Across Palestine, entire communities have endured cycles of destruction that claim the lives of children whose only battlefield was the ground beneath their feet. Hospitals, schools, and residential blocks have all entered the expanding geography of devastation.

These events do not occur in a vacuum. They form part of a broader pattern in which military power operates alongside narrative power. Missiles shape the physical battlefield, while selective reporting shapes the battlefield of perception.

What emerges is not merely a media bias but a form of narrative engineering. Certain victims are elevated as symbols of universal suffering, while others — often far more numerous — are rendered invisible. Compassion itself becomes curated, distributed unevenly according to political convenience.

For Western audiences accustomed to believing in the neutrality of their information systems, this selective visibility should provoke serious reflection. The credibility of humanitarian discourse depends on consistency.

The girls of Minab deserved the same recognition afforded to any victims of violence anywhere in the world. They deserved to have their stories told, their lives acknowledged, and their deaths confronted with the seriousness such an atrocity demands.

Instead, they encountered a second form of erasure.

First came the missiles that ended their lives. Then came the silence that followed.

Selective visibility needs reflection
For Western audiences accustomed to believing in the neutrality of their information systems, this selective visibility should provoke serious reflection.

In the contemporary information age, propaganda rarely announces itself openly. It often operates through absence — through the stories that never reach the front page, the victims whose names remain unspoken, and the tragedies that disappear before the world has time to notice.

The massacre in Minab therefore stands as more than a local catastrophe. It exposes a deeper crisis in the global information order — one in which the value of human life appears disturbingly contingent on political context.

And if the deaths of 165 schoolgirls in their classrooms fail to trigger universal outrage, the question is no longer about geopolitics alone.

It becomes a question about the credibility of the moral system that claims to defend humanity itself.

Dr Hana Saada is an Algerian university lecturer and journalist, and editor-in-chief of the English edition of Dzair Tube. She holds a PhD in media translation and writes on geopolitics, media narratives, and international affairs. This article is republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons.

When I heard the terrible news that the Americans and Israelis had killed more than 165 children this week in an elementary school in Minab in Southern Iran it took me back to a wonderful day I spent in Isfahan in 2018.

I met lots of Iranian school children and their teachers that day. They were keen to practise their English and ask lots of questions. I want to share that day with you because it was filled with hope, with promise for a better world.

My wife and I were visiting Iran, both for the second time.

• READ MORE:  Death toll in Israeli strike on southern Iran school rises to 165
• After a sports hall in Iran was bombed, witnesses describe chaos and ‘continuous screaming’
• Luxon defends NZ’s position on Iran attacks – same as Australia
• Neither preemptive nor legal, US-Israeli strikes on Iran have blown up international law
• UN’s Guterres condemns US-Israeli strikes, retaliatory attacks by Iran
• Other US-Israel attack on Iran reports

Right at the end of our time there we spent a day in Naqsh-e Jahan Square in Isfahan. It is a massive square that could enclose a dozen football fields.

Built by Shah Abbas I in the 17th Century, during the Safavid period, it is a UNESCO World Heritage site with markets, palaces and other cultural sites framing its four sides.  At one end is the magnificent Imam Mosque where a string of memorable moments happened to me.

I even saw a most astonishing one-woman demonstration.

We were just approaching the Imam Mosque when I noticed a young woman removing her head scarf. A mass of black hair fell down to her waist and then she began dancing.

‘Is this a protest?’
Rhythmically she swirled her upper body in a circular motion that sent her hair out horizontally around her. I was gob-smacked.

After a minute or two she stopped and started talking to her male companion who had been photographing her. I approached.

“Is this a protest?” I asked, somewhat gormlessly.  Yes, against the clothing restrictions.

Today the courage and determination of such people has, to a degree, paid off. Those restrictions, particularly in the cities, have effectively been lightened.  I have seen lots of footage of Iranian women without any head covering.

I salute their courage and determination and know their struggle will continue.

I also salute the courage and determination of the millions of Iranians who have turned out this week to support their government against the violent assault on the sovereignty of Iran by the racist, fascist genocidal Israeli state and its powerful vassal the USA.

Following the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, I saw remarkable footage of that same vast square in Isfahan filled to the four corners with what must have been hundreds of thousands of people. As with millions around the country, they were defying the missiles to protest the violation of their sovereignty.

The inconvenient truth
The scale of the pro-government demonstrations is virtually never shown in the Western media but to understand the contested political landscape that is Iran you need to understand that inconvenient truth.

Iranian politics in the Western view has been reduced to a cartoon, to a Manichean world of black and white — which partly explains why Westerners, most particularly the leaders, fail to grasp the fierce nationalism that has seen millions of Iranians rally round their government as their state comes under an existential threat.

That day in 2018 in that square I chatted with pro-government and anti-government people; all incredibly nice and open and welcoming. Everyone was keen to discuss Iran and the wider world.

There were lots of school parties and both the teachers and their students were keen to speak with us. It was an unalloyed pleasure for us. Iranians are remarkably hospitable, cultured and kind. For me, they are the finest people in the Middle East.

That is partly why I felt sad and bitter when I watched the footage of the bombed-out Shajareh Tayyebeh girls elementary school (6-12 year-olds) in Minab and heard the screams of mothers calling for children whom they will never walk to school again.

The Western empire has a long history of killing children. I recently referenced Madeleine Albright’s infamous comment on the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children being “a price worth paying”.

This is just standard modus operandi for the West.

Protected by Mossad
Israeli football hooligans travel through Europe chanting “Why is school out in Gaza? Because there are no kids left!” They are protected by Mossad, local police and politicians like British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Australian PM Anthony Albanese recently welcomed Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel, who in October 2023 said: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”

This is as clear a statement of genocidal intent as you could get and Israel made good on it.

Israel, the killer of tens of thousands of school kids, presents itself as a liberator for Iran? You don’t have to be an A-grade student to spot that lie.

Many people around the Western world want to commit the children of Iran into the hands of the President of the United States.

According to US Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA), Vice-Chair of the House Democratic Caucus: “In the Epstein files, there’s highly disturbing allegations of Donald Trump raping children, of Donald Trump threatening to kill children.”

Lieu, one of the architects of the Epstein Files Transparency Act is also one of those legislators who has had access to some of the files still kept out of the public record.

Iranian children have as much right to grow up in safety as our own children.

infamous bro-talk
We should all also recall Trump’s infamous bro-talk with the vile radio host Howard Stern. Stern asked if he could refer to Ivanka Trump as a “piece of ass,” and Donald Trump salivated back at him: “Yeah.”

While they were joking about this “piece of ass”, Trump said he would try to date Ivanka if she wasn’t his daughter. It is a relevant anecdote because we live in the age of American Geopolitical Epsteinism — a world of predators seeking to violate those weaker than them.

You don’t have to like the Iranian government to support the UN Charter and the insistence on the sovereign equality of nations.

Nothing in the Charter says it is okay for powerful white countries to attack other countries.  The West needs to bring its leaders to justice for the crime of genocide not launch yet another war on innocents.

Hands off Iran, Netanyahu. Hands off the children of Iran, Trump.

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser based in Wellington, publisher of Solidarity and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam war. This article was first published by Solidarity on 2 March 2026.

Australia’s two federal combating antisemitism bills, the New South Wales laws providing the means to shutdown street protests and move on stationary public assemblies, along with the envoy’s plan to combat antisemitism and the Royal Commission into the same prejudice, have all been set in place following two ISIS-fuelled killers murdering 15 people at Bondi Beach six weeks ago.

While some of these measures were drafted in a hurry immediately post-Bondi in a theatrical attempt to prevent what had already occurred, much of the “combating antisemitism” smorgasbord of laws that serve to clamp down on free speech and the right to political communication in general, appear to have been waiting in the wings for the right political moment to enact.

These dramatic changes that have been foisted upon the country’s public square have been central to a broad campaign that the Zionist lobby has been progressing both locally and throughout the Western world, which is difficult to pin down as most of this advocating takes place behind closed doors, while when featured in the media, these positions are increasingly reflected as the norm.

• READ MORE: Caitlin Johnstone: Oppose Israel’s abuses while you still can
• Australia’s frightening new ‘hate speech’ laws are clearly aimed at pro-Palestine groups
• Other Australian hate speech laws reports

The Zionist lobby is also known as the Israel lobby. Political Zionism advocates for the establishment of a Jewish state on Palestinian land, which is today Israel.

A key outcome of the doctrine of Zionism is the displacement and genociding of Palestinians. And it is these truths, and the fact that the Gaza genocide is in progress, that make it necessary to progress the lobby’s agenda right now.

But while the Albanese government is implementing the envoy’s plan and a Royal Commission into antisemitism, which both include a definition of antisemitism that serves to block criticism of Israel at the behest of the lobby, the scope of the federal hate laws further reveal desperate Labor and Liberal parties attempting to shore up power in the face of a drastically shifting political climate.

McCarthyite Zionism
While the Israel lobby has long been understood to have an excessive influence upon the US political establishment, the sway of the Zionist lobby in Australia had not been common knowledge among the broader public until Gaza, as over the past 26 months of the mass slaughter and starvation programme, the lobby’s propaganda machine has been actioned in an attempt to hide this.

