I thought this was an excellent piece from Bowen.
Israel is accused of the gravest war crimes - how governments respond could haunt them for years to come
Even wars have rules. They don't stop soldiers killing each other but they're intended to make sure that civilians caught up in the fighting are treated humanely and protected from as much danger as possible. The rules apply equally to all sides.
If one side has suffered a brutal surprise attack that killed hundreds of civilians, as Israel did on 7 October 2023, it does not get an exemption from the law. The protection of civilians is a legal requirement in a battle plan.
That, at least, is the theory behind the Geneva Conventions. The latest version, the fourth, was formulated and adopted after World War Two to stop such slaughter and cruelty to civilians from ever happening again.
At the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva (ICRC) the words "Even Wars Have Rules" are emblazoned in huge letters on a glass rotunda.
The reminder is timely because the rules are being broken.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0r1xl5wgnko
Melanie Phillips' response:
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Journalists for genocide
The media constitutes the eighth front in the war to exterminate Israel
Melanie Phillips
Jun 8
READ IN APP
Released by the Israel Defence Forces
Next month, the London freelance branch of Britain’s National Union of Journalists is to hold a meeting to discuss ”the ethics and realities of reporting genocide when the only journalists on the scene are being slaughtered.”
The meeting is being sponsored by the hard-left Labour MP and former Corbyn apparatchik John McDonnell, who has accused Israel of murder and called for its economic and military isolation.
So a fair, balanced and objective discussion, then.
Accusing Israel of “genocide,” when it’s fighting a just war against genocidal attack, when it’s allowed into Gaza tens of thousands of tons of food and other aid, when it’s repeatedly moved Gaza’s civilians out of harm’s way and has killed a far lower proportion of civilians to combatants than any other military in war, denotes either illiteracy, imbecilism or malice.
As for “the only journalists on the scene being slaughtered,” a number of those individuals have been exposed as terrorists masquerading as journalists.
Yesterday, the Israel Defence Forces said it had killed two Islamic jihadi terrorists who had posed as journalists and who had operated from a command centre in the courtyard of the Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza. So not only were these individuals not journalists but they were terrorists engaged in the war crime of using a hospital as cover for terrorism.
Will the NUJ meeting discuss the “ethics and realities” of that?
Last October, the IDF disclosed that intelligence information and numerous documents found in Gaza had confirmed the military affiliation of six Al Jazeera “journalists” to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. This discovery included personnel tables, lists of terrorist training courses, phone directories and salary documents for terrorists.
Last month, Al Jazeera and other Arabic outlets mourned the death of “journalist” Bilal al Hatoum, who they said had been targeted and killed with a group of “civilians” in Gaza. Yet Al Jazeera analyst Saeed Ziad eulogised Bilal as a “beloved martyr” who “fought from the dawn of the Day of the Flood [October 7th] until noon today”. And someone else who called him his “beloved brother” described him as having been “martyred” with “a group of mujahideen” in a “blessed battle”.
Will the NUJ meeting discuss the “ethics and realities” of that?
Repeatedly, the western media has passed off as impartial journalists people who either belong to or work closely with Hamas.
The spokesman for Gaza’s Civil Defence, Mahmoud Zabar Tafesh Bassal, who was responsible for informing the media about casualties in Gaza and has been quoted by CNN, the BBC, the Guardian, the Washington Post and many other outlets, has now been outed as an active Hamas terrorist. The Jewish Chronicle reports:
The IDF claims to have found documents during operational activities in Gaza that prove “unequivocally” that spokesperson Mahmoud Zabar Tafesh Bassal is a “terrorist in the Hamas terrorist organisation” and responsible for advancing “psychological warfare and propaganda” as part of his role.
The three intelligence documents disclosed by the IDF all mention Bassal by name and list him serving in various roles, including as a cell head in a Hamas intelligence unit…The IDF claimed Bassal “abuses his role [as spokesperson] by spreading false and unverified information to the international media, while falsely attributing war crimes to Israel and by presenting fabricated data. This information receives global media exposure and has caused a severe distortion of the reality on the ground.”
Will the NUJ meeting discuss the “ethics and realities” of that?
But the issue is even worse than this. For every single journalist in Gaza must toe the Hamas line — or else face exclusion or death.
