The HAMAS Case

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REPORT ON HAMAS AND THE POST 7 OCTOBER 2023 PROPAGANDA

CONFLATING IT WITH TRANSNATIONAL TERRORISM¹

BY

ROBERT INLAKESH²

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A. INTRODUCTION

I have been instructed by Riverway Law to provide a report on matters within my expertise in support of the application to the British Home Secretary to deproscribe Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah (‘Hamas’).

The purpose of this report is to demonstrate how deliberately false narratives about Hamas and the 7 October 2023 operation recklessly propagated by Western media have played an enabling role in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and are fundamentally undermining efforts to bring about a just and lasting peace in the region.

B. QUALIFICATIONS

I have authored this report in my personal capacity.

I am a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker specializing in Middle Eastern affairs, with a particular focus on Palestine. My work encompasses on-the-ground reporting, in-depth analysis, and documentary production, providing nuanced insights into the complexities of the region.

I have lived in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and provided firsthand accounts of the situation on the ground. I have authored numerous article for The Palestine Chronicle, Middle East Eye, the Cradle, and the Middle East Monitor amongst others. I also directed the documentary, “Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe” which critiques the US administration’s policies towards Israel and Palestine.

C. INTRODUCTION

By considering Hamas a terrorist organization, similar to how the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was considered as such until the late 1980’s, the United Kingdom and its Western allied governments are losing out on a historic opportunity to bring about a path to peace and instead are pushing the Middle East towards regional paroxysm.

The UK and its allies in the United States have consistently upheld that “Hamas must be eliminated,”³ or that it cannot be allowed to remain in power in Gaza following any potential ceasefire. This was followed up through rejecting draft resolutions presented at the UN Security Council calling for a ceasefire in Gaza on the basis that Israel has a right to dismantle all the Palestinian armed movements there.

The United States and UK governments uphold the attack of October 7 to be a testament to the terroristic nature of the Hamas leadership, but Israel’s disproportionate response that has resulted in a tragedy of much greater proportions is scarcely worthy of criticism in circles of Western power. In fact, the UK, US, and many EU states have given the Israeli military a carte blanche to displace millions of Palestinians, kill and injure over one hundred thousand while initially blocking all humanitarian aid for weeks and later letting in a trickle of the aid needed. With every hour that passes, the crimes unfolding inside the Gaza Strip make it more and more likely that the war will escalate on multiple fronts, perhaps dragging in the entire region to everyone’s detriment. This is why it is time to take a critical look at what history tells us about today and how we can move forward toward peace.

This report will be divided between separate segments, each of which focuses on mischaracterizations of Hamas that appear across the media. It is important in the pursuit of peace, democracy and the overall reduction of hateful narratives that often reflect negatively on minority groups in the United Kingdom that identify with the Palestinian struggle for Statehood, that a sober view be taken. This is especially important at times of heightened conflict.

D. THE OCTOBER 7 ATTACK AND ITS APPLICATION TO UNDERSTANDING HAMAS

The argument that the Hamas-led October 7 attack justifies labelling the Hamas movement as a terrorist organization, thus breaking off all communications with it and refusing to allow it to function within the fold of Palestinian domestic politics, is fundamentally flawed.

To begin with, the United Kingdom proscribed Hamas as a terrorist organization - in its totality - in November of 2021. This, in and of itself, is an admission that history did not begin on October 7, 2023.

If we look at the examples given on the UK government website of the kinds of acts the organization commits, the most egregious are detailed below:

“Hamas commits and participates in terrorism. Hamas has used indiscriminate rocket or mortar attacks, and raids against Israeli targets. During the May 2021 conflict, over 4,000 rockets were fired indiscriminately into Israel. Civilians, including 2 Israeli children, were killed as a result. Palestinian militant groups, including Hamas, frequently use incendiary balloons to launch attacks from Gaza into southern Israel. There was a spate of incendiary balloon attacks from Gaza during June and July 2021, causing fires in communities in southern Israel that resulted in serious damage to property.”

Looking at these actions in isolation falls into the category of de-contextualization. Omitted from the picture are a litany of copiously documented human rights violations committed by Israel, its ongoing decades-long occupation – that is now unquestionably considered to be illegal as per the recent ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – and the unequal balance of power.