As the internet filled with footage of Israeli state actors perpetrating horrific acts in the Gaza Strip in late 2023, the Australian public sphere became a place to attack constituents for speaking out about this worst atrocity since the genociding of Jewish people during the Second World War, and the key way to silence these critics was to charge them with antisemitism — the hate that stoked the Holocaust.

The central target of the local Zionist lobby has been the Palestine solidarity movement, which has been a loud secular voice sprung from a diverse constituency.

Yet, federal and state Labor leaders have been labelling these people, who have been calling for an end to the practice of exterminating humans to obtain land, as outright antisemites and further implied they’re somewhat terroristic.

Assisting in the progression of the Zionist lobby’s hasbara mission, a documentary about rising antisemitism was aired last year, then a series of staged antisemitic crimes swept Sydney streets, rallies against Israel’s barbarity in Gaza have been framed as antisemitic, Jewish voices decrying Israel have been labelled self-hating, while attempts to remove Palestinian voices are underway.

According to US professors Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler, the Israeli state and the Zionist lobby commenced framing criticism of Israel as antisemitic in the late 1960s.

This idea is predicated upon Israel being a Jewish state. It denies the fact that many Jewish people globally don’t adhere to the doctrine of Zionism. And it rests on a flimsy link that only holds because of the force of the lobbyists.

Getting our hasbara on
The Zionist lobby got a foot in the door when PM Anthony Albanase appointed arch-Zionist Jillian Segal to the newly created position of Australian Special Envoy on Antisemitism in July 2024.

This had appeared to be spurred by the moral panic around antisemitism, however it has since come to light that the envoy programme exists across the Western world, with the first US envoy appointed in 2004.

Segal released her Plan to Combat Antisemitism in July 2025. Albanese implemented it straight after Bondi.

At its heart, the plan inserts the IHRA definition of antisemitism that blocks criticism of Israel into every level of Australian government and all its institutions. Further aspects involve the monitoring of tertiary institutions and the media for antisemitism or rather, anti-Israel sentiment.

The IHRA working definition of antisemitism comprises of two lines and 11 examples of hatred towards Jewish people, seven of which involve criticising Israel.

The body that produced it has never officially adopted it. However, as one of its drafters has been warning over the past decade, the Zionist lobby has been weaponising the definition to silence anti-Israel criticism globally.

The determination to hold a Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is the result of an all-pervasive campaign to see it established post-Bondi massacre, with the suggested reason being to understand how such a terrorist action was able to come to fruition.

Further moral panic
However, the criminal case against one shooter rules this out, so the inquiry will likely serve to stoke further moral panic.

The NSW government commenced seriously stamping out protest in April 2022.

So, the blanket ban on protests, or the public assembly restriction declaration regime rolled out post-Bondi, can be understood as not only placating the Zionist lobby, via the silencing of Palestine solidarity rallies on Gadigal land in the Sydney CBD, but it’s also as a continuation of the closing of the public sphere.

The 50 pages of hate crime laws the Albanese government whipped out of its back pocket last week, appeared so broad that the suggestion is the measures were in the works long before the antisemitic attack in Bondi on 14 December 2025.

ASIO boss Mike Burgess hinted at a need for these last year, so as to stamp out groups, like the neo-Nazi National Socialist Network and Islamic group Hitz ut Tahrir, as they had both been understood to be hovering just beneath the threshold of criminal activity.

So, broad is the reach is the new listing prohibited hate group regime that the major concern right now is that they might be applied to stamp out pro-Palestinian sentiment and protest in the public square to again placate the Zionist lobby.

But further, these laws sitting on the books could likely be used by a future “true blue” führer, so that their opposition can be eradicated on taking office.

The fallacy of necessitated free speech denial
NSW premier Chris Minns’ favoured mantra over the period of the Gaza genocide — or the rise in antisemitism in Australia if one is being “politically correct” — has been along the lines of “the reason NSW does not have free speech protections like they do in the United States, is that this state has a multicultural society and therefore, divergent voices must be tempered”. Yet, this is a lie.

During the 1890s drafting of the Australian Constitution, those involved determined not to enshrine rights in the founding document, as it might result in discriminatory laws already on the books that specifically applied to First Nations people and Chinese people becoming invalid, former High Court Justice Micheal Kirby has noted on occasion.

This was just prior to the 1901 federation of Australia, which was when various pieces of legislation were passed in order to progress the White Australia policy. So, rights were initially denied in this country to maintain a form of white supremacy.

The premier is not only progressing this line when the moral panic around antisemitism is in full flight, but he is also suggesting that the right to free speech should not be protected in NSW, over and over again, after NSW MP Jenny Leong introduced the Human Rights Bill 2025 last October, which seeks to protect free speech, or “freedom of opinion and expression”, among other rights.

The failure to protect free speech in this country was initially about maintaining power when attempting to establish an ethnostate. But the ongoing denial of rights protections since Australia embraced multiculturalism commencing in the 1970s, has really been about politicians maintaining power, and not an attempt to save various ethnic groups living here from annihilating each other.

The idea progressed by Minns is that the broad free speech protections in the United States, which are contained in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, would be a problem in our community because it is multicultural.

However, while the US has traditionally been understood to have been a melting pot of different ethnicities, what is operating as societies in both countries today are based upon multiethnicities, and they’re pretty much the same.

The progression of the “combating antisemitism” laws and policies right now is all about placating the Zionist lobby, while Israel takes as many pounds of flesh as it desires upon occupied Palestinian territory, in order to prevent the ongoing mass civil society outcry over this ethnic cleansing, the mass starvation and mass murder, along with the genocidal tactics that are ongoing in the Gaza Strip.

Yet, the federal listing of prohibited hate group regime also provides the ability to the major parties to criminalise their political opponents as hate groups — think, the Greens — at a point in time when the long-term capture of holding government office by the majors is now under threat.

Paul Gregoire is a Sydney-based journalist and writer. He is the winner of the 2021 NSW Council for Civil Liberties Award For Excellence In Civil Liberties Journalism. Prior to Sydney Criminal Lawyers®, Paul wrote for VICE and was the news editor at Sydney’s City Hub.

An Al Jazeera journalist who has documented Israel’s trail of atrocities for almost the past two years has condemned Western news agencies covering the war on Gaza as treating Palestinian reporters like “robots”.

“You see how Palestinian journalists are treated. There’s no protection when they are alive,” Hind Khoudary told Al Jazeera from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.

“And after they are killed, no one even mentions them.”

• READ MORE: Other Israeli attacks on journalists reports

She said today was a “very, very angry morning” after five journalists were killed yesterday among at least 21 people, including medical workers, at al-Nasser Medical Centre in Khan Younis in a “double tap” strike by the Israeli military.

The slain news professionals have been named as Hossam al-Masri, a freelance photographer for the Reuters news agency; Mariam Abu Daqqa, freelance journalist for The Independent and the Associated Press (AP); Moaz Abu Taha, correspondent for the American broadcasting network NBC; Mohamad Salama, press photographer for Al Jazeera; and Ahmed Abu Aziz, freelance journalist working for Middle East Eye and the Tunisian radio station Diwan FM, who died later from his injuries.

“Palestinian journalists do not know how to mourn their five colleagues and there’s a wave of anger at the international news agencies.

“Many news outlets [that the killed journalists worked for] did not even mention their contributors. The Reuters news agency did not mention in their headline their cameraman who had been working for them for months.

“In their article, they simply described him as a Reuters ‘contractor’.

‘Not mentioned’
As for Moaz Abu Taha [another journalist killed in the Nasser medical centre attack], not a single news organisation that he was working for said he was working for them,” she said.

“Palestinian journalists have been risking their lives for 23 months now, and after they are killed, they are not even mentioned in headlines.

“In the end, they are mentioned as ‘contractors’, as ‘freelancers’ – while, when they were alive, they were working 24/7 to produce, fix and document for these news outlets.

“This is how most Palestinian journalists feel — that we’re just being used as robots to report on what’s going on because there are no foreign journalists.

“We get killed and then everyone forgets about us.”

Gaza’s silenced voices.     Video: Al Jazeera

RSF ‘fiercely condemns’ killings
The Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) “fiercely condemned” the latest killings, saying they came after the murder of Khaled al-Madhoun on Saturday, August 23.

This was a toll of six journalists killed in two days. It follows the killing of six other journalists two weeks ago on August 10.

According to RSF information, all were deliberately targeted. RSF again called for an emergency UN Security Council meeting to “end this massacre of journalists”.

Thibaut Bruttin, director-general of RSF, said: How far will the Israeli armed forces go in their gradual effort to eliminate information coming from Gaza? How long will they continue to defy international humanitarian law?

“The protection of journalists is guaranteed by international law, yet more than 200 of them have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza over the past two years.

“Ten years after the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2222, which protects journalists in times of conflict, the Israeli army is flouting its application.

“RSF calls for an emergency UN Security Council meeting to ensure this resolution is finally respected, and that concrete measures are taken to end impunity for crimes against journalists, protect Palestinian journalists, and open access to the Gaza Strip to all reporters.”

‘Suicide drone’
According to Al Jazeera, the first strike on the live broadcast post that killed Hossam al-Masri was carried out using a loitering munition — also known as a “suicide drone” — typically equipped with a camera and an explosive charge.

A Reuters article also confirmed the death of its contractor, Hussam al-Masri.

