Monday 1st of September 2025

mainstream media: how the dove died, NOT WHY fascist israel killed it.....

An investigation by CNN into Israel’s strike on the Nasser Hospital this week – an attack that killed more than 20 people, including emergency workers and five journalists – is a case study in how even well-intentioned journalism, ostensibly examining Israeli crimes, ends up concealing more than it reveals.

CNN’s detailed examination of footage of Monday’s strike on the hospital in Khan Younis found that Israel’s so-called “double-tap” actually involved three missiles.

 

Even the media’s Gaza ‘investigations’ hide the real story of Israel’s atrocities

BY JONATHAN COOK

The atrocity news treadmill makes sure western media are so busy chasing after Israel’s latest crime in Gaza they never pause long enough to piece together the bigger story of genocide

 

The first strike hit a fourth-floor stairwell close to a hospital upper balcony. Then, 10 minutes later, as emergency crews and journalists scrambled to help the victims, a second and third strike hit precisely the same spot.

A munitions expert who examined the footage notes that the second and third missiles were almost certainly fired from two different tanks in very close succession.

As he and CNN conclude, that removes any last trace of doubt on whether the attack on the hospital was, as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims, “a tragic mishap”. Rather, it was a highly coordinated precision strike.

CNN reiterates a further and important contextual point that should obliterate Israel’s subsequent justification for its attack, following what Israel terms an “initial investigation”.

Let us note in passing that the Israeli military is pretending to investigate itself only to dampen the rare furore that has erupted over the strike, chiefly because the new atrocity was caught on camera and killed journalists working for major western news organisations. Israel has abandoned almost all of its previous investigations as soon as the western media could be provided with a fresher atrocity to report on. And Israel seems to have an endless production line of atrocities with which to distract them.

All too predictably, Israel’s “initial investigation” found a “Hamas” excuse.

According to the Israeli military, it hit Nasser Hospital’s stairwell because it had identified a camera there supposedly being used by Hamas.

No ‘mishap’

Even if we take this claim seriously – which, outrageously, is exactly what the western media are doing – it falls apart on even the most cursory inspection.

Not least, the Israeli military was fully aware that this was a favoured spot for Gaza’s journalists, a place where they often congregated.

The high elevation and good cell signal meant that it was ideal for uploading their material and for conducting live broadcasts.

And the location at Nasser Hospital – the last (barely) functioning medical facility in southern Gaza – meant it was certain to be at the centre of the story every time Israel bombed the surrounding area, as it does relentlessly.

Nasser Hospital was the site from which emergency crews were dispatched, and it was the place where Israel’s bloodied victims were brought for treatment.

CNN’s investigation features several photographs and videos of the journalists Israel killed this week working on the balcony and stairwell in the preceding several months. The photo below, by Mohammad Salama, was taken on June 12 and includes two of the journalists Israel killed this week: Mariam Abu Daqqa and Moath Abu Taha.

All of this was known to the Israeli military. When they targeted a “Hamas camera”, they knew that, in reality, that camera was being used by a Reuters journalist, Hussam Al-Masri.

Israel’s ever-present drones, their whine constantly filling the skies over Gaza, had been watching him and other journalists on that stairwell day after day, week after week, for months on end.

And when Israel struck 10 minutes later with two coordinated missiles, it knew that the main victims would be the emergency workers who went to rescue survivors from the first strike and journalists – al-Masri’s friends – who were nearby and rushed to the scene.

Nothing was a “mishap”. It was planned down to the minutest detail.

Reuters smears itself

But here is where we get to the main problem with CNN’s coverage.

In picking apart Israel’s patently bogus claims, the investigation treats those claims with a seriousness they in no way merit. And worse, it ignores the wider context that damns Israel and makes the investigation itself – any investigation – utterly redundant in terms of determining whether a war crime was committed.

On that matter, there can be no debate. And yet, CNN’s investigation takes as its premise the idea that there are two sides to be considered and settled. That the truth has to be determined. That Israel’s case needs to be weighed.

These are the straws that western leaders, and the large contingent of genocide apologists in western professional circles, including journalists, so desperately clutch at.

Because otherwise it would be only too clear that they have been cheerleading – and assisting – a genocide for two years.

The first point is this: An investigation by Israel, or anyone else for that matter, is not needed to establish whether the targeted camera belonged to Hamas. It didn’t because it belonged to Reuters news agency.

The extraordinary contortions made by Reuters to avoid pointing this simple fact out are illustrative of the way media outlets are willing to construct narratives that actually undermine the very thing they are supposed to be engaged in: truth-telling journalism.

