UK journalists go to Gaza, but still cover up Israel’s genocide
Mourners at the funeral of Palestinians who were killed in Israeli strikes on 22 November 2025, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, on 23 November 2025
Hamza Yusuf writes in Middle East Eye on 28 November 2025:
For more than two years, Israel has carried out a remorseless campaign of erasure in Gaza, reducing the territory to rubble. Many Palestinians in the enclave have been turned into accidental journalists.
Amid Israel’s ban on foreign journalists, the only sources of information have been the citizens living through and live-streaming the genocide. Even so, their courageous efforts were not widely appreciated.
“There are no journalists in Gaza,” David Lammy, then the British foreign secretary, asserted late last year. The same sentiment was expressed by prominent CNN presenter Christiane Amanpour. The implication was that Palestinians could not be trusted to narrate their reality accurately or objectively, and that only mainstream journalists could serve as credible truth-tellers to aid public understanding.
Rooted in hubris, this theory has been put to the test and comprehensively shattered, as journalists from Britain’s main broadcasters – including ITV, Sky News and the BBC – recently entered Gaza, and characteristically obscured the reality. They upheld the fiction that Gaza represents the site of complex warfare, not meticulously orchestrated mass slaughter.
Or as some might say, business as usual. Reporting from Gaza in early November, the BBC’s Lucy Williamson noted: “This is just a taste of what two years of war has done to Gaza … Israel’s army says it’s still fighting Hamas here almost every day.” The desolate landscape in Gaza is framed as a byproduct of Israel’s violence, carefully directed exclusively at Hamas.
An accompanying article persists with this characterisation of an intricate conflict. The headline cites “total devastation after two years of war”, while the text reproduces Israel’s usual robotic renditions of Hamas tunnels and terror infrastructure, effectively whitewashing the sustained annihilation of Palestinian life since October 2023, while justifying continued attacks.
An Israeli spokesperson is quoted directly as saying the level of destruction was “not a goal”, and adding: “The goal is to combat terrorists.” Above these quotes, the article features an image of the pulverised and flattened neighbourhood of Shujaiya – highlighting the stark contrast between the BBC’s framing and the inescapable truth.
Distorted picture
Although Israel’s brutality has not stopped, the BBC refers to the ceasefire as leaving Gaza in a “tense limbo”. In reality, Israel has violated the ceasefire around 500 times since October, killing more than 300 Palestinians and levelling hundreds of buildings.