While the purpose of pointing this out could be interpreted as an attempt to excuse potential crimes committed by Palestinians, it is rather the opposite. It is to revive the context, challenging the artificially constructed narrow confines under which the issue is generally interrogated by the media in the UK and subsequently in circles of British power.

If the potential violations of international law committed by Hamas, during the 11-day battle between Gaza and Israel in May of 2021, or on October 7 of 2023, are to be considered as acts rendering the Palestinian movement a terrorist group, then the violence committed by Israel’s security forces must then also render it a violent and irrational actor. Arguing that the side which has committed comparably few potential violations of international law, in the face of Israel’s actions, would be enforcing a double-standard.

The media coverage of the October 7 death toll and attempts to justify the much greater violence that Israel has committed undoubtedly contribute to the fundamentally flawed understanding of Hamas’ violent actions.

On October 7, it was quickly reported⁴ that at least 413 Palestinians were killed in Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip. However, the Israeli death toll underwent several revisions before an accurate figure emerged. Initially, the Israeli government stated that 1,400 Israelis had been killed. On November 10, 2023, this number was revised⁵ down to “around 1,200,” with officials attributing the discrepancy to difficulties in differentiating between Israeli and Palestinian bodies due to severe burns.

The final Israeli death toll from the October 7 attack stands at 1,139⁶, including 815 civilians and 324 soldiers, police, or security officers. This would suggest a civilian-to-combatant ratio of roughly 3.5:1, assuming all deaths were caused by Palestinian attackers.

Other accepted statistical breakdowns report 695⁷ civilian deaths and 373 combatants, along with 71 foreigners. This highlights the ongoing debate over who should be classified as a civilian, as many off-duty soldiers and trained fighters took up arms during the attack, shifting their status from civilians to combatants.

According to a March 25 article⁸ written for Newsweek by John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point, “Israel has created a new standard for urban warfare” in its war on Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later cited Spencer’s article during his speech⁹ to the US Congress in July.

Spencer’s argument is flawed, as he relies on Israeli ratio claims that don’t hold up when examining the official death toll in Gaza, particularly when accounting for the women and children killed. Spencer references the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul in Iraq to justify what he deems an acceptable civilian-to-combatant ratio in US wars, highlighting a 4:1 ratio where 10,000 civilians were killed for every 2,000 ISIS fighters.

Using this military logic and assuming Hamas was responsible for every Israeli death on October 7, they achieved a more favorable civilian-to-combatant kill ratio than the US did in Mosul. Notably, this was accomplished without the use of modern precision weapons.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has even come forth and argued that if you take into consideration population sizes between the US and Israel, the October 7 attack was like “20 9/11’s in one day”. Well, according to the updated statistics, it would be more like 13 9/11’s in one day if we accept this argument; making death tolls proportionate to population sizes. However, two can play that game, if we then look at the Gaza death toll of 413 killed in the first day of the war in Gaza, then this would be like 21 9/11’s in one day. In fact, if we use the same metrics and compare the death toll in Gaza that day, proportionate to Israel’s population size, it would come out to around 1,652. So, using this kind of logic, Palestinians in Gaza suffered a more devastating blow – in terms of death toll – than Israel did on October 7, 2023.

Although these comparisons and arguments may deviate from the core issue and are not an appropriate way to assess the events between Gaza and Israel, it is crucial to understand the flawed logic behind the Israeli narrative about October 7 – which is routinely accepted and not challenged in the media.

E. HAMAS THEN AND NOW

The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) was originally founded in late 1987, following the eruption of the first Palestinian Intifada; a mass non-violent uprising across the occupied Palestinian territories. In its foundation, Hamas had essentially grown from a socially focused Islamic movement, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which was named the ‘Mujamma Islamiyya’ and was at first opposed to armed rebellion in the occupied territory, seeking instead to build up the Islamic civil society sector and to spread their Islamic ideology through deeds and education.