The second strike 8 minutes later targeted the hospital yet again after rescue teams and journalists had arrived.

The Al-Nasser complex is a well-known gathering place for displaced journalists in Gaza who, since October 2023, have been living in tents around the hospital to access information on injured and deceased patients, as well as available facilities.

Targeted Murder. This is what israeli nazis do.. pic.twitter.com/RL8mc1YCMW

— Ali (@MerruX) August 25, 2025

If you imagined Western politicians and media were finally showing signs of waking up to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, think again.

Even the decision this week by several Western states, led by the UK, to ban the entry of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, two far-right Israeli cabinet ministers, is not quite the pushback it is meant to seem.

Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway may be seeking strength in numbers to withstand retaliation from Israel and the United States. But in truth, they have selected the most limited and symbolic of all the possible sanctions they could have imposed on the Israeli government.

• READ MORE: Israel launches ‘major strike’ on Iran’s military, nuclear sites
• Other Israeli aggression in the Middle East reports

Their meagre action is motivated solely out of desperation. They urgently need to deter Israel from carrying through plans to formally annex the Occupied West Bank and thereby tear away the last remnants of the two-state comfort blanket — the West’s solitary pretext for decades of inaction.

And as a bonus, the entry ban makes Britain and the others look like they are getting tough with Israel on Gaza, even as they do nothing to stop the mounting horrors there.

Even the Israeli Ha’aretz newspaper’s senior columnist Gideon Levy mocked what he called a “tiny, ridiculous step” by the UK and others, saying it would make no difference to the slaughter in Gaza. He called for sanctions against “Israel in its entirety”.

“Do they really believe this punishment will have some sort of effect on Israel’s moves?” Levy asked incredulously.

2500 sanctions on Russia
Remember as Britain raps two cabinet ministers on the knuckles that the West has imposed more than 2500 sanctions on Russia.

While David Lammy, the UK’s Foreign Secretary, worries about the future of a non-existent diplomatic process — one trashed by Israel two decades ago — Palestinian children are still starving to death unseen.

The genocide is not going to end unless the West forces Israel to stop. This week more than 40 Israeli military intelligence officers went on an effective strike, refusing to be involved in combat operations, saying Israel was waging a “clearly illegal” and “eternal war” in Gaza.

Yet Starmer and Lammy will not even concede that Israel has violated international law.  

What is clear is that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s sighs of regret last month — expressing how “intolerable” he finds the “situation” in Gaza — were purely performative.

Starmer and the rest of the Western establishment have continued tolerating what they claim to find “intolerable”, even as the death toll from Israel’s bombs, gunfire and starvation campaign grow day by day.

Those emaciated children — profoundly malnourished, their stick-then legs covered by the thinnest membrane of skin — aren’t going to recover without meaningful intervention. Their condition won’t stabilise while Israel deprives them of food day after day. Sooner or later they will die, mostly out of our view.

Parents must risk lives
Meanwhile, desperate parents must now risk their lives, forced to run the gauntlet of Israeli gunfire, in a — usually forlorn — bid to be among the handful of families able to grab paltry supplies of largely unusable, dried food. Most families have no water or fuel to cook with.

As if mocking Palestinians, the Western media continue to refer to this real-life, scaled-up Hunger Games — imposed by Israel in place of the long-established United Nations relief system — as “aid distribution”.

We are supposed to believe it is addressing Gaza’s “humanitarian crisis” even as it deepens the crisis.

On the kindest analysis, Western capitals are settling back into a mix of silence and deflections, having got in their excuses just before Israel crosses the finishing line of its genocide.

They have readied their alibis for the moment when international journalists are allowed in — the day after the population of Gaza has either been exterminated or violently herded into neighbouring Sinai.

Or more likely, a bit of both.

Truth inverted
What distinguishes Israel’s ongoing slaughter of the two million-plus people of Gaza is this. It is the first stage-managed genocide in history. It is a Holocaust rewritten as public theatre, a spectacle in which every truth is carefully inverted.

That can best be achieved, of course, if those trying to write a different, honest script are eliminated. The extent and authorship of the horrors can be edited out, or obscured through a series of red herrings, misdirecting onlookers.

Israel has murdered more than 220 Palestinian journalists in Gaza over the past 20 months, and has been keeping Western journalists far from the killing fields.

Like the West’s politicians, the foreign correspondents finally piped up last month — in their case, to protest at being barred from Gaza. No less than the politicians, they were keen to ready their excuses.

They have careers and their future credibility to think about, after all.

The journalists have publicly worried that they are being excluded because Israel has something to hide. As though Israel had nothing to hide in the preceding 20 months, when those same journalists docilely accepted their exclusion — and invariably regurgitated Israel’s deceitful spin on its atrocities.

If you imagine that the reporting from Gaza would have been much different had the BBC, CNN, The Guardian or The New York Times had reporters on the ground, think again.

The truth is the coverage would have looked much as it has done for more than a year and a half, with Israel dictating the story lines, with Israel’s denials foregrounded, with Israel’s claims of Hamas “terrorists” in every hospital, school, bakery, university, and refugee camp used to justify the destruction and slaughter.

British doctors volunteering in Gaza who have told us there were no Hamas fighters in the hospitals they worked in, or anyone armed apart from the Israeli soldiers that shot up their medical facilities, would not be more believed because Jeremy Bowen interviewed them in Khan Younis rather than Richard Madeley in a London studio.

Breaking the blockade
If proof of that was needed, it came this week with the coverage of Israel’s brazen act of piracy against a UK-flagged ship, the Madleen, trying to break Israel’s genocidal aid blockade.

Israel’s law-breaking did not happen this time in sealed-off Gaza, or against dehumanised Palestinians.

Israel’s slaughter of the two million-plus people of Gaza is the first stage-managed genocide in history. It is a Holocaust rewritten as public theatre

Israel’s ramming and seizure of the vessel took place on the high seas, and targeted a 12-member Western crew, including the famed young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. All were abducted and taken to Israel.

Thunberg was trying to use her celebrity to draw attention to Israel’s illegal, genocidal blockade of aid. She did so precisely by trying to break that blockade peacefully.

The defiance of the Madleen’s crew in sailing to Gaza was intended to shame Western governments that are under a legal — and it goes without saying, moral — obligation to stop a genocide under the provisions of the 1948 Genocide Convention they have ratified.

Western citizens wring hands
Western capitals have been ostentatiously wringing their hands at the “humanitarian crisis” of Israel starving two million people in full view of the world.

The Madleen’s mission was to emphasise that those states could do much more than tell two Israeli cabinet ministers they are not welcome to visit. Together they could break the blockade, if they so wished.

Britain, France and Canada — all of whom claimed last month that the “situation” in Gaza was “intolerable” — could organise a joint naval fleet carrying aid to Gaza through international waters. They would arrive in Palestinian territorial waters off the coast of Gaza.

At no point would they be in Israel territory.

Any attempt by Israel to interfere would be an act of war against these three states — and against Nato. The reality is Israel would be forced to pull back and allow the aid in.

But, of course, this scenario is pure fantasy. Britain, France and Canada have no intention of breaking Israel’s “intolerable” siege of Gaza.

None of them has any intention of doing anything but watch Israel starve the population to death, then describe it as a “humanitarian catastrophe” they were unable to stop.

The Madleen has preemptively denied them this manoeuvre and highlighted Western leaders’ actual support for genocide — as well as let the people of Gaza know that a majority of the Western public oppose their governments’ collusion in Israel’s criminality.

‘Selfie yacht’
The voyage was intended too as a vigorous nudge to awaken those in the West still slumbering through the genocide. Which is precisely why the Madleen’s message had to be smothered with spin, carefully prepared by Israel.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry issued statements calling the aid ship a “celebrity selfie yacht“, while dismissing its action as a “public relations stunt” and “provocation”. Israeli officials portrayed Thunberg as a “narcissist” and “antisemite”.

When Israeli soldiers illegally boarded the ship, they filmed themselves trying to hand out sandwiches to the crew — an actual stunt that should appall anyone mindful that, while Israel was concern-trolling Western publics about the nutritional needs of the Madleen crew, it was also starving two million Palestinians to death, half of them children.

Did the British government, whose vessel was rammed and invaded in international waters, angrily protest the attack? Did the reliably patriotic British media rally against this humiliating violation of UK sovereignty?

No, Starmer and Lammy once again had nothing to say on the matter.

They have yet to concede that Israel is even breaking international law in denying the people of Gaza all food and water for more than three months, let alone acknowledge that this actually constitutes genocide.

Instead, Lammy’s officials — 300 of whom have protested against the UK’s continuing collusion in Israeli atrocities — have been told to resign rather than raise objections rooted in international law.

Bypass legal advisers
According to sources within the Foreign Office cited by former British ambassador Craig Murray, Lammy has also insisted that any statements relating to the Madleen bypass the government’s legal advisers.

Why? To allow Lammy plausible deniability as he evades Britain’s legal obligation to respond to Israel’s assault on a vessel sailing under UK protection.

The media, meanwhile, has played its own part in whitewashing this flagrant crime — one that has taken place in full view, not hidden away in Gaza’s conveniently engineered “fog of war”.

Much of the press adopted the term “selfie yacht” as if it were their own. As though Thunberg and the rest of the crew were pleasure-seekers promoting their social media platforms rather than risking their lives taking on the might of a genocidal Israeli military.

