The official Israeli army version of why it targeted civilian areas during the intense and deadly bombardment of southern Lebanon on 20 September is that the Lebanese are hiding long-range missile launchers in their homes. This official explanation was meant to justify the killing of 492 people and the wounding of 1,645 in a single day of Israeli air strikes.
This off-the-shelf explanation will be repeated throughout the Israeli war in Lebanon, however long it takes. Israeli media is now citing these claims and, as usual, US and western media are parroting the same narrative. Keep this in mind as you reflect on earlier statements made by Israeli President Isaac Herzog on 13 October last year when he argued that there are no civilians in Gaza, and that, “There is an entire nation out there that is responsible [for 7 October ].”
Israel does this in every war it launches against the Palestinians or any Arab nation.
Instead of removing civilians and civilian infrastructures from its target bank, it immediately turns the civilian population into the main targets for its bombs.
A quick glance at the number of civilians killed in the ongoing war and genocide in Gaza should be enough to demonstrate that Israel targets ordinary people as a matter of course. According to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, children and women constitute the largest percentage of the war’s victims at 69 per cent . If we factor in the number of adult males who have been killed — including doctors and other medical staff, civil defense workers and numerous other categories — it will be obvious that the vast majority of all of Gaza’s victims of Israeli brutality were civilians.
Only Israeli media, and their allies in the west, continue to find justifications for killing Palestinian and now Lebanese civilians in large numbers.
Compare the following two statements, which received much attention in the media, by Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari regarding both Gaza and Lebanon: “Hamas systematically uses hospitals to wage war and consistently uses the people of Gaza as human shields,” said Hagari on 25 March. Then he claimed on September 27, “Hezbollah’s terror headquarters was intentionally built under residential buildings in the heart of Beirut, as part of Hezbollah’s strategy of using human shields.”
For those who routinely give Hagari and other Israeli spokespeople the benefit of the doubt, just review what has taken place in Gaza in the past year. For example, Israel claimed that the massacre at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital was not of its doing, and that it was a Palestinian rocket that killed the nearly 500 displaced refugees and wounded hundreds more on 17 October 2023. All evidence, including investigations by well -respected rights groups, concluded the opposite. However, the false Israeli claims still dominated the media headlines.
The Baptist Hospital episode was repeated with other lies on numerous occasions. In fact, the lies started on 7 October, not 17 October, when Israel made claims about decapitated babies and mass rape. Even though much of that has been proven conclusively to be wrong, some in the media, and pro-Israel officials, continue to speak of it as if it is a proven fact.
Moreover, although no Hamas headquarters were ever found under Al-Shifa Hospital, the unsubstantiated Israeli claims continued to be repeated as if they were the full truth of the matter, and thus justified the death and destruction at Gaza’s main medical facility.
The same logic is now being applied to Lebanon, where Israel claims that it does not target civilians and, when civilians are killed, that it is the Lebanese themselves who should be blamed for supposedly using civilians as human shields.
The Gaza playbook is now the Lebanon playbook.
Of course, many are playing along, not because they are irrational or unable to reach proper conclusions based on the obvious evidence. They do so because they are happy to be part of the Israeli narrative, not neutral storytellers or honest journalists.
Even the BBC plays its part within that narrative, as it uses Israeli claims as the starting point of any conversation on Palestine or Lebanon. “Israel has said it carried out a wave of pre-emptive strikes across southern Lebanon to thwart a large-scale rocket and drone attack by Hezbollah,” reported the corporation on 26 August. That’s just one example of many.
Israel gets away with its lies pertaining to the mass killings in Gaza, and now in Lebanon, because Israeli propaganda is welcomed, in fact, embraced by western officials and journalists. Thus, when US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan described the 20 September air strikes on Lebanon as “justice served”, he was telling mainstream media that its coverage should remain committed to that official assessment.
Imagine the outrage if the tables were turned, and Israeli civilians were slaughtered in their own homes by Lebanese bombs. There would be no need to have to explain the reactions of the US or western media, as they would be obvious to anyone who is paying attention.
Lebanon is a sovereign Arab state. Gaza is an occupied territory, and its people are protected under the Fourth Geneva Conventions. Neither Lebanese nor Palestinian lives are without worth, and their mass murder should not be allowed to take place for any reason, especially based on lies communicated by an Israeli military spokesperson and repeated by complicity media.
Perpetuating Israeli lies is dangerous, not only because truth-telling is a virtue, but also because words kill. Dishonest reporting can, in fact, succeed in justifying genocide, which is why Israel gets away with murder in Gaza and Lebanon.
-Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of the Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is ‘These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC).