In the late 1970s and early to mid 1980s, the Mujamma Islamiyya was in opposition – on the question of armed struggle – to what is the second most powerful armed movement in Gaza today; Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). While the PIJ movement, headed by its secretary general Fathi Shiqaqi, was convinced that the only viable option was an armed struggle, the leaders of the Mujamma Islamiyya argued that the time for this option was not upon the Palestinians. With the eruption of the Intifada, the visions of those who would become the Hamas leadership, namely the likes of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, dramatically changed. It is important to note the early competition between the ideologies of the Mujamma and PIJ, as they help distinguish Hamas as a party that is rooted in civil society and is, in essence, a political movement that is involved in the military sphere due to necessity, as opposed to PIJ, which is a military movement involved in the political sphere.

Often today, the original Hamas charter is heavily quoted as proof that the political party’s nature is of a group solely dedicated to the eradication of Jews from Palestine, yet this discounts changes and the examples of pragmatism within the movement since 1988; when the original charter was published. Added to this is the fact that leaders within Hamas voiced disagreements with the initial charter’s spirit. In a Guardian interview published in September of 1988 with the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, he is quoted as saying, “The best solution is to let all – Christians, Jews and Muslims – live in Palestine, in an Islamic state.” Although it is clear that this statement expresses the desire to end the Israeli State, this is a far cry from the conventionally accepted idea that Hamas is completely committed to the expulsion or murder of every Jewish person living in Palestine.

In fact, in 2017, Hamas adopted a new charter for its party¹⁰, one which condemns antisemitism as a European phenomenon, as well as accepting – in theory – the idea of a two-state settlement along the 1967 borders, in accordance with UN resolution 242. The new Hamas charter explicitly states that it is a “Palestinian Islamic national liberation and resistance movement”, indicating that it is solely focused on reclaiming Palestinian territory, differentiating it from other proscribed groups like ISIS which seek to eradicate all modern states and create a worldwide system of tyrannical rule. Although Israel has gone to great lengths to link Hamas and ISIS, these two movements could not be more different.

F. HAMAS AND THE WEST

In 2006, Hamas won a landslide victory in the Palestinian National Authority legislative elections, beating its secular-nationalist opposition of the Fatah Party. Yet, despite the evolution within Hamas, which led to it running in a fair and democratic election, the Palestinian party was never given a chance to prove itself as a government in the occupied territory. Instead, the US, EU and Israel rejected the results of the democratic elections and imposed economic sanctions on the Hamas government. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who had personally monitored the elections, argued against Washington’s approach, stating the following:

“If you sponsor an election or promote democracy and freedom around the world, then when people make their own decision about their leaders, I think that all the governments should recognize that administration and let them form their government,” he said of the US-EU approach to Hamas.

Instead of listening to cooler heads, like Jimmy Carter, who had argued that the American government should “give Hamas a chance,” the very opposite approach was taken. The Bush administration had planned what Vanity Fair called ‘Iran Contra 2.0’, whereby the American government had implemented a secret initiative to remove the Hamas government in Gaza through a coup d’etat. The plan, which was spearheaded on the Palestinian side by the Fatah party’s Mohammed Dahlan – the former Palestinian Authority (PA) preventative security head – was preempted by Hamas in Gaza, leading to a Hamas takeover of the coastal enclave in 2007. Another disastrous outcome of the US plot was that a violent civil war erupted between Hamas and Fatah in the occupied Palestinian territory.

Following this, the Israeli government imposed a comprehensive siege on the Gaza Strip, which was followed by successive military operations, the most notable coming in 2008/9, 2012, and 2014, all of which were fully backed by the US government. Also, most of the first line of the Hamas leadership, who had started the movement back in 1987, were assassinated in indiscriminate bombing attacks on densely populated neighborhoods in Gaza; Ahmed Yassin, Saleh Shehadeh, and Abdel-Aziz Rantisi to name a few. Over time, Hamas and their political rivals in Fatah – which had continued to receive financing from the U.S. to maintain limited control over the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank – tried to reach an agreement at forming a unity government, coming close in 2014, prior to Israel launching an attack on the Gaza Strip that year.

Since 2006, there have been no democratic national elections in Palestine, and the US and UK governments have not taken tangible action to reach such an outcome. This has led to a situation on the ground where there is no unified Palestinian leadership and hence makes it more difficult to reach any diplomatic solution to the conflict. In addition to this, the US continues its economic sanctions against the Hamas government in Gaza and considers nearly every single Palestinian political party/movement/group to be a terrorist organization, with the exception of the mainstream branch of Fatah.