They had good reason to be fearful. After all, the Israeli military shot dead 10 of their predecessors — activists on the Mavi Marmara aid ship to Gaza — 15 years ago. Israel has killed in cold blood American citizens such as Rachel Corrie, British citizens such as Tom Hurndall, and acclaimed journalists such as Shireen Abu Akleh.

And for those with longer memories, the Israeli air force killed more than 30 American servicemen in a two-hour attack in 1967 on the USS Liberty, and wounded 170 more. The anniversary of that crime — covered up by every US administration — was commemorated by its survivors the day before the attack on the Madleen.

‘Detained’, not abducted
Israel’s trivialising smears of the Madleen crew were echoed uncritically from Sky News and The Telegraph to LBC and Piers Morgan. 

Strangely, journalists who had barely acknowledged the tsunami of selfies taken by Israeli soldiers glorifying their war crimes on social media were keenly attuned to a supposed narcissistic, selfie culture rampant among human-rights activists.

As Thunberg headed back to Europe on Tuesday, the media continued with its assault on the English language and common sense. They reported that she had been “deported” from Israel, as though she had smuggled herself into Israel illegally rather than being been forcibly dragged there by the Israeli military.

But even the so-called “serious” media buried the significance both of the Madleen’s voyage to Gaza and of Israel’s lawbreaking. From The Guardian and BBC to The New York Times and CBS, Israel’s criminal attack was characterised as the aid ship being “intercepted” or “diverted”, and of Israel “taking control” of the vessel.

For the Western media, Thunberg was “detained”, not abducted.

The framing was straight out of Tel Aviv. It was a preposterous narrative in which Israel was presented as taking actions necessary to restore order in a situation of dangerous rule-breaking and anarchy by activists on a futile and pointless excursion to Gaza.

The coverage was so uniform not because it related to any kind of reality, but because it was pure propaganda — narrative spin that served not only Israel’s interests but that of a Western political and media class deeply implicated in Israel’s genocide.

Arming criminals
In another glaring example of this collusion, the Western media chose to almost immediately bury what should have been explosive comments last week from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

He admitted that Israel has been arming and cultivating close ties with criminal gangs in Gaza.

He was responding to remarks from Avigdor Lieberman, a former political ally turned rival, that some of those assisted by Israel are affiliated to the jihadist group Islamic State. The most prominent is named Yasser Abu Shabab.

The Western media either ignored this revelation or dutifully accepted Netanyahu’s self-serving characterisation of these ties as an alliance of convenience: one designed to weaken Hamas by promoting “rival local forces” and opening up new “post-war governing opportunities”.

The real aim — or rather, two aims: one immediate, the other long term — are far more cynical and disturbing.

More than six months ago, Palestinian analysts and the Israeli media began warning that Israel — after it had destroyed Gaza’s ruling institutions, including its police force – was working hand in hand with newly reinvigorated criminal gangs.

Israel’s immediate aim of arming the criminals — turning them into powerful militias — was to intensify the breakdown of law and order. That served as the prelude to a double-barrelled Israeli disinformation campaign.

Instead of the UN’s trusted and wide distribution network across Gaza, the GHF’s four “aid hubs” were perfectly designed to advance Israel’s genocidal goals

Prime looting position
These gangs were put in a prime position to loot food from the United Nations’ long-established aid distribution system and sell it on the black market. The looting helped Israel falsely claim both that Hamas was stealing aid from the UN and that the international body had proven itself unfit to run humanitarian operations in Gaza.

Israel and the US then set about creating a mercenary front group — misleadingly called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — to run a sham replacement operation.

Instead of the UN’s trusted and wide distribution network across Gaza, the GHF’s four “aid hubs” were perfectly designed to advance Israel’s genocidal goals.

They are located in a narrow strip of territory next to the border with Egypt. Palestinians are forced to ethnically cleanse themselves into a tiny area of Gaza — if they are to stand any hope of eating — in preparation for their expulsion into Sinai.

They have been herded into a massively congested area without the space or facilities to cope, where the spread of disease is guaranteed, and where they can be more easily massacred by Israeli bombs.

An increasingly malnourished population must walk long distances and wait in massive crowds in the heat in the hope of small handouts of food. It is a situation engineered to heighten tensions, and lead to chaos and fighting.

All of which provide an ideal pretext for Israeli soldiers to halt “aid distribution” pre-emptively in the interests of “public safety” and shoot into the crowds to “neutralise threats”, as has happened to lethal effect day after day.

Repeated ‘aid hub’ massacres
The repeated massacres at these “aid hubs” mean that the most vulnerable — those most in need of aid — have been frightened off, leaving gang members like Abu Shabab’s to enjoy the spoils.

On Wednesday, Israel massacred at least 60 Palestinians, most of them seeking food, in what has already become normalised, a daily ritual of bloodletting that is already barely making headlines.

And to add insult to injury, Israel has misrepresented its own drone footage of the very criminal gangs it arms, looting aid from trucks and shooting Palestinian aid-seekers as supposed evidence of Hamas stealing food and of the need for Israel to control aid distribution.

All of this is so utterly transparent, and repugnant, it is simply astonishing it has not been at the forefront of Western coverage as politicians and media worry about how “intolerable the situation” in Gaza has become.

Instead, the media has largely taken it as read that Hamas “steals aid”. The media has indulged an entirely bogus Israeli-fuelled debate about the need for aid distribution “reform”.

And the media has equivocated about whether it is Israeli soldiers shooting dead those seeking aid.

Of course, the media has refused to draw the only reasonable conclusion from all of this: that Israel is simply exploiting the chaos it has created to buy time for its starvation campaign to kill more Palestinians.

Calibrated warlordism
But there is much more at stake. Israel is fattening up these criminal gangs for a grander, future role in what used to be termed the “day after” — until it became all too clear that the period in question would follow the completion of Israel’s genocide.

It comes as no surprise to any Palestinian to hear confirmation from Netanyahu that Israel has been arming criminal gangs in Gaza, even those with affiliations to Islamic State.

It should not surprise any journalist who has spent serious time, as I have, living in a Palestinian community and studying Israel’s colonial control mechanisms over Palestinian society.

For years, Israel’s ultimate vision for the Palestinians – if they cannot be entirely expelled from their historic homeland – has been of carefully calibrated warlordism

Palestinian academics have understood for at least two decades — long before Hamas’ lethal one-day break-out from Gaza on 7 October 2023 — why Israel has invested so much of its energy in dismantling bit by bit the institutions of Palestinian national identity in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The goal, they have been telling me and anyone else who would listen, was to leave Palestinian society so hollowed out, so crushed by the rule of feuding criminal gangs, that statehood would become inconceivable.

As the Palestinian political analyst Muhammad Shehada observes of what is taking place in Gaza: “Israel is NOT using [the gangs] to go after Hamas, they’re using them to destroy Gaza itself from the inside.”

For years, Israel’s ultimate vision for the Palestinians — if they cannot be entirely expelled from their historic homeland — has been of carefully calibrated warlordism. Israel would arm a series of criminal families in their geographic heartlands.

Each would have enough light arms to terrorise their local populations into submission, and fight neighbouring families to define the extent of their fiefdom.

None would have the military power to take on Israel. Instead they would have to compete for Israel’s favour — treating it like some inflated Godfather —  in the hope of securing an advantage over rivals.

In this vision, the Palestinians — one of the most educated populations in the Middle East – are to be driven into a permanent state of civil war and “survival of the fittest” politics. Israel’s ambition is to eviscerate Palestinian social cohesion as effectively as it has bombed Gaza’s cities “into the Stone Age”.

Divinely blessed
This is a simple story, one that should be all too familiar to European publics if they were educated in their own histories.

For centuries, Europeans spread outwards — driven by a supremacist zealotry and a desire for material gain — to conquer the lands of others, to steal resources, and to subordinate, expel and exterminate the natives that stood in their way.

The native people were always dehumanised. They were always barbarians, “human animals”, even as we — the members of a supposedly superior civilisation — butchered them, starved them, levelled their homes, destroyed their crops.

Our mission of conquest and extermination was always divinely blessed. Our success in eradicating native peoples, our efficiency in killing them, was always proof of our moral superiority.

We were always the victims, even while we humiliated, tortured and raped. We were always on the side of righteousness.

Israel has simply carried this tradition into the modern era. It has held a mirror up to us and shown that, despite all our grandstanding about human rights, nothing has really changed.

There are a few, like Greta Thunberg and the crew of the Madleen, ready to show by example that we can break with the past. We can refuse to dehumanise. We can refuse to collude in industrial savagery. We can refuse to give our consent through silence and inaction.

But first we must stop listening to the siren calls of our political leaders and the billionaire-owned media. Only then might we learn what it means to be human.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. Republished from the author’s blog with permission.

A media studies professor at Qatar’s Doha Institute for Graduate Studies has completed empirical studies examining Western media coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza — and his findings have been highly critical.

Professor Mohamad Elmasry found that Western media have failed to do much more than “parrot Israeli propaganda regarding al-Shifa Hospital [in Gaza City] and the war more generally”.

Western news outlets, such as BBC, CNN, Sky News, MSNBC, Fox News — and others that are frequent sources of news in New Zealand — “tended to rely overwhelmingly on Israeli and pro-Israeli sources,” he told Al Jazeera.

