‘From a hasbara perspective, a serious ‘terror attack”: Israeli TV reports killing of Rafah aid workers

A frame grab from a video released by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society shows emergency vehicles, lights blazing, seconds before they came under a barrage of gunfire in Rafah, March 2025

Yoana Gonen writes in Haaretz on 8 April 2025:

TV criticism generally deals with what appears on the screen. Sometimes, though, what’s missing from the lineup is just as important. Take, for example, the silence surrounding the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

A horrific war has been raging in Gaza for the past year and a half. Throughout this time, Israeli media outlets have almost entirely avoided covering the atrocities committed by Israel. Instead of acting as a watchdog, the news studios have behaved like an eager, blushing cheerleader and played a crucial role in the machinery of denial.

The walls of indifference were partially breached by the case of 15 aid workers who were killed by the military near Rafah and buried under the sand alongside their emergency vehicles. The Israel Defense Forces spokesman claimed the ambulances had been driving suspiciously and without flashing lights. The story might well have been buried, in every sense, if not for the emergence of video evidence proving the military was lying.

Following the global uproar, a few Israeli channels grudgingly mentioned the incident, tucking it into the margins of their broadcasts. The focus, of course, wasn’t the possibility that Israeli soldiers had committed a horrific war crime, but rather the “damage to Israel’s image” caused by the IDF’s shifting accounts.

“From a Hasbara [public diplomacy] perspective, this is a very serious ‘terror attack,'” Jacob Dayan, the former consul general in Los Angeles, told Channel 12, using a common Israeli metaphor for a serious blow. The Palestinians, it seems, are such consummate terrorists that even as Israel massacres them, they’re somehow suicide bombers blowing up Israel’s PR efforts. “It’s the last thing the State of Israel, and certainly the IDF, needed right now,” lamented Keren Betzalel, the channel’s international correspondent. Indeed, the true victims of the incident have been found.

Even when the military is caught in a blatant lie, the media frames it as a slip-up caused by haste. “Why did the army decide to issue an unready statement?” asked anchor Adi Zarifi, as if the issue were an unripe avocado rather than a systematic cover-up.

“The initial version that’s released is a quick version,” said former IDF spokesman Ran Kochav. “And after a deeper investigation… the facts change.”
But the facts didn’t change. What changed was the discovery of a video exposing the lie – forcing the IDF spokesperson to invent a new version to justify firing on paramedics and burying them in a mass grave.

The truth is, the soldiers didn’t even need justification – just as they haven’t in tens of thousands of other cases involving the killing of innocent civilians in Gaza. In a Channel 14 broadcast last Thursday, a Golani Brigade commander was shown briefing his troops before entering Gaza, telling them: “Everyone you encounter is an enemy. You see a person – open fire, eliminate and move on.”

If every person is an enemy, then an ambulance with flashing lights is an enemy, as is a toddler in his bed. Eliminate and move on.

In the TV studios, they prefer to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that the shootings and the cover-ups are isolated mishaps. But no matter how hard they try, this horrifying reality cannot be buried.

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