Western media ignores Israeli confirmation of Hannibal Directive on 7 Oct

BE'ERI, ISRAEL - OCTOBER 13: A swing is left intact while most of the Gat house is left in ruins. (Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images)

Despite a major Israeli daily confirming that the army killed many of its own soldiers and civilians on October 7, corporate news outlets have chosen to stay silent

by News Desk, reposted from The Cradle, July 11, 2024

Major western media outlets have remained silent days after Israel’s leading newspaper Haaretz confirmed that army commanders directed troops to kill their own soldiers and civilians on October 7, turning the Gaza border area into an “extermination zone.”

A search of reports on the Israeli investigation in outlets like CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, BBC, Reuters, AP, the Wall Street Journal, NBC News, and others yielded no results.

The only major English-language outlets that have reported on the news are The Guardian and The Independent. However, both seemingly attempt to downplay the revelations with headlines that say the Israeli army “may have risked civilian lives” by invoking its “controversial” procedure known as the Hannibal Directive.

In contrast, most of these outlets repeatedly spread misinformation in the wake of the October 7 Palestinian resistance operation, including discredited claims of Hamas fighters “raping” Israeli women or the existence of “beheaded babies,” a false claim that US President Joe Biden even repeated.

“[The]comprehensive Haaretz investigation should have prompted a reaction from the mainstream US reporters who are stationed in Israel. American journalists should have been cultivating their own sources since October 7 and been ready to at least match the Haaretz article. Instead, the only response so far has been a panel hosted by Piers Morgan, and a Mehdi Hasan/Bassem Youssef podcast,” Mondoweiss columnist James North wrote earlier this week.

Reporting on the latest confirmation of Israel killing its own on October 7 has fallen mainly on the shoulders of alternative media outlets, including Middle East Monitor, People’s Dispatch, Middle East Eye, and Truthout, among others.

Since late October, The Cradle has also regularly reported on new pieces of evidence that show an unknown number of Israel’s October 7 death toll falls at the feet of their own army.

Besides staying silent about the major revelations of a day that the US president compared to “15 9/11s,” recent studies show that western corporate outlets regularly devalue the lives of Palestinians.

According to a study of coverage in major US newspapers of the Gaza genocide, for every two Palestinian deaths, Palestinians are mentioned once. Meanwhile, for every Israeli death, Israelis are mentioned eight times – a rate 16 times more per death than that of Palestinians.

Furthermore, emotive terms for the killing of civilians, like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific,” are used exclusively for Israelis. In particular, the term “slaughter” was used by major western outlets to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians at a 60-to-1 ratio, and “massacre” was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125-to-2.

An analysis of BBC coverage conducted late last year found a similar disparity. It determined that humanizing terms such as “mother” or “husband” were used far less often to describe Palestinians. In contrast, emotive words such as “massacre” or “slaughter’” were almost only ever applied to the Israeli victims of Hamas.

An explicit example of dehumanization came earlier this year when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a piece titled “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom.” In it, Friedman likens nations in West Asia to various insects while equating the US to a “lion.” “Sometimes I contemplate the Middle East by watching CNN. Other times, I prefer Animal Planet,” Friedman concludes.

News Desk offers the latest news and analysis on Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iran and more. The Cradle is an online news magazine covering the geopolitics of West Asia from within the region.

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