• READ MORE: Israel kills the journalists. Western media kills the truth of genocide in Gaza
• Failing Gaza: Behind the lens of Western media – Listening Post
• Other Israel’s war on Gaza reports

“Palestinian sources were mostly neglected as were pro-Palestinian sources.

“It’s not a conspiracy; it’s not as though journalists are showing up to work and saying, ‘we’re really going to make the Israelis look good today’.

“But there is a structural problem [in the media] today,” Dr Elmasry added.

“Western news organisations simply do not get Israel-Palestine right.”

US ‘scoffs’ at international law
In a separate interview yesterday, Dr Elmasry blamed the United States for ignoring international law to lead the world to “where we are” over the ongoing Gaza genocide with no end in sight.

“About 95 percent of Israel’s weapons come from the United States and Germany, so as long as those countries scoff at the idea of international law, we won’t get anywhere with the calls for an arms embargo against Israel,” Dr Elmasry said.

Professor Mohamad Elmasry on why there is a stalemate over Gaza genocide. Video: Al Jazeera

“There has been a suggestion that there might be a draft resolution put forward at the United Nations Security Council,” he added.

“There is no question in my mind that nearly all of the countries on the Security Council would support that resolution”.

All countries except for the US, Dr Elmasry added.

“There is also no question in my mind that the United States would veto it, so one of the reasons why we are where we are is because of the United States.”

Hundreds of former employees of Israel lobbying groups such as AIPAC, StandWithUs and CAMERA are working in top newsrooms across the United States, writing and producing America’s news — including on Israel-Palestine, reports a new investigation.

These outlets include MSNBC, The New York Times, CNN and Fox News, says the MintPress News inquiry written by Alan MacLeod.

“Some of these former lobbyists are responsible for producing content on Israel and Palestine — a gigantic and undisclosed conflict of interest,” MacLeod writes.

• READ MORE: Revealed: The Israel lobbyists writing America’s news
• Other media reports on Palestine

“Many key US newsroom staff were also formerly Israeli spies or intelligence agents, standing in stark contrast to journalists with pro-Palestine sentiments, who have been purged en masse since October 7, 2023.”

This MintPress News investigation is part of a series detailing Israel’s influence on American media.

An earlier report exposed the former Israeli spies and military intelligence officials working in US newsrooms.

“The fight for control over the Israel-Palestine narrative has been as intense as the war on the ground itself,” writes MacLeod.

Criticised for ‘distinct bias’
“US media have been widely criticised for displaying a distinct bias towards the Israeli perspective.”

However, MacLeod said this new investigation had revealed “not only is the press skewed in favour of Israel, but it is also written and produced by Israeli lobbyists themselves”.

“This investigation unearths a network of hundreds of former members of the Israel lobby working at some of America’s most influential news organisations, helping to shape the public’s understanding of events in the Middle East.

“In the process, it helps whitewash Israeli crimes and manufacture consent for continued US participation in what a wide range of international organisations have described as a genocide.”

The report author, Alan MacLeod, is senior staff writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017, he published two books, Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent and writes for a range of publications.

• Read the full report

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says Israel has stepped up systematic attacks on journalists and media infrastructure since the start of its northern Gaza campaign.

Israeli strikes killed at least five journalists in October and Israeli forces began a smear campaign against six Al Jazeera journalists reporting on the north, the global media watchdog said in a statement.

“There are now almost no professional journalists left in the north to document what several international institutions have described as an ethnic cleansing campaign. Israel has not allowed international media independent access to Gaza in the 13 months since the war began,” CPJ said.

• READ MORE: Kamala Harris’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza ‘betrayal of true feminism’
• Silencing the messenger
• Other Israel’s war on Gaza reports

“It seems clear that the systematic attacks on the media and campaign to discredit those few journalists who remain is a deliberate tactic to prevent the world from seeing what Israel is doing there,” said CPJ programme director Carlos Martinez de la Serna.

“Reporters are crucial in bearing witness during a war, without them the world won’t be able to write history.”

“The situation is catastrophic and beyond description,” a camera operator for the privately owned Al-Ghad TV, Abed AlKarim Al-Zwaidi, told CPJ.

“We do not know what our fate will be in light of these circumstances.”

Media watchdogs have varying figures on the death toll of Gazan journalists, but the Palestine Media Office reports at least 188 have been killed in the Israeli war on the enclave.

This figure includes four more journalists who have been killed and have been named by the media office: Zahraa Muhammad Abu Sakhil and Ahmed Muhammad Abu Sakhil, siblings killed in an Israeli attack on Gaza City on Saturday; Mustafa Khader Bahr, a correspondent killed on March 31 near the Kuwait roundabout south of Gaza City; and Abdul Rahman Khader Bahr, a photojournalist killed on October 6 in al-Karama, northwest of Gaza

Rights groups say the Gaza conflict has been the most dangerous ever recorded for journalists.

Could not answer questions
The IDF responded on October 31 to CPJ’s email requesting comment on these killings, repeating previous statements it could not fully address questions if sufficient details about individuals were not provided.

The statement reiterated previous comments that it “directs its strikes only towards military targets and military operatives, and does not target civilian objects and civilians, including media organisations and journalists.”

CPJ is also investigating reports that two other journalists were killed during this time in northern Gaza.

Al Jazeera report on the Amsterdam clashes.  Video: AJ

Meanwhile, the UN Special Reporteur on the Occupied Palestine Territories, Francesca Albanese, has called for Western media to be investigated over their coverage of the clashes between Israeli football fans and locals in the Dutch city of Amsterdam.

The call came after some Western media outlets failed to report on or minimised the actions of the fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv ahead of and during the confrontations on Friday.

“Once again, Western media should be investigated for the role they are playing in obscuring Israel’s atrocities,” Albanese said in a post on X.

“In other contexts, international tribunals have found media figures responsible for complicity, incitement, and other international crimes.”

Once again. Western media should be investigated for the role they are playing in obscuring Israel’s atrocities. In other contexts, intl tribunals have found media figures responsible for complicity, incitement, and other intl crimes. https://t.co/YGBA9cpxNW

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) November 9, 2024

In one video from the clashes, Israeli fans were heard singing: “Let the [Israeli army] win, and f*** the Arabs!” while another showed them tearing down a Palestinian flag from a building.

A timeline distributed on social media clearly indicated how the Israeli fans provoked the attack by their own violence, but this was largely ignored by Western media.

We are witnessing the total collapse of journalism. Instead, cognitive dissonance and blatant falsehoods reign supreme. Did anyone expect anything different from Western and Zionist media? pic.twitter.com/7vPP4dnaxm

— red. (@redstreamnet) November 8, 2024

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

Israel knew that, if it could stop foreign correspondents from reporting directly from Gaza, those journalists would end up covering events in ways far more to its liking.

They would hedge every report of a new Israeli atrocity – if they covered them at all – with a “Hamas claims” or “Gaza family members allege”. Everything would be presented in terms of conflicting narratives rather than witnessed facts. Audiences would feel uncertain, hesitant, detached.

Israel could shroud its slaughter in a fog of confusion and disputation. The natural revulsion evoked by a genocide would be tempered and attenuated.

• READ MORE: November 2 – International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists
• One journalist killed every four days in 2022-23, most cases unpunished: UN
• RSF condemns Israeli accusations and calls for protection for Al Jazeera journalists

For a year, the networks’ most experienced war reporters have stayed put in their hotels in Israel, watching Gaza from afar. Their human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians.

That is why Western audiences have been forced to relive a single day of horror for Israel, on October 7, 2023, as intensely as they have a year of greater horrors in Gaza — in what the World Court has judged to be a “plausible” genocide by Israel.

That is why the media have immersed their audiences in the agonies of the families of some 250 Israelis — civilians taken hostage and soldiers taken captive — as much as they have the agonies of 2.3 million Palestinians bombed and starved to death week after week, month after month.

That is why audiences have been subjected to gaslighting narratives that frame Gaza’s destruction as a “humanitarian crisis” rather than the canvas on which Israel is erasing all the known rules of war.

While foreign correspondents sit obediently in their hotel rooms, Palestinian journalists have been picked off one by one — in the greatest massacre of journalists in history.

Israel is now repeating that process in Lebanon. On the night of October 24, it struck a residence in south Lebanon where three journalists were staying. All were killed.

In an indication of how deliberate and cynical Israel’s actions are, it put its military’s crosshairs on six Al Jazeera reporters last month, smearing them as “terrorists” working for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They are reportedly the last surviving Palestinian journalists in northern Gaza, which Israel has sealed off while it carries out the so-called “General’s Plan”.

Israel wants no one reporting its final push to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza by starving out the 400,000 Palestinians still there and executing anyone who remains as a “terrorist”.

These six join a long list of professionals defamed by Israel in the interests of advancing its genocide — from doctors and aid workers to UN peacekeepers.

Sympathy for Israel
Perhaps the nadir of Israel’s domestication of foreign journalists was reached last month in a report by CNN. Back in February whistleblowing staff there revealed that the network’s executives have been actively obscuring Israeli atrocities to portray Israel in a more sympathetic light.

In a story whose framing should have been unthinkable — but sadly was all too predictable — CNN reported on the psychological trauma some Israeli soldiers are suffering from time spent in Gaza, in some cases leading to suicide.