Reuters knows the camera position on the stairwell was not being used by Hamas because Reuters was using it for their live feeds. Images of the wrecked camera even show it wired up for broadcast at the time it was hit.

And yet like the rest of the media, Reuters is required to play dumb: it reports Israel’s outright lie that it targeted a “Hamas camera” – and six terrorists alongside it – as if that might be true.

Reuters headline on the story – the only part that most people read – runs: Initial inquiry says Hamas camera was target of Israeli strike that killed journalists.

Notice, Reuters does not even put scare-quote marks around the term “Hamas camera” to alert readers to the fact that this claim should be treated with caution, or better still derision.

Nor does the agency include a comment from one of its senior editorial staff disputing Israel’s claim or presenting its own side of the story.

Astonishingly, Reuters instead colludes in smearing itself by entertaining Israel’s claim that its own live-feed camera was being used by Hamas.

Rather than defend its own journalist, it leaves it up to an Israeli military spokesperson to later conclude that al-Masri, Reuters’ journalist, was not the intended “target” – and thereby, presumably, exonerate him of being a terrorist. If only Reuters had done that first.

But the Israeli spokesperson’s “admission” only deepens the absurdity of Israel’s claims. How was a Reuters camera serving Hamas when it was being operated at the time by a Reuters journalist who was not the target?

Don’t look to Reuters, or CNN, or any of our western media for an answer. The mystery will simply be left to permanently cloud our understanding.

Are the media doing all this in the interests of a self-sabotaging notion of phoney “balance”? Or because the job of Reuters and the rest of the establishment media is to reinforce a western narrative in which Israel is always the good guy, even when it is perpetrating genocidal “mishaps” – and because the journalists these media outlets employ are terrified of incurring the wrath of Israel, and Washington behind it?

If even Reuters behaves this way when its own camera has been recruited by Israel to justify the murder of one of its own journalists, what more can we expect of media like CNN when they “investigate” the story?

These outlets are all so utterly servile to an overarching narrative that promotes the interests of the West and its top military client state in the oil-rich Middle East that they would rather bury the truth than risk taking on the centres of power.

Routine war crimes

Second, even if we accept Israel’s ludicrous claim that it identified a “Hamas camera” at the site, why did it fire two more missiles 10 minutes later?

The Reuters camera was destroyed and the journalist operating it killed in the first hit. Israel knew that because its drones surveilled the site of the attack.

A second round of missiles was entirely unnecessary – if the aim was to take out the camera.

But, of course, that wasn’t the aim. The goal was – as it has been throughout this genocide – to target both the enclave’s medical workers, who are needed to save the lives of those Israel wants to exterminate, and the media workers Israel wishes to kill so there are no witnesses to its Final Solution for the people of Gaza.

A 10-minute delay between strikes was ideal in attracting the very people that are highest on Israel’s list to murder.

The point intentionally lost as CNN and the rest of the media pretend to debate the logistics of the strike is that this is yet another attack by Israel – one of hundreds – on Gaza’s hospitals over the past two years.

And it is just the latest assassination strike against Gaza’s journalists, more than 200 of whom have been killed – an unprecedented death toll.

Intentionally attacking hospitals and killing journalists used to be considered the gravest of war crimes.

Now these attacks are so routine that the latest one on Nasser Hospital is simply the unremarkable backdrop to a story – a preposterous one – about whether there was a secret Hamas camera in a busy stairwell used by journalists. Even to entertain the story as credible, as the western media is doing, is an insult to Gaza’s journalists and to western audience’s intelligence.

Third, shortly after the attack on Nasser Hospital, CNN interviewed Dr Mimi Syed, who revealed that, exceptionally, there had been no foreign doctors or aid workers at Nasser Hospital that day. All of them had been required to attend in person a training session on gender sensitivity at the offices of the World Health Organisation. Attendees have backed up her account.

Even more unusually, even the doctors leaving Gaza the next day, who had no need of the training and tried to be excused, were told they had to attend.

All of this had to be coordinated with an Israeli military liaison body, COGAT, that approves the movement of foreign workers in Gaza if they are to avoid being killed in drone strikes.

Most likely Israel insisted on the pretext for evacuation so it could strike the hospital and kill Palestinian emergency crews and journalists without also harming foreigners and so limit whatever tepid indignation the murder of Palestinian journalists would provoke from the western media.

