The truth is, there is not a single Western journalist who could report effectively from inside Gaza in this genocide. We do not have the skills, the contacts, the knowledge of the ground, and the society.
Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA Commissioner General, is the latest person to use the distraction of calling for “international media” to be allowed into Gaza “to independently report on the ongoing atrocities including this morning’s heinous crime.”
Western journalists have been demanding this for months. But, the truth is there is not a single Western journalist who could report effectively from inside Gaza in this genocide. We do not have the skills, the contacts, the knowledge of the ground, and the society.
The relentless work of Palestinian journalists’ teams day by day has given the world the reality of this genocide. Living and working from tents or hospitals, hungry, thirsty, exhausted, suffering deepest grief at family and colleagues’ deaths, 233 of our media colleagues have been killed. Without their courage and their work, there would not be any substance to any UN or Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, or NGO report, or, more crucially, any of the authoritative ICJ hearings from the South African legal teams.
I have been a reporter in wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, Angola and Mozambique, South Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia, and an editor in charge of journalists reporting from Bosnia and Chechnya. It was frightening work, dependent on the knowledge and access of local journalists, and luck. Colleagues died. They died in unlucky helicopter accidents, in reckless risk-taking, one of an asthma attack. In many countries, journalists are killed, disappeared, or imprisoned by governments.
But never, ever, before have there been targeted assassinations of journalists on such a scale as Israel has been doing with impunity for 19 months and continues. Knowing they could be a target every day, these journalists increasingly wrote moving farewell notes about “their duty to witness.”
The shocking record of most of the Western mainstream media on Gaza rests on the false narrative that “people can’t know what is going on” because foreign media are banned from reporting there. Even the use of some reporting from Palestinian journalists inside Gaza is blurred by the overwhelming lack of context, focus on October 7 and Israeli deaths and hostages, the normalization of inhuman cruelty and dehumanization of Palestinians by Israeli Cabinet Ministers, military leaders, torturers, young soldiers laughingly rejoicing at Palestinian deaths under bombing, Palestinian homes which they have vandalized, men they have publicly humiliated.
Mr. Lazzarini referred to “competing narratives and disinformation campaigns in full gear.” Israeli disinformation campaigns and false narratives are certainly in full gear. They are exposed by the facts on the ground revealed by Palestinian journalists.
No one can forget the egregious example of the 23 March 2025 assassinations of eight Palestinian medics, six Civil Defense first responders, and one UN staff member—still in their uniforms and gloves heading for a rescue mission. They were executed one by one and buried in a mass grave with their crushed ambulances after a pre-dawn attack by Israeli soldiers on their convoy. A 6-minute video, later found on the mobile phone of the dead 23-year-old paramedic Rifat Radwan, revealed as completely false the account given by the Israeli military.
Sir Geoffrey Nice KC, a senior British barrister with a long history of work in the International Criminal Court, where he led the prosecution of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, described these March events as “terribly serious war crimes.”
He compared it to the iconic American Vietnam war crime at My Lai on 16 March 1968, a mass murder in two villages of at least 347 women, children and elderly men, which included rape and mutilation of children as young as 12. Sir Geoffrey went on to call for an international investigation, saying he hoped to see “Western powers using their power to pour condemnation on Israel.”
Very slowly in the weeks since, there has been a modest change of tone among Western politicians and some of the Western press. But it falls far short of Western leaders’ action needed to act to stop the genocide, and the normalization of today’s horror. The stakes are too high for this normalization to go on with false narratives of anti-Semitism and terrorism allowed to hold sway in efforts of government control.
The keys to ending the genocide are known and it is time to stop seeing them as impossible: ending weapon supplies, especially from the US, demand that Israel agree to a permanent ceasefire, open the borders, as Mr. Lazzarini is urging, to UN-administered supplies of food, fuel, medical equipment, drugs and doctors, and allow the gravely ill to leave Gaza with their families for treatment.
In addition, the freeing of all 57 Israeli hostages, alive and dead, and the nearly 10,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israel’s crowded prisons and military bases of torture, like Sde Teiman in the Naqab (Negev) desert, are key demands.
Thirty-seven years ago, in 1988, Noam Chomsky wrote Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, exploring the state propaganda model of communication and control. The book still says it all.
And, there is a sea change in the influence of mainstream media, especially among the young. Many media platforms give a very different, credible version of events.
The old US titles, Counterpunch and Consortium News, have been doing this for decades. Today, the young know many new sources, such as Declassified in the UK, Dropsite, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim, Mondoweiss, the Palestine Chronicle, Middle East Eye, and from Paris, Orient XXI, which breaks language barriers and appears in many languages. The old media dominance is broken.
Actions are stronger than words. Mr. Lazzarini, Cindy H. McCain, head of the World Food Program, Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, Tom Fletcher, UN Under-Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs, Catherine Russell, head of UNICEF, and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres all speak eloquently for Gaza. They speak for civil society across the world, in the name of International Law, for moral leaders like Pope Leo XIV in the name of humanity.
They should go publicly together to Tel Aviv and confront the Israeli Prime Minister, his Cabinet, military leaders, and settler leaders. However, the Israeli government tries to evade the confrontation, the group could spark courage among Western governments who have been complicit in watching the UN disrespected, history twisted, and this genocide brazenly showed to the world.
– Victoria Brittain worked at The Guardian for many years and has lived and worked in Washington, Saigon, Algiers, Nairobi, and reported from many African, Asian and Middle Eastern countries. She is the author of a number of books. She contributed this article to the Palestine Chronicle.
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من القدس المحتلة
This is a long-overdue and excellent article. Some of us have long dreaded what would happen if the New York Times, Washington Post, etc., were allowed to make their lies even more ‘authoritative’ by their presence on the ground in Gaza. Foreign medical personnel already give us an explicitly ‘non-partisan’ view of what they report. There is also the consideration of how long prestigious Western reporters would be willing to breathe the air, drink the water, and live with the absence of food, let along risk the bombings, snipings and other killings by actually being present on the ground in the midst of the genocide. ‘Embedded’ reporters might both fare and report even worse.
https://electronicintifada.net/
https://thecradle.co/
https://www.mintpressnews.com/
https://thegrayzone.com/
https://strategic-culture.su/