Committing a genocide can be bad for your mental health, it seems. Or as CNN explained, its interviews “provide a window into the psychological burden that the war is casting on Israeli society”.

In its lengthy piece, titled “He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him”, the atrocities the soldiers admit committing are little more than the backdrop as CNN finds yet another angle on Israeli suffering. Israeli soldiers are the real victims — even as they perpetrate a genocide on the Palestinian people.

One bulldozer driver, Guy Zaken, told CNN he could not sleep and had become vegetarian because of the “very, very difficult things” he had seen and had to do in Gaza.

What things? Zaken had earlier told a hearing of the Israeli Parliament that his unit’s job was to drive over many hundreds of Palestinians, some of them alive.

CNN reported: “Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza.”

Doubtless some Nazi concentration camp guards committed suicide in the 1940s after witnessing the horrors there — because they were responsible for them. Only in some weird parallel news universe, would their “psychological burden” be the story.

After a huge online backlash, CNN amended an editor’s note at the start of the article that originally read: “This story includes details about suicide that some readers may find upsetting.”

Readers, it was assumed, would find the suicide of Israeli soldiers upsetting, but apparently not the revelation that those soldiers were routinely driving over Palestinians so that, as Zaken explained, “everything squirts out”.

Banned from Gaza
Finally, a year into Israel’s genocidal war, now rapidly spreading into Lebanon, some voices are being raised very belatedly to demand the entry of foreign journalists into Gaza.

This week — in a move presumably designed, as November’s elections loom, to ingratiate themselves with voters angry at the party’s complicity in genocide — dozens of Democratic members of the US Congress wrote to President Joe Biden asking him to pressure Israel to give journalists “unimpeded access” to the enclave.

Don’t hold your breath.

Western media have done very little themselves to protest their exclusion from Gaza over the past year — for a number of reasons.

Given the utterly indiscriminate nature of Israel’s bombardment, major outlets have not wanted their journalists getting hit by a 2000lb bomb for being in the wrong place.

That may in part be out of concern for their welfare. But there are likely to be more cynical concerns.

Having foreign journalists in Gaza blown up or executed by snipers would drag media organisations into direct confrontation with Israel and its well-oiled lobby machine.

The response would be entirely predictable, insinuating that the journalists died because they were colluding with “the terrorists” or that they were being used as “human shields” — the excuse Israel has rolled out time and again to justify its targeting of doctors in Gaza and UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.

But there’s a bigger problem. The establishment media have not wanted to be in a position where their journalists are so close to the “action” that they are in danger of providing a clearer picture of Israel’s war crimes and its genocide.

The media’s current distance from the crime scene offers them plausible deniability as they both-sides every Israeli atrocity.

In previous conflicts, western reporters have served as witnesses, assisting in the prosecution of foreign leaders for war crimes. That happened in the wars that attended the break-up of Yugoslavia, and will doubtless happen once again if Russian President Valdimir Putin is ever delivered to The Hague.

But those journalistic testimonies were harnessed to put the West’s enemies behind bars, not its closest ally.

The media do not want their reporters to become chief witnesses for the prosecution in the future trials of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, at the International Criminal Court. The ICC’s Prosecutor, Karim Khan, is seeking arrest warrants for them both.

After all, any such testimony from journalists would not stop at Israel’s door. They would implicate Western capitals too, and put establishment media organisations on a collision course with their own governments.

The Western media does not see its job as holding power to account when the West is the one committing the crimes.

Censoring Palestinians
Journalist whistleblowers have gradually been coming forward to explain how establishment news organisations — including the BBC and the supposedly liberal Guardian — are sidelining Palestinian voices and minimising the genocide.

An investigation by Novara Media recently revealed mounting unhappiness in parts of The Guardian newsroom at its double standards on Israel and Palestine.

Its editors recently censored a commentary by preeminent Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa after she insisted on being allowed to refer to the slaughter in Gaza as “the holocaust of our times”.

Senior Guardian columnists such as Jonathan Freedland made much during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour party that Jews, and Jews alone, had the right to define and name their own oppression.

That right, however, does not appear to extend to Palestinians.

As staff who spoke to Novara noted, The Guardian’s Sunday sister paper, The Observer, had no problem opening its pages to British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson to smear as a “blood libel” any reporting of the provable fact that Israel has killed many, many thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.

One veteran journalist there said: “Is The Guardian more worried about the reaction to what is said about Israel than Palestine? Absolutely.”

Another staff member admitted it would be inconceivable for the paper to be seen censoring a Jewish writer. But censoring a Palestinian one is fine, it seems.

Other journalists report being under “suffocating control” from senior editors, and say this pressure exists “only if you’re publishing something critical of Israel”.

According to staff there, the word “genocide” is all but banned in the paper except in coverage of the International Court of Justice, whose judges ruled nine months ago that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was committing genocide. Things have got far worse since.

Whistleblowing journalists
Similarly, “Sara”, a whistleblower who recently resigned from the BBC newsroom and spoke of her experiences to Al Jazeera’s Listening Post, said Palestinians and their supporters were routinely kept off air or subjected to humiliating and insensitive lines of questioning.

Some producers have reportedly grown increasingly reluctant to bring on air vulnerable Palestinians, some of whom have lost family members in Gaza, because of concerns about the effect on their mental health from the aggressive interrogations they were being subjected to from anchors.

According to Sara, BBC vetting of potential guests overwhelmingly targets Palestinians, as well as those sympathetic to their cause and human rights organisations. Background checks are rarely done of Israelis or Jewish guests.

She added that a search showing that a guest had used the word “Zionism” — Israel’s state ideology — in a social media post could be enough to get them disqualified from a programme.

Even officials from one of the biggest rights group in the world, the New York-based Human Rights Watch, became persona non grata at the BBC for their criticisms of Israel, even though the corporation had previously relied on their reports in covering Ukraine and other global conflicts.

Israeli guests, by contrast, “were given free rein to say whatever they wanted with very little pushback”, including lies about Hamas burning or beheading babies and committing mass rape.

An email cited by Al Jazeera from more than 20 BBC journalists sent last February to Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, warned that the corporation’s coverage risked “aiding and abetting genocide through story suppression”.

Upside-down values
These biases have been only too evident in the BBC’s coverage, first of Gaza and now, as media interest wanes in the genocide, of Lebanon.

Headlines — the mood music of journalism, and the only part of a story many of the audience read — have been uniformly dire.

For example, Netanyahu’s threats of a Gaza-style genocide against the Lebanese people last month if they did not overthrow their leaders were soft-soaped by the BBC headline: “Netanyahu’s appeal to Lebanese people falls on deaf ears in Beirut.”

Reasonable readers would have wrongly inferred both that Netanyahu was trying to do the Lebanese people a favour (by preparing to murder them), and that they were being ungrateful in not taking up his offer.

It has been the same story everywhere in the establishment media. In another extraordinary, revealing moment, Kay Burley of Sky News announced last month the deaths of four Israeli soldiers from a Hezbollah drone strike on a military base inside Israel.

With a solemnity usually reserved for the passing of a member of the British royal family, she slowly named the four soldiers, with a photo of each shown on screen. She stressed twice that all four were only 19 years old.

Sky News seemed not to understand that these were not British soldiers, and that there was no reason for a British audience to be especially disturbed by their deaths. Soldiers are killed in wars all the time — it is an occupational hazard.

And further, if Israel considered them old enough to fight in Gaza and Lebanon, then they were old enough to die too without their age being treated as particularly noteworthy.

But more significantly still, Israel’s Golani Brigade to which these soldiers belonged has been centrally involved in the slaughter of Palestinians over the past year. Its troops have been responsible for many of the tens of thousands of children killed and maimed in Gaza.

Each of the four soldiers was far, far less deserving of Burley’s sympathy and concern than the thousands of children who have been slaughtered at the hands of their brigade. Those children are almost never named and their pictures are rarely shown, not least because their injuries are usually too horrifying to be seen.

It was yet more evidence of the upside-down world the establishment media has been trying to normalise for its audiences.

It is why statistics from the United States, where the coverage of Gaza and Lebanon may be even more unhinged, show faith in the media is at rock bottom. Fewer than one in three respondents — 31 percent — said they still had a “great deal or fair amount of trust in mass media”.

Crushing dissent
Israel is the one dictating the coverage of its genocide. First by murdering the Palestinian journalists reporting it on the ground, and then by making sure house-trained foreign correspondents stay well clear of the slaughter, out of harm’s way in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

And as ever, Israel has been able to rely on the complicity of its Western patrons in crushing dissent at home.

Last week, a British investigative journalist, Asa Winstanley, an outspoken critic of Israel and its lobbyists in the UK, had his home in London raided at dawn by counter-terrorism police.

Though the police have not arrested or charged him — at least not yet — they snatched his electronic devices. He was warned that he is being investigated for “encouragement of terrorism” in his social media posts.

Police told Middle East Eye that his devices had been seized as part of an investigation into suspected terrorism offences of “support for a proscribed organisation” and “dissemination of terrorist documents”.

The police can act only because of Britain’s draconian, anti-speech Terrorism Act.

Section 12, for example, makes the expression of an opinion that could be interpreted as sympathetic to armed Palestinian resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation — a right enshrined in international law but sweepingly dismissed as “terrorism” in the West — itself a terrorism offence.