But at the very minimum, if the pretext for the evacuation was not initiated by Israel, it was Israel that took advantage of an opportunity to strike the hospital when it knew it was going to clear of foreign staff.

Either way, this was no “mishap” – and had nothing to do with a “Hamas camera”.

It was about creating yet another opening to attack a hospital, the last one functioning, just barely, in its area. It was about killing yet more of Gaza’s medical workers and journalists. And it was about further normalising the war crimes needed to advance the genocide to its horrifying end.

And yet this part of the story, perhaps the most crucial in understanding what went on, is not included in CNN’s “investigation” at all, even though it was CNN that conducted the earlier interview in which Dr Syed made her revelation.

You might imagine that CNN and other outlets – were they really interested in getting to the truth – are all over this incriminating testimony. And yet this part of an “investigation” has not been pursued. Extraordinarily, it is all but impossible to find mention of itin coverage of the strike.

On the news treadmill

The facts that CNN and other western media are duty bound to ignore in their news “investigations” are the very facts that are most glaring, most unmistakeable.

That Israel has been systematically destroying the enclave’s hospitals to bring to a hastier close the genocide of Gaza’s people as they are bombed, displaced and starved to death; and that Israel has been assassinating Gaza’s journalists – our chief witnesses to the crime – to add a layer of “plausible deniability” to its genocidal ambitions.

The media’s “investigations” raise but never answer the question of whether Israel is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, even though the answers are staring us in the face. Before we get an answer, Israel is busy with the next atrocity and the restless media busy chasing after fresh answers on the relentless news treadmill.

The truth lies not in the details CNN, Reuters or any other news outlet briefly pore over before pursuing the next “news event”. There is a bigger picture all that frenetic activity is designed to distract from. Journalists and their audiences can study the trees, but they must never be allowed to stand back and see the wood.

Israel was emboldened to kill five journalists at Nasser Hospital this week because the western political and media class meekly swallowed Israel’s patent lies two weeks earlier when Israel killed six journalists in Gaza City, claiming one of them was a terrorist.

No one should be surprised when Israel executes another handful of journalists next week or the week after.

But doubtless there will continue to be media “investigations”. Journalists will show they are on the case – even as hospitals keep getting attacked, journalists keep being assassinated, children keep dying of starvation, and an unremarked genocide unfolds to the bitterest of conclusions.

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JONATHAN COOK

 

https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2025-08-29/media-gaza-investigations-atrocities/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

stop bibi!....

Maryam was my friend. Israel killed her and four other Gaza journalists
After the airstrike on Nasser Hospital, our plea is ever more urgent: Palestinian reporters need international protection now, or Gaza's voice will be silenced.

By Ruwaida Amer August 27, 2025

 

Maryam Abu Daqqa was my friend. She was a photojournalist and a mother. On Monday, she was killed by the Israeli army in a “double tap” attack on Nasser Hospital, along with four other journalists. She was 32 years old.

I first met Maryam in 2015 during a photography course in the Italian center in Gaza City, where she was one of the trainees. I was drawn to her energy. I remember thinking how quickly she spoke, as if she had more ideas than time to express them.

She came from Abasan, east of Khan Younis, an agricultural town famous for its fruits, vegetables, and delicious cuisine. Whenever I reported on farming there, I knew I could turn to her. She was always ready to help, and her photos of the village and its people never failed to inspire me.

At first, I didn’t know that Maryam was a mother. One day before the war, while I was working in Abasan, I heard a boy call out to her: “Mom!” I was surprised. She laughed and introduced me to her son. “This is Ghaith,” she said proudly. “He is my man, and he will protect me when he grows up.” She told me all of her work was for him.

Since the war began, I had seen Maryam many times in the field. We always greeted each other and made sure we were both okay, but we didn’t speak much.  We were always tired and stressed. The only moments we had to truly catch up were at hospitals in Khan Younis, where she often came to report.

I remember meeting her during Israel’s May 2024 offensive on Rafah. My cameraman was forced to flee north to Deir al-Balah, leaving me to film alone on my phone. Maryam appeared in the ICU at the European Hospital, where I was interviewing an American doctor. Seeing me struggle with my camera, she immediately helped me adjust the settings and offered a few tips. She looked exhausted, and could hardly walk. It was a side of her I wasn’t used to seeing.

Before she left, I hugged her and asked her to be careful. I was scared for her; I knew she had been working in the dangerous eastern areas of Khan Younis only weeks earlier. The last time I saw her was in April, at Nasser Hospital — the very place where, months later, she would be killed by the Israeli army.

