Issue:
September 2025 | Gaza Media Special Report Part III
The official Israeli narrative has always loomed large in Western media coverage of Gaza and the West Bank
I lived and worked in Israel for roughly two-and-a-half years from 2010 to 2012. The Arab Spring broke out in the middle of my posting, so I spent a lot of time away from Israel in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and ultimately in Libya, where I witnessed the fall of Tripoli. But I also spent a good deal of time reporting from the West Bank, and made several trips to Gaza.
Previously I had spent many years reporting in China and Russia, both of which are considered difficult places to work as a journalist. And they were. But Israel was the most challenging reporting environment I have ever worked in. Not because of the danger, but because of the relentless interrogation of your reporting by all sides in the conflict, particularly by the Israeli government. When I worked in Jerusalem, the Israeli government (led then, as now, by Benjamin Netanyahu) kept an office in the same media building that housed the BBC and other media organizations. That proximity enabled them to demand an on-air right of reply to any report that I or my colleagues had done. If there was a running story on Israel, you would see the highly articulate government spokesman in the BBC studio hour after hour, refuting it or questioning our reporting within minutes of it going on air.
The Israeli government and its supporters in the UK were also highly practiced in the use of the BBC complaints system. The effect on the BBC was the introduction of an explicit system of reporting - which I did not experience elsewhere, by which every single story had to have what was termed “internal balance”. This meant that if you interviewed a Palestinian you had to balance that with an Israeli voice, and vice versa. This often led to what I would call “he said, he said” reporting. If I reported, say, an accusation that Israeli settlers had destroyed Palestinian olive orchards, I would have to include a sequence from in which Israeli settlers living nearby would usually deny any knowledge of the incident and instead accuse the Palestinians of committing acts of “terrorism” against their settlement. Far from clarifying a complex situation, this kind of reporting only muddied the waters, making it hard for viewers to understand what was really going on.
There were also clear red lines that Western journalists were explicitly not allowed to cross. Describing the system of rule in the West Bank as anything akin to apartheid was absolutely forbidden. Why? Because of fear of the backlash against any media organization that making such a statement would incur.
And yet to any journalist working there it was plain that the system of rule was, and is, a form of apartheid. Settlers lived under Israeli civil law, were protected by the Israeli military, and had use of their own exclusive, and usually far superior, roads. Settlers could come and go freely between their settlements and Israel proper. West Bank Palestinians, on the other hand, lived under Israeli military law. If accused of anything, they would face a military tribunal and could be detained for long periods without trial in “administrative detention.” But there was more to it than that … the everyday lives of Palestinians in the West Bank were mired in bureaucracy and petty humiliation. Crossing to Israel, where hundreds of thousands of West Bank Palestinians continued to work, was a daily grind that began with lining up at a checkpoint at 4 a.m. Moving around the West Bank became more and more arduous, with new settlements, road construction and mobile military check points that changed location every day. Palestinians required Israel-issued passes to do pretty much anything that required movement.
Settler violence is certainly worse now that it was then, but it was already an endemic feature of life, particularly in the city of Hebron. But back then these incidents were only occasionally reported in the Western media. The occupation was decades old and was considered an “old story”. Instead, the world was focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The consensus seemed to be that the situation in Israel and the Occupied Territories was largely stable.
Gaza was an example of that. The situation there got very little coverage, except when the Israeli army went in from time to time to “cut the grass”, as the killing of Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants was termed by the IDF.
But anybody’s first visit to Gaza is a shock, regardless of what you have heard before. The old Israeli crossing at Erez is (or was) a fortress, with high concrete walls and remote-controlled machine-gun towers pointing towards Gaza. The security was extreme. Every item was pulled apart and scanned, and only then would you make the long walk down a corridor of perhaps 300 meters in length before suddenly finding yourself in northern Gaza. The contrast is astonishing. Fleets of battered taxis waited for passengers on a dusty parking lot, but saw little custom. Almost no one except, journalists and aid workers were allowed across. For Gazans there was almost no way out, except for medical emergencies, when permission for treatment in an Israeli hospital may have been granted.
Here was another of those red lines. Gaza was to any objective observer something akin to an open-air prison or fortified ghetto. But describing it as such was extremely sensitive and usually forbidden. But look at the facts. Since 2007 Haza has been under intense blockade. It is surrounded by concrete walls and high fences, with high-tech sensors and remotely operated machine gun towers dotted along its length. Crossing it, or even coming close to it, could mean injury or death. Off the coast, Israeli naval patrol boats kept constant watch. Gazan fishermen were restricted to a small area of sea, and no ships were allowed in or out. Every time I visited Gaza I could hear the constant whine of multiple drones circling overhead. The small southern border with Egypt was also close and patrolled by Egyptian troops. How should one describe a place like this?
It was in Gaza, or rather while leaving it, that I got my first taste of Israeli government intimidation. I had filed a report in Gaza City on the killing of a Hamas operative in an Israeli missile strike. The building he had lived in had been destroyed and a number of civilians, including children, killed. When I got back to the Erez Crossing I was pulled away from my cameraman and put in a small glass -floored room. With the door now locked, I was ordered over an intercom to strip naked. I refused and a long stand-off ensued. It finally ended when the BBC Jerusalem bureau called the Israeli prime minister’s office to demand I be released, after which apologies were made over the “misunderstanding”. I had the BBC organization behind me. Others are not so fortunate.
It feels like the absolute horror of what is being inflicted on the people of Gaza now has finally loosened the terms that Western media can use to report the story. We are seeing more reporters describing Gaza as an open prison, we see more reporting of the escalating settler violence and illegal takeover of land in the West Bank. The fact that European governments are now describing the Israeli government’s actions in in Gaza as a potential war crimes has provided Western media with cover to report more openly and accurately.
But the fact is much of what is going on is not new. Fifteen years ago, settlers I interviewed were already talking about the need for the complete annexation of the West Bank. Right-wing politicians talked about the need for a greater Israel that would stretch from “the river to the sea”. The settler movement was continuously expanding settlements and starting new illegal ones that would then retrospectively become legalized. When I lived in Israel, the number of settlers east of the Green Line was around half a million; now it is 700,000. The settlement process began almost immediately after the conquest of the West Bank in 1967. It has been a continuous process ever since of “building facts on the ground” under Israeli governments of the left and right. It means that a return of occupied land has become far more difficult, if not impossible. And that is the point. Yet this is not the impression you will get from watching or reading most Western media accounts, most of which are tethered to the possibility of a “two state solution”.
Rupert Wingfield-Hayes is a British journalist. He was previously the BBC's Tokyo correspondent for 10 years after postings as a correspondent in Beijing, Moscow and the Middle East.