Palestinians have not been allowed to practice democracy because every major political alternative to the Palestinian Authority is considered in the West to be a terrorist organization, and hence they will not be accepted as legitimate “peace partners.” This means that the Palestinian people do not have the option of voting for any other party, whether they be secular-nationalists, socialists, or Islamic parties. They have not had any say on their fate, which has almost entirely been dictated by the Israeli government and US-UK-EU decision-makers, along with those giving aid handouts.

G. HAMAS AS A POLITICAL ACTOR

It is not necessary that people agree with the tactics employed by the Hamas armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, but it is certainly important to understand what led up to the offensive on October 7. The context is important to understanding why it made sense, strategically and politically, for the Palestinian movement.

As noted above, the Gaza Strip has been under a brutal and comprehensive siege for over 17 years. This has created a situation where roughly 2.2 million people have been forced to live with one of the highest unemployment rates in the world while living in near unlivable conditions, for example, Gaza’s water supply is roughly 97% unfit for human consumption. It is also a majority child population, with over half of the besieged coastal enclave’s inhabitants being under the age of 18. The blockade has robbed Hamas of the ability to function as a proper government in many respects; as the bare minimum required to provide for the people of Gaza is simply not there.

Since the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was internally elected to power in 2017 as the Gazan leader of the movement, Hamas had tried a number of strategies attempting to find a solution for the suffering people under their rule. In 2017, Hamas nearly implemented a deal with their Fatah rivals that control the PA in the West Bank, the deal entailed handing over full civilian control of Gaza to the Fatah-run PA, in return for securing an easing of the economic blockade. This initiative eventually fell through however, at a time when Hamas was suffering economically as a governing force.

The following year, in 2018, Hamas temporarily adopted an approach employed by the Palestinian Authority, supporting non-violent resistance against the Israeli occupation in an attempt to lift the blockade in accordance with calls from the United Nations. The Great March of Return, which began on March 30, 2018, was an overwhelmingly non-violent, mass demonstrator movement that lasted over a year and gained the full support of Hamas. The response from the Israeli military was to commit weekly massacres against these unarmed civilians. Hundreds of Palestinians were shot dead, while tens of thousands were injured, as Israeli snipers directly targeted women, children, the elderly, journalists, medical workers, and people with disabilities. During this time, the US government continued its one-sided support of Israel and recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel that same year.

Then in early 2021, PA President Mahmoud Abbas announced that he would be holding the first Palestinian national elections in 15 years. Hamas, along with all other political parties in Palestine, prepared themselves for the elections, which were later canceled by Abbas. And yet, Israeli provocations continued to escalate.

Later in 2021, after Israeli occupation forces repeatedly entered Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, assaulting worshippers throughout the Holy Month of Ramadan, Hamas issued a threat to the Israeli government, calling on them to cancel a march that was organized by extremist settler groups, which they said was to defend to the Palestinian people. The Israeli authorities chose to assault worshippers inside Al-Aqsamosque once again, while occupied East Jerusalem erupted into chaos and riots. Finally, on May 10, Hamas opened fire and declared the battle of the “Sword of Jerusalem’. After 11 days of war, Hamas openly announced that they were preparing for a greater war, which would come in response to further attacks at Al-Aqsa Mosque. In many ways, this set the stage for “Operation Al Aqsa Flood” in October 2023.

Non-violent struggle was ignored, Palestinian reconciliation failed, elections were canceled, and Israeli provocations continued to escalate. What this quick recounting makes clear is that Hamas is not ISIS, it is a Palestinian political party, one that non-Western powers like Russia, Türkiye, and China will openly engage with. It is only the Western world that takes such a one-sided and hardline approach against Hamas. This approach has clearly not worked and has only resulted in the eruption of horrifying bloodshed. For this predicament to change, Hamas must be approached seriously as a political entity.

Eliminating Hamas is not possible,and attempting to do this will only escalate tensions. So, just like the US, EU and UK were able to drop its rhetoric about the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) being a terrorist group, so too must it drop its current stance against Hamas. This doesn’t mean it has to ally itself with them, but it must engage with them politically. The leadership of Hamas has consistently proclaimed to be open to such a dialogue, and that time should be now. It is only arrogance and a complete disregard for the facts on the ground and human suffering that leads Washington, London and Brussels to refuse to engage with Hamas seriously.