Those journalists who haven’t been house-trained in the establishment media, as well as solidarity activists, must now chart a treacherous path across intentionally ill-defined legal terrain when talking about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Winstanley is not the first journalist to be accused of falling foul of the Terrorism Act. In recent weeks, Richard Medhurst, a freelance journalist, was arrested at Heathrow airport on his return from a trip abroad. Another journalist-activist, Sarah Wilkinson, was briefly arrested after her home was ransacked by police.

Their electronic devices were seized too.

Meanwhile, Richard Barnard, co-founder of Palestine Action, which seeks to disrupt the UK’s supply of weapons to Israel’s genocide, has been charged over speeches he has made against the genocide.

It now appears that all these actions are part of a specific police campaign targeting journalists and Palestinian solidarity activists: “Operation Incessantness”.

The message this clumsy title is presumably supposed to convey is that the British state is coming after anyone who speaks out too loudly against the British government’s continuing arming and complicity in Israel’s genocide.

Notably, the establishment media have failed to cover this latest assault on journalism and the role of a free press — supposedly the very things they are there to protect.

The raid on Winstanley’s home and the arrests are intended to intimidate others, including independent journalists, into silence for fear of the consequences of speaking up.

This has nothing to do with terrorism. Rather, it is terrorism by the British state.

Once again the world is being turned upside down.

Echoes from history
The West is waging a campaign of psychological warfare on its populations: it is gaslighting and disorientating them, classing genocide as “self-defence” and opposition to it a form of “terrorism”.

This is an expansion of the persecution suffered by Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who spent years locked up in London’s Belmarsh high-security prison.

His unprecedented journalism — revealing the darkest secrets of Western states — was redefined as espionage. His “offence” was revealing that Britain and the US had committed systematic war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now, on the back of that precedent, the British state is coming after journalists simply for embarrassing it.

Late last month I attended a meeting in Bristol against the genocide in Gaza at which the main speaker was physically absent after the British state failed to issue him an entry visa.

The missing guest — he had to join us by zoom — was Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, who was locked up for decades as a terrorist before becoming the first leader of post-apartheid South Africa and a feted, international statesman.

Mandla Mandela was until recently a member of the South African Parliament.

A Home Office spokesperson told Middle East Eye that the UK only issued visas “to those who we want to welcome to our country”.

Media reports suggest Britain was determined to exclude Mandela because, like his grandfather, he views the Palestinian struggle against Israeli apartheid as intimately linked to the earlier struggle against South Africa’s apartheid.

The echoes from history are apparently entirely lost on officials: the UK is once again associating the Mandela family with terrorism. Before it was to protect South Africa’s apartheid regime. Now it is to protect Israel’s even worse apartheid and genocidal regime.

The world is indeed turned on its head. And the West’s supposedly “free media” is playing a critical role in trying to make our upside-down world seem normal.

That can only be achieved by failing to report the Gaza genocide as a genocide. Instead, Western journalists are serving as little more than stenographers. Their job: to take dictation from Israel.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years and returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, including Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011, Cook was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism for his work on Palestine and Israel. This article was first published in Middle East Eye and is republished with the author’s permission.

US President Joe Biden has spoken at the annual White House Correspondents’ dinner in Washington in spite of protests over alleged “complicity” of media about Israel’s war on Gaza, offering a toast to “press freedom and democracy” but ignoring the death toll of Palestinian journalists.

Demonstrators targeted the Washington Hilton hotel which hosted the dinner, denouncing the Biden administration’s handling of the war and urging guests — especially media — to boycott the event.

Media freedom watchdogs have cited varying death toll figures for Palestinian journalists killed since October 7 although Al Jazeera network news today reported 142 dead — more than double the number of journalists killed in each of the Second World War and the Vietnam War.

• READ MORE: Is­raeli forces kill 27 in Gaza as pro-Pales­tine protests sweep US cam­pus­es
• Other War on Gaza reports

“It’s astonishing. We’ve never seen a White House correspondents’ dinner like this,” reported Al Jazeera’s Washington correspondent Shihab Rattansi.

“The President is here to speak while being warmly applauded by the national US press core.

“But these VIPs are all dressed up in the evening finery, and they have to run the gauntlet of hundreds of protesters out here who are shouting, ‘Shame on you’.

“‘Shame on you’ for breaking bread when there are [142] journalists dead as a result of, as far as they say, Biden’s complicity in their murder.”

Code Pink flag protest
Members of the feminist organisation Code Pink dropped a huge Palestinian flag from a top floor window of the Washington Hilton hotel.

The group said members involved in the action managed “to get out quickly and without arrest”.

The protesters were gathered outside the hotel to express solidarity with the dozens of Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza.

NOW: Protestors have dropped a Palestinian flag out of the window of the Washington Hilton, where the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is being held tonight. pic.twitter.com/v8womcm8QP

— CODEPINK (@codepink) April 27, 2024

More than two dozen Palestinian journalists had called for a boycott of the dinner, writing an open letter urging their American colleagues not to attend.

“You have a unique responsibility to speak truth to power and uphold journalistic integrity,” said the letter from the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate.

“It is unacceptable to stay silent out of fear or professional concern while journalists in Gaza continue to be detained, tortured, and killed for doing our jobs.”

‘It hurts our souls’
Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary was one of the signatories of the letter calling for the boycott.

She spoke to the network from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, saying she did not “have the words” to describe what she had been going through.

“This isn’t something that has been ending. It has been continuous every single day for more than 200 days.

“We have been killed, displaced and homeless, and we’re not only reporting on this, but we’re also living it with every single detail.

“We’re living this war in all aspects of life. We have not seen our families as journalists. We have not been able to eat well. We have been dehydrated.

“We have been reporting in one of the harshest conditions any reporter can go through despite losing a lot of colleagues, and it hurts our souls and our hearts every single day.

“We have been constantly targeted by the Israeli air strikes and shelling.

“All of these daily things we have been living as journalists are overwhelming [and] exhausting, but we still continue because there have been at least 100 Palestinian journalists whom I personally know that have been killed since October 7.

“If they were here today with us, they would be reporting, and they would be raising the voice of the voiceless Palestinians.”

Unfortunately there was no discussion of foreign policy during Aotearoa New Zealand’s general election last year. Aside from the odd obligatory question in a TV debate it barely got a mention.

Our international relations tend to be glossed over because most policy is shared by Labour and National at least.

It wasn’t always this way. Back in the 1970s there was a palpable feeling of pride across the country as the Norman Kirk Labour government sent a New Zealand frigate to protest against French nuclear testing in the Pacific.

• READ MORE: Bureaucratic muck up releases two versions of joint statement from New Zealand, Australia and Canada on the Beehive website
• A shameful NZ response to genocide of Palestinians in Gaza
• NZ to deploy Defence Force to Red Sea
• Other War on Gaza reports

A similar community pride surrounded developing our anti-nuclear policy in the 1980s and relief as well when New Zealand did not buckle to US pressure and stayed out of the infamous invasion of Iraq in 2003 while the rest of the Western world fell for the huge propaganda blitz about non-existent “weapons of mass destruction”.

It has been an awful surprise to see New Zealand give up that independence so easily in the last two years.

We rightly joined the condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because while there were clear reasons for Russia’s action there was no justification.

But then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her successor Chris Hipkins just gave up even the pretence of independence.

Fast downhill ride
Both attended belligerent NATO meetings and it’s been a fast downhill ride since. Our new National-led coalition government is continuing the same political momentum.

Nevertheless, it still came as a shock last month when Prime Minister Christopher Luxon — flanked by Foreign Minister Winston Peters and Defence Minister Judith Collins — announced we were sending military personnel to join the US-led bombing of Yemen.

There was no United Nations mandate for war and it was supported only by the tiniest minority of Western countries.

The Houthi group in Yemen have attacked Israeli-linked shipping in the Red Sea to pressure Israel to end its slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

Yemeni groups have done this because the Western world has turned its back on the people of Gaza and refuses to condemn Israel’s indiscriminate killing of Palestinians.

Shouldn’t we be speaking strongly for an immediate permanent ceasefire in Gaza like most of the world rather than joining in bombing one of the world’s poorest countries?

A ceasefire in Gaza would end the attacks on Red Sea shipping and dramatically reduce tensions across the Middle East.

That’s what an independent New Zealand would have done.

Shame, instead of pride
Instead of pride, most of us feel shame as the world now looks on us as a small, obsequious appendage to the US empire — an empire which has blocked three UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

The killing of civilians and the taking of civilian hostages is a war crime under the fourth Geneva convention and must always be condemned, no matter who the perpetrator.

We were right to condemn the killing of Israeli civilians, but our government’s refusal to condemn the killing of more than 28,000 Palestinians, including more than 12,000 children, or even call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza — until it belatedly did so this week — leaves an indelible stain on our reputation.

Our lack of independence was on display again last month when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found a plausible case exists that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Instead of backing up the court ruling with demands Israel end the killing of Palestinians New Zealand has been all but silent with the Prime Minister blundering his way through question time in Parliament without a clue about our international responsibilities.

While all but ignoring the genocide ruling by the ICJ, Luxon was quick to halt New Zealand funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency over Israeli allegations that 12 of UNRWA’s 30,000 employees had been implicated in terrorism.