Some Arab journalists have spoken about the intimidation they’ve suffered at the hands of Hamas. The head of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate said:
There are major violations committed by the Hamas government and group against journalists.The violations range from summonses, interrogations, phone calls, threats, sometimes beatings and arrests, to harassment, publication bans, interference with content, and surveillance.
This, then, is the western media’s dirty little secret. Any journalist reporting from Gaza faces these threats by Hamas — and always has done. Yet not one media outlet has ever told the public the truth — that the words being said or the pictures being shown from Gaza are all produced under intimidation and coercion.
Instead, the BBC and other western journalists whine that Israel refuses to allow western media into Gaza (other than those who are embedded with the IDF). What they don’t say is that, given the lies such journalists would tell the world under an intimidation they conceal, allowing them into Gaza would be tantamount to aiding the genocidal enemy. What other country at war for its life would ever be expected to do such a thing?
Back in 2014, in a classic Tablet essay during yet another Gaza war, Matti Friedman wrote from first-hand experience the definitive exposé of the control exercised by Hamas on every journalist in Gaza, and the corruption of virtually the entire media in concealing this. He wrote:
There has been much discussion recently of Hamas attempts to intimidate reporters. Any veteran of the press corps here knows the intimidation is real, and I saw it in action myself as an editor on the AP [Associated Press] news desk. During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting I personally erased a key detail — that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll — because of a threat to our reporter in Gaza. (The policy was then, and remains, not to inform readers that the story is censored unless the censorship is Israeli.)
Key to this is that the editors sitting in western newsrooms frame the Middle East conflict entirely in term of Israeli oppressiveness and Palestinian victimhood. Friedman went on:
The fact is that Hamas intimidation is largely beside the point because the actions of Palestinians are beside the point. Most reporters in Gaza believe their job is to document violence directed by Israel at Palestinian civilians. That is the essence of the Israel story. In addition, reporters are under deadline and often at risk, and many don’t speak the language and have only the most tenuous grip on what is going on. They are dependent on Palestinian colleagues and fixers who either fear Hamas, support Hamas, or both. Reporters don’t need Hamas enforcers to shoo them away from facts that muddy the simple story they have been sent to tell.
On Friday, an extremely rare event occurred. An anonymous senior BBC figure actually admitted the truth. This source told the UK’s Times (£):
Hamas is a body that routinely lies and executes people it doesn’t like, but we treat them as if they’re of equal status to a democratically elected government that runs an open society. Impartiality does not mean neutrality — it means truthfulness.
Someone should bring that to the attention of the BBC’s Global News Director, Jonathan Munro. Asked whether some BBC journalistic sources were compromised by Hamas, he said:
They're not restricted in what they are able to see and show. There may be physical restrictions — for example, not many of them have much fuel to go from one town to another — but there is no restriction on what they can show, what they can see and what they can film when they're on location. There is no suggestion at all that any of those very brave people are under any political influence.
You really do have to wonder whether Munro is merely lethally ignorant or knows that what he’s saying is garbage. My guess is the former. That’s because the BBC almost universally subscribes to the view that it upholds objectivity and truth and that anyone who says otherwise is by definition an extremist. On the subject of Israel, the BBC inhabits a totally closed thought system.
That’s why it’s simply impossible to get it to acknowledge its crucial role in propagating Palestinian propaganda that has incited murderous hatred of Israel and the Jewish people. It’s why it routinely uses journalists who are venomous partisans against Israel. In a report on Unherd last March, David Rose wrote:
In a long article on the BBC website today, the BBC’s International Editor Jeremy Bowen wrote an egregiously one-sided vilification of Israel which was for many hours treated as front page news. Referencing one Israel-basher after another with no attempt at balance, he constructed a narrative libelling Israel with the now stock falsehoods of famine, expulsion, war crimes and genocide. He made no mention of the testimony by international military experts that Israel punctiliously observes the laws of war. He made no mention of the number of terrorists killed by the IDF — indeed, one might imagine that instead of 70 per cent of those killed being fighting age men (as researchers have shown can be gleaned from Hamas’s own statistics) the IDF had killed no terrorists at all.https://www.euronews.com/2025/04/03/hamas-run-health-ministry-quietly-removes-thousands-from-gaza-death-toll-researchers-find?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