H. AN ORIENTALIST VIEW OF HAMAS AND ITS DESTRUCTIVE OUTCOMES

On May 7, 2024, U.S. President Joe Biden stated¹¹ that Hamas had carried out the October 7 attack against Israel, “driven by ancient desire to wipeout the Jewish people off the face of the Earth”. The American President’s remarks portray the Palestinian people as having been born with a genetically inherited propensity towards committing violence against Jewish people.

This is the conclusion that countless Israeli soldiers have arrived at and expressed publicly.¹² This notion is also naturally drawn by consumers of media which employs biased language, and orientalist depictions of Palestinians and devoids the current conflict of its context. Unfortunately, Hamas is also often conflated with the entire population of Palestinians in Gaza too, which is evidenced through some of the rhetoric espoused by Joe Biden.

While Israel stands plausibly accused of genocide at the World Court and its Prime Minister has an outstanding ICC war crimes arrest-warrant, little attention has been directed towards the media’s culpability for the ongoing crimes against humanity we see in Gaza.

The official death toll in Gaza is set at over 46,000, while some estimates project that up to 300,000¹³ could have actually been killed and that the lower estimates are down to the inability to properly account for the dead. Either way, mass murder is ongoing in Gaza at a rate that surpasses the civilian death toll inflicted during the worst years of the Daesh/ISIS scourge¹⁴ on Iraq.

Despite the avalanche of human rights reports, along with every organ of the United Nations and even the International Criminal Court, all providing expert opinions that accuse Israel of carrying out unprecedented war crimes, the Western corporate media still manages to obscure reality. Little focus has been placed upon the way the media’s biased language and uncritical adoption of blatant propaganda, has influenced how we perceive the situation on the ground and the justifications made for Israel’s continuation of the war.

Examples from Israeli soldiers' interpretations of the situation serve as powerful examples as to how the media narratives regarding Hamas and Gaza motivate them. It must then be kept in mind the kinds of conclusions that are also likely to be drawn from the media coverage in the West.

Take for example Israeli Major. Avinoam Goelman, a Commander in the 98th Division, who described himself as a “liberal” who had changed his mind on the idea of “peace” after the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023. On October 10, 2023, he writes the following:

“As time passes, the full extent of the horror and pogrom carried out by the cursed beasts from Gaza becomes clear. Rape of women, murder, looting, torture, humiliations, and abuse of babies, the elderly, and soldiers—a true Holocaust. No less. The city of Gaza, with all its residents, must be destroyed. Whoever wants to flee and save their miserable life should flee to Egypt. But the city of Gaza, with all its buildings, must be erased from existence. A city of Sodom that has no right to exist. The Hamas organization and all its people should be destroyed and lost and killed. A prey animal of the lowest kind has no right to exist.”¹⁵

That same day is when the “40 beheaded babies” hoax was spread uncritically across Western corporate media. Fox News ran the headline “At least 40 babies, some beheaded, found by Israel soldiers in Hamas-attacked village”; while Canada’s National Post published an article entitled “Hamas terrorists murdered as many as 40 babies in village attack: IDF soldiers”¹⁶; CNN published its own 40 beheaded babies piece that read “Children found ‘butchered’ in Israeli kibbutz, IDF says, as horror of Hamas’ attacks near border begins to emerge”.¹⁷

While the actual death toll statistics prove that one Israeli baby was directly killed due to crossfire on October 7, none died at Kibbutz Kfar Aza as was reported across corporate media. Yet, the media still churned out headlines about the 40 butchered babies, despite the fact that the Israeli army had told Turkiye’s Anadolu Agency, on October 10, that they couldn’t confirm the beheaded babies claims.¹⁸

The first media outlet to run with the story was Israel’s I24News, with the source being an extremist Israeli settler named David Ben Zion, who was quoted by the BBC as saying Hamas gunmen were “just a jihad machine to kill everybody, [people] without weapons, without nothing, just normal citizens that want to take their breakfast and that's all.”¹⁹

None of these media outlets bothered to do a basic Google search, which would have revealed the “Israeli soldier” they quoted as an authority, to be an extremist who had helped incite an anti-Palestinian pogrom²⁰ in the West Bank and called for the town to be “wiped out”. The 40 beheaded babies story was then “confirmed” on air by a CNN reporter, who later had to retract her statement.