A classic diversion by Israel to avoid the dreadful truth of their killing of Palestinians in Gaza. New Zealand happily joined the diversion.

Why are Israeli attacks on UNRWA so much more important for the Prime Minister than genocide committed against the Palestinian people?

The simple truth is we are swimming against the great tide of humanity which stands with Palestinians.

Our government has pushed us into the dark shadow of US/Israeli policies of oppression and domination. We need to be back out in the sun.

John Minto is national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). Republished with permission from The Daily Blog.

COMMENTARY: By Mazin Qumsiyeh

It is so hard for me to write today — too many tears. The US-supported Israeli occupation forces’ crimes continue daily but some days are harder than others.

Shireen Abu Akleh, wearing a blue helmet and vest with “PRESS” written over it has been assassinated by Israeli occupation forces.

All journalists on the scene explained how Israeli snipers simply targeted journalists. The first three bullets were a miss, then a hit on one male journalist (in the back). Then when Shireen shouted that he was hit, she was killed with a bullet beneath the ear.

• READ MORE: Latest Abu Akleh killing updates: Palestine rejects Israeli probe
• Shireen Abu Akleh: Al Jazeera reporter killed by Israeli gunfire
• Palestinians in besieged Gaza Strip mourn Abu Akleh’s killing

Shireen was also a US citizen (she was a Bethlehemite Christian who lived in Jerusalem). But that is no protection.

Rachel Corrie was run over by an Israeli military bulldozer and killed intentionally in Rafah two decades ago and the killers were rewarded. Both killings happened as the world was distracted by other conflicts (Iraq and now Ukraine).

The US government cares nothing about its own citizens because politicians are under the thumb of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Thousands of others were killed and the murderers still roam free and are funded by US taxpayers.

War crimes and crimes against humanity continue daily here. The US government is a partner in crime (just note how the US Ambassador simply hoped for an investigation — why not send the FBI to investigate the murder of countless US citizens). The events and the reaction in Western corporate (“mainstream”) media and Western governments makes us so mad.

Same day murder of teenager
If you are not outraged to act, you are not human. In the same day today the apartheid forces murdered 15-year-old Thaer Alyazouri as he was returning from school.

As we pointed out before, Palestine remains the fulcrum and the litmus test and it exposes hypocrisy and collusion.

It is actually the achilles heel for Western propaganda. Like with South Africa under apartheid, Western leaders’ empty rhetoric of human rights and democracy is exposed by their direct support for apartheid and murder.

May this intentional murder of a journalist finally be the straw that breaks the back of hypocrisy, Zionism and imperialism.

Millions of people mourn this brave journalist murdered by a fascist racist regime. Millions will rededicate themselves to challenge Western hypocrisy and US-supported Israeli crimes against humanity.

The Nakba atrocities
My 90-year-old mother born before the Nakba told me about the atrocities done since 1948 and before by the terrorist Zionist militias in their quest to colonise Palestine. From the first terrorist attack (and yes, Zionists were first to use terrorism like bombing markets or hijacking airplanes) to the 33 massacres during the 1948-1950 ethnic cleansing of Palestine (Tantura, Deir Yassin etc).

We will not forget nor forgive. Justice is key to peace here and justice begins with ending the nightmare called Zionism and prosecuting its leaders and collaborators and funders in real fair trials.

Only then will Jews, Christians, Muslims, and all others flourish in this land of Palestine. Palestine will then retun to be a multiethnic, multicultural, and multireligious society instead of a racist apartheid state of Israel.

It is inevitable but we can accelerate it with our actions.

We honour Shireen, Rachel and more than 110,000 martyrs by acting as they did: telling truth, challenging evil deeds, working for justice (which is a prerequisite for peace).

Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh teaches and does research at Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities. He previously served on the faculties of the University of Tennessee, Duke, and Yale Universities. He and his wife returned to Palestine in 2008, starting a number of institutions and projects such as a clinical genetics laboratory that serves cancer and other patients. Qumsiyeh has been harassed and arrested for non-violent actions but also received a number of awards for these same actions.

Veteran Al Jazeera journalist killed by Israeli forces: Live news https://t.co/5B5gkk1MKI

— El_Grillo (@El_Grillo1) May 11, 2022

For journalists who cover Afghanistan, the bombing that killed nine local reporters last week in Kabul was a sober reminder of the dangers the media continue to face in the country’s seemingly endless conflict.

The victims were not well-known foreign correspondents, but a group of courageous Afghan photographers, reporters and cameramen who had gone to report on another bomb blast that had exploded about 40 minutes earlier.

They included a photographer from the French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP), as well as contributors to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and several local media companies.

READ MORE: Free media week killings underscore crimes of impunity against journalists

Elsewhere on the same day, a 10th journalist was shot dead – a reporter for the BBC’s Pashto service, Ahmad Shah.

According to Reporters Without Borders, it was the deadliest single day for journalists in the country since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001.

The principal way we receive news from conflict zones like Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq is via eyewitnesses on social media and the global news agencies – AFP, Associated Press and Reuters. Agency reporters are often the first “media responders” to deadly incidents like suicide bombings and terror attacks. They also negotiate with local reporters on the ground to secure the best pictures, which then get relayed to the thousands of media companies around the world who subscribe to their services.

To feed this beast of global 24/7 news coverage, there is still an expectation that agency journalists will dare to tread where others will not.

Journalists as targets
Increasingly, this has become even more dangerous, as extremist groups like the Islamic State have shifted tactics to specifically target journalists.

The Afghan Journalists Safety Committee warned of “an unprecedented increase in threats and violence against journalists” in a 2017 report:

Increased threats from DAESH to media and journalists have created a new wave of concerns about the security of journalists and media. What is seriously worrying is the group’s direct attacks against media, which in 2017 is responsible for the vast majority of journalists’ deaths.

Reporters Without Borders says 34 journalists and media workers have died in attacks by the Islamic State and Taliban in Afghanistan since the start of 2016. The situation has become so dire that the group has called on the United Nations to appoint a special representative dedicated to protecting the lives of journalists. The proposal has been backed by French President Emmanuel Macron and the German Parliament.

Without adequate security provisions, journalists have also been abandoning countries that have become too dangerous, Reporters Without Borders notes in its 2017 annual report on reporters killed in the line of duty.

AFP continues to operate with a team of two or three foreign journalists in Kabul, backed up by seven full-time Afghan journalists and various stringers working across the country. Reuters employs just one foreign correspondent and one local journalist in Kabul, and AP has two local reporters and two local photographers.

Former BBC journalist Bilal Sarwary, who now works as a freelancer, tells me there are very few Western journalists left in Afghanistan because “Iraq and then Syria have commanded their attention” in recent years. He said The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post still have reporters based in the country, but now rely almost entirely on freelance photographers.

Responding to the new reality
Under global news director Michèle Léridon, AFP has been highly innovative at adapting to news gathering challenges, but also strict in its policy of not being made stooges by terrorists. According to Phil Chetwynd, AFP’s global editor-in-chief, the company is constantly evaluating its security procedures.

We have always been cautious about rushing to the scene of attacks. We have moved our office several times in Kabul to find a better location as the threat level has changed. We have sent security experts to review our procedures and to recommend physical reinforcements and measures to our buildings.

We have also sent reporters on hostile environment courses and sent trainers to Kabul to train all staff including non-journalists. The message to all our reporters remains that security comes first.

Chetwynd notes the suicide bomber who killed the nine Afghan journalists in Kabul last week – a group that included AFP photographer Shah Marai – had apparently been posing as a fellow reporter, a new tactic by terror groups.

“We are already changing and reacting to this appalling new reality,” he says.

It’s clear that all media organisations need to constantly rethink their strategies when it comes to reporting in conflict zones.

Media scholars, too, are tackling the issue. At the upcoming International Communications Association conference in Prague later this month, I will be joining other academics on a panel titled “Voices in journalism: Local news staff producing international news” to discuss the latest research examining the working conditions of stringers, fixers and local journalists.

Researched challenges
One of the panellists, Saumava Mitra, has researched the work of photojournalists in Afghanistan and co-authored an essay last week on the challenges they face:

We have seen that local journalists usually have much poorer access to hostile-environment training, work-hazard insurance or even medical benefits from their employers. They face different threats and risks than those who parachute into the conflict and have nowhere to go if the situation escalates.

They are also much more prone to reprisals. The first step to help prevent their deaths is to acknowledge that the news we consume is often produced by journalists working under precarious conditions in hostile places.

Marai, for one, always knew the dangers of working in Kabul, as his blog on the AFP website so devastatingly shows. In it, he recounts how life changed for the worse when the Taliban returned to stage attacks in Kabul in the mid-2000s:

“I don’t dare to take my children for a walk. I have five and they spend their time cooped up inside the house. Every morning as I go to the office and every evening when I return home, all I think of are cars that can be booby-trapped, or of suicide bombers coming out of a crowd. I can’t take the risk. So we don’t go out.

“I have never felt life to have so little prospects and I don’t see a way out. It’s a time of anxiety.”

Dr Colleen Murrell is undergraduate coordinator for journalism at Monash University, Melbourne, and the author of Foreign Correspondents and International Newsgathering: The role of fixers.This article was first published by The Conversation and is republished on Asia Pacific Report under a Creative Commons licence.

• Journalists in war zones tread a fine line between safety and freedom of speech