On the day Maryam was killed along with 19 others in the attack on the hospital, I was nearby with my family in Khan Younis refugee camp. A deafening blast shook the ground. My mother suggested it might have been a house that was hit, but when I finally found an internet signal and checked the news, the truth became clear. The grief and disbelief were overwhelming.

I thought of her son, Ghaith, the boy she once called her protector, who she cared for so much. I thought of her father, to whom she had donated a kidney to save his life. I thought of my friend; bold, adventurous, always caring for others.

No words can capture what we feel

Since October 2023, Israel has killed at least 230 journalists in the Gaza Strip — more journalists than were killed worldwide in the previous three years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. In the past month alone, 11 Gazan journalists have been killed in Israeli strikes, Maryam among them.  

On August 10, five journalists were killed when the Israeli army targeted a journalists’ tent just outside al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. That day, as I scrolled through my phone for any news of a ceasefire, messages began to arrive from colleagues abroad checking on me, asking if I was okay. Alarmed, I turned to the news groups, which were flooded with initial reports of the attack. 

Among the six names mentioned, one caught me: Anas Al-Sharif. I was not a close friend of Anas, having spoken to him only a few times about news coming from northern Gaza, but I felt that I knew him well through watching his reports. 

Though he had been an on-screen reporter for less than two years, Anas’ presence had left an indelible mark. A 28-year-old husband and father of two, Anas roamed tirelessly through northern Gaza, capturing the voices of residents and documenting the unfolding genocide with unflinching honesty. Even after losing his father to an Israeli airstrike in December 2023, he refused to abandon the mission of telling the truth while enduring the same deprivation as his neighbors.

Indeed, every journalist in Gaza over the past two years has faced hunger, displacement, and the loss of their homes and family members,  all while trying to relay Gaza’s raw reality to the world. I too have spent long hours in the streets without shelter. My sick mother, still struggling to recover from spinal surgery, walks beside me and my sister as we search for somewhere, anywhere, to take refuge.

I love my job as a journalist, along with my work as a teacher, yet I am devastated and terrified. It’s been more than 680 days of continuous work, with constant internet outages, no proper electricity, no safe shelter, and no transportation. I’ve continued to report since the beginning of the war because I believe in its mission, but I do it knowing that every day could very well be my last. No words can capture what we feel as journalists with the successive loss of colleagues.

Why is Israel targeting Palestinian journalists in Gaza? Simple. We are the only ones able to document and transmit what is actually happening on the ground. Every image, every testimony, every broadcast we produce pierces through the wall of Israel’s official narrative. That makes us dangerous: by recording the displacement, the starvation, and the relentless bombardment, we expose Israel’s actions to the world.

And so, we are deliberately attacked. Cameras are treated as weapons, and those who hold them as combatants. Our very presence threatens Israel’s ability to sustain its genocidal path — which is why it is doing everything it can to snuff us out.

A desperate need for protection

Earlier this month, after two years of pressure by international press bodies, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel would allow foreign journalists to enter Gaza in order to witness “Israel’s humanitarian efforts” and “civilian protests against Hamas.” With no details or timeline, it’s hard not to see this as yet another lie. But even if the international press was allowed free and unfettered access to the Strip, what good would it be if Palestinian journalists in Gaza remain unprotected?

We are tired of working continuously for two years without rest or safety, inhabiting a constant state of anxiety about being killed at any time. And while we demand that our international colleagues enter Gaza to convey its brutal reality to the world, we know their reporting will not differ from what we have already documented.

When a CNN journalist accompanied a Jordanian plane dropping aid over Gaza this month, and saw the enclave from the plane’s window, he described a “sweeping view of what two years of Israeli bombardment has done … utter devastation across vast areas of the Gaza Strip, a shocking desert of ruins.” This is what we have been saying from the ground for almost two years: Israel’s destruction of Gaza is massive, and it will only continue without an end to the war.

When I was 9 years old, my house in the Khan Younis refugee camp was destroyed by an Israeli bulldozer. That image did not leave my mind. And when I saw journalists working to convey what happened to my home to the world, I decided I wanted to become one, too.

I believe that journalists have immense value, but in Gaza, they are killed in front of the world and no one takes action. We fear losing more of our colleagues, and we desperately need international protection — before Israel succeeds in silencing Gaza’s voice.


Ruwaida Amer is a freelance journalist from Khan Younis.

https://www.972mag.com/maryam-abu-daqqa-gaza-journalists/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.