October 10 was the same day when The Atlantic published an article entitled “Understanding Hamas’s Genocidal Ideology”.²¹ MSNBC also ran a story that day entitled “Israeli official confirms women were raped during Hamas attack”.²² The very next day, The Forward ran a piece in which they quoted the Israeli military as stating they didn’t yet have any evidence of rape.²³

Furthermore, Palestinian women from the West Bank who suffered threats of sexual violence and were abused by Israeli forces provided testimony to Israel’s top rights group B’Tselem, many with similar stories. Take the example of 47-year-old Lama al-Fakhouri²⁴, who provided the following testimony after her release from Israeli jail in late October, 2023:

“An interrogator came in and asked me in English what I thought about what Hamas did. He swore at me and called me a 'whore.' He said there were 20 soldiers in the room and that they would rape me like Hamas–ISIS raped Jewish women in southern Israel. He kept swearing at me and threatening me and my family. Then, a female soldier came and took me to another room with more female soldiers, who told me: 'Welcome to hell.' They sat me in a chair and started laughing at me and calling me 'whore’ again and again.”

On top of this, media pundits were repeating the mantra that the Hamas attack was the “deadliest day” and “worst slaughter” of Jewish people “since the Holocaust”²⁵, clearly attempting to link the Hamas attack to the Nazi genocide of Jews during the Second World War. The message here was clear: Hamas are the Nazis, they are Jihadist²⁶ “barbarians”²⁷ and “savages”²⁸ who butcher babies and rape women, they are on the verge of committing a holocaust.

These claims were spread completely uncritically in Western corporate media and, at a time when the most egregious allegations couldn’t possibly be confirmed or were already being called into question, whipped up an unprecedented amount of hysteria and hate. Happening in tandem with the media coverage, were statements from the likes of U.S. President, Joe Biden, falsely claiming²⁹ to have seen confirmed images of beheaded children.

When you then look at the radical statements from Israeli soldiers, the narrative is often the same as the Western media's reporting. Take Captain. Elad Gabianm, of the Carmeli brigade, who said³⁰ on October 11 (2023) - about Palestinians in Gaza that “They need to be exterminated along with their families down to the last one. To clarify, their children also need to die; they suck this evil from the breasts of their pig mothers and will pass this evil on to their children as well.”

Gabianm justifies his genocidal rhetoric, stating that he isn’t surprised that “there are Arabs who are essentially continuing the ways of the Nazis”, referring to the developing news about the October 7 attack.

Senior Israeli commander, Lt. Colonel Yair Maen of the 252nd Division, who was appointed to help oversee Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, openly bragged about blowing up civilian infrastructure on social media. Maen also revealed that Israel’s Oz and Nir Operation³¹ against Gaza’s city of Khan Younis, had included the aim of completely wiping out the town of Khirbet Khuza'a as an act of revenge. He explained his motivations on November 19, in a social media post:

“An overwhelming majority of the so called innocent civilians of Gaza and the West Bank support the pogrom of October 7th: the slaughter of babies, beheadings, shooting pregnant women, murdering women and babies, killing the elderly and children, burning people alive, raping women and girls, and then murdering them and kidnapping the elderly to Gaza—all with smiles and joy. Zero humanity. And this is what the majority of Palestinian residents in Gaza and Judea and Samaria support. We will never forget and never forgive the cursed murderers and their people who support their heinous acts. Am Yisrael Chai.”³²

Even the media’s false reporting on the Israeli death toll is relevant to the narrative that Israeli soldiers who are fighting in Gaza have cited as their reason for wanting to leave “no innocents in the strip and the total expulsion of its citizens”. For some time, the Israeli death toll was set at 1,400 Israelis killed on October 7 (2023), until Israel revised it to 1,200³³ in November of 2023.

AFP later provided a breakdown of the final death toll³⁴, using Israeli social security data, revealing that 695 Israeli civilians, 373 combatants, and 71 foreigners were killed, giving a total of 1,139. Yet, even after the figure was revised down, popular British media commentators/hosts like Piers Morgan continued to use the outdated figure, even inflating the number to “fifteen-hundred innocent people”.³⁵

“They killed 1,500 people,”³⁶ was exactly what Senior Israeli Commander, Lt. Colonel Sheila Granevich from the Kiryati Brigade, used to justify his calls for completely expelling the entire civilian population from Gaza. “Even if it takes three years, Israeli citizens will no longer live a few hundred meters from bloodthirsty Nazis. That's how it is. And in such a reality, it makes no sense to leave innocents in Gaza, assuming there are such” Granevich said on October 18.

While the dissemination of false allegations – often combined with loaded language – throughout Western corporate media during the initial months of the war is clear, it is important to also point out the disparity in the way Israeli and Palestinian suffering was covered. This is especially the case as many Israeli soldiers who have fought in Gaza had signed up and traveled from Western nations in order to serve in Israel’s war. In other words, the media coverage there could well have directly impacted their opinions on the issue.

Research published on the reporting of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, revealed that – between October 7 and October 22³⁷ (2023) – these outlets mentioned Israeli deaths more than Palestinian ones, despite the Gaza death toll being much higher on every day after the first.

Another research analysis, which was published by Dana Najjar and Jan Lietava, reviewed 600 articles and 4,000 live feed posts on the BBC website between October 7, 2023, and December 2, 2023. It specifically looked at the language employed to describe Israeli and Palestinian victims, with the research revealing that humanizing language was scarcely employed to describe Palestinians³⁸, while there was an abundance of such words used to describe Israelis.

Media bias festers in the language employed by different outlets through selective choices of stories and the regurgitation of false allegations or claims made by partisan sources, it also manifests itself more blatantly in the treatment of guests on broadcast media.

Perhaps the most egregious case of mistreatment came in the case of Palestinian journalist Wafa al-Udaini, who was murdered on September 30 by an Israeli airstrike on her secondary residence in Deir al-Balah. Wafa was murdered alongside her husband and her two young daughters, one of which suffered for hours before passing away from her wounds, her two little sons were left as orphans.

At the beginning of the Gaza war, Wafa had worked tirelessly to cover the events unfolding inside the besieged coastal territory. Yet, her whole world was turned upside down on October 16, 2023, when she was subjected to a hostile interrogation by TalkTV’s Julia Hartley-Brewer.

While Hartley-Brewer had just hosted Israeli military spokesperson Peter Lerner³⁹, treating him with courtesy, as a trustworthy authority, her body language and tone immediately changed upon bringing on Wafa to the show.⁴⁰ The TalkTV host challenged and somewhat mocked Wafa on her use of the word “massacres” to describe the killings in Gaza, despite allowing Lerner to use that very same word to describe the killings of Israelis.

Hartley-Brewer then began to ask Wafa why she hadn’t evacuated her home in Gaza City, following the issuance of Israeli army warnings to move south. “Why should I leave? This is my homeland. If someone asks you to leave, are you going to leave your home?” Wafa answered. Hartley-Brewer replied in a condescending tone, “If someone said they were going to bomb me and my family to death, like you’re saying ‘a massacre,’ then yes, I would leave.”

The final question posed to Wafa was how she believed Israel should be attacking Gaza, which she attempted to answer and was interrupted after giving a response Hartley-Brewer didn’t like, only for the interview to be suddenly cut off.

Israeli media outlets picked up on the interview⁴¹ and the segment posted on Julia Hartley-Brewer’s own X [formerly Twitter] page was saturated with Islamophobic and racist comments about Wafa Al-Udaini. Making things worse, the Palestinian journalist then received threatening calls from the Israeli military that she believed were directly linked to the interview she had given.

After the incident, she expressed that the interview had made her fearful for her family and said “The anchor killed me.” For months after the incident, Wafa was fearful of letting anyone know her location and was not as active in her reporting. While the Israeli military ultimately murdered Wafa, the incredibly volatile bias that she was subjected to had directly impacted her life and was not punished by TalkTV.

Different Western media outlets have contributed to completely normalizing the use of biased language, spreading Israeli propaganda claims without fact-checking first and have tolerated a double-standard approach to interviewing Palestinians. While it is impossible to know how much of an influence each media outlet's reports contributed towards influencing the individual actions of Israeli soldiers, their contribution to validating false claims and an overall racist narrative, cannot be ignored.

This is especially the case when it comes to Hamas as an organization; instead of presenting the world with a balanced view, the terrorist label and exaggerated claims about its actions have worked to render it an insurmountable task to even provide a critical analysis of it. All that is accepted is an ultra-politicized take that serves nothing other than to continue justifying the ongoing war.

At a time when Ahmad Shara’a (Abu Mohammed al-Jolani), is now accepted as the de-facto leader of Syria by the United Kingdom and its Western allies, it is completely irrational to therefore isolate Hamas. Shara’a was a former commander of ISIS and went on to lead Al-Qaeda in Syria (Jabhat al-Nusra), both of which are transnational militant organizations. Whereas, in the case of Hamas, it has always described itself as being a localized national liberation movement within the borders of historic Palestine and no more.

I. A TIME FOR CHANGE

The potential benefits attached to opening up communications and talking to Hamas are numerous. As a start, in order to end the current war, it will take more than a simple ceasefire, and it is paramount that a number of steps be taken towards reconstruction, relief efforts, and governance in post-war Gaza. One possibility is that a deal is struck between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, which could solve the issue of who runs the civil administration, and in the event that the PA is to have a role there, this could facilitate ending the siege and larger economic blockade.

Hamas is, in reality, the primary Palestinian political entity, with the Palestinian Authority representing little more than an administrative body in the West Bank and has minimal real relevance in the sphere of politics. However, as irrelevant as the PA may be as a political player, there is still a need for its involvement in the unification of the Palestinian movement. Without accepting the influence and overwhelming popularity of Hamas, attempting to strike a deal on any diplomatic solution, whether this be a short-term fix to the predicament of Gaza or a larger solution to the conflict, would prove disastrous and only lead to further bloodshed in the future.

The US, EU and British governments, despite being irrefutably biased in favor of Israel’s national interests, hold the cards due to its influence over the Israeli government. Therefore, accepting the reality on the ground in order to foster an environment in which sustainable deals can be struck is paramount. At this current moment, there is no path toward any comprehensive solution to the conflict, yet there is a possibility for improving the lives of Palestinians and fostering the environment from which a unified national leadership can emerge.

The primary error the UK has made is the assumption it could control a situation where Palestinians are forced to live indefinitely under ever-deteriorating circumstances with no viable political options. The growing armed struggle inside the West Bank⁴², and the enduring armed struggle in the Gaza Strip, show that this situation will only lead to further escalation if not addressed. It is crystal clear that the Palestinian people will not suffer in silence and, like any other people, need a viable path toward a brighter future. Robbing them of their democratic rights and forcing “road maps” and “peace plans” on them, over which they have no say, will not work.

Policy makers in London and Washington are just as responsible as any other actor for the environment that led to this current war, and the one thing that it has never tried is giving Hamas a chance, just as former U.S. President Jimmy Carter once proposed they do. If there was ever a time to look toward new solutions, it is now. The Israeli government is plausibly accused at the highest judicial body in the world, the International Court of Justice, of committing genocide in Gaza, this means that it’s time to be brave, it’s time to look past petty politics and search for an immediate solution that saves innocent lives. It is time that the UK engage Hamas politically and take them seriously in order to end this horror and pave the way toward progress. The alternative is only further escalation, bloodshed, and the possibility of triggering a wider regional war in the Middle East, one which could completely devastate whole nations and even eliminate them entirely.

J. EXPERT OBLIGATIONS

I confirm that I have made clear which facts and matters referred to in this report are within my own knowledge and which are not. Those that are within my knowledge I confirm to be true. The opinions I have expressed represent my true and complete professional opinion on the matters to which they refer.

I understand that proceedings for contempt of court may be brought by anyone who makes, or causes to be made, a false statement in a document verified by a statement of truth without an honest belief in its truth.

I confirm that I have not received any remuneration for preparing this report.

Robert Inlakesh

London

United Kingdom

15 January 2025