Despite being directly governed by Israeli policies, some Israeli media outlets critically report on their government’s actions and use accurate terminology, whereas Western media has shown complete bias, failing to be impartial in its coverage of Israel’s aggression in Gaza.

Israeli Media’s Divergent Coverage of the War

When Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken referred to Palestinians as “freedom fighters” last October, his remarks sent shockwaves not only through the Israeli society, but also across Western newsrooms.

Speaking at a conference in London, Schocken acknowledged the legitimate rights of Palestinians—rights that Israel outright denies and that segments of mainstream Western media actively ignore.

"The Netanyahu government doesn't care about imposing a cruel apartheid regime on the Palestinian population. It dismisses the costs of both sides for defending the settlements while fighting the Palestinian freedom fighters that Israel calls terrorists,” Schoken stated.

Following the backlash, Schoken later clarified that he was not equate “freedom fighters” with Hamas. However, the controversy underscored the role of Haaretz, a liberal Israeli newspaper known for critical journalism, to question Israel’s crimes in its continued and relentless military operations in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, where more than 47,500 Palestinians have been killed.

Since October 2023, Haaretz has been among a handful of Israeli media outlets to report critically on the genocide in Gaza, unleashed on the besieged enclave by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling out war crimes, and repeatedly questioning the Israeli government’s motives for prolonging the war.

“In its previous wars, too, Israel committed heinous acts. Sometimes it tried to deny, conceal, and lie, and sometimes it even admitted and was ashamed of them. Not this time,” wrote Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy.

Haaretz has not shied away from using terms such as “genocide” to describe events in Gaza and extensively covered the calls from captives’ families for a ceasefire. 

Meanwhile, investigative reports from Local Call and +972 Magazine have detailed Israeli military tactics, including bombarding residential areas in Gaza without clear intelligence on Hamas commanders’ locations, as well as “intentionally weaponized toxic byproducts of bombs to suffocate militants in their tunnels”.

Western Media’s Pro-Israel Bias

The reporting and language used by a handful of critical Israeli media outlets stand in stark contrast to how mainstream Western media has portrayed the targeting and suffering of Palestinians and Israel’s conduct on the ground since October 2023, often downplaying Palestinian suffering and justifying Israeli actions. Pro-Israel bias, disproportionate framing of perspectives, lack of Palestinian voices, and a tendency to echo Israeli government and military narratives have become the norm.

CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and other major outlets have repeatedly been criticized for their one-sided coverage, selective terminology, and lack of balanced representation.

Assal Rad, a non-resident fellow at DAWN, explains that the pro-Israel bias in Western media is rooted in the long-standing political alliance between the United States and Israel. This bipartisan support—shared by both Democrats and Republicans—ensures unwavering backing for Israel, regardless of its actions. Over time, the language used by U.S. administrations has become normalized within political discourse, shaping public perception and influencing media narratives that often go unchallenged.

“It’s the ecosystem that creates that situation,” Rad explains. She also points to a racialized perspective embedded in U.S. politics, describing it as “a white supremacist lens” through which many American politicians and segments of the public view their support for Israel.

Israeli Government Retaliates Against Haaretz to Muzzle Critical Reporting

Following Amos Schocken’s remarks, Haaretz faced swift backlash from the Israeli government. In response, officials barred all government-funded bodies from engaging with the newspaper or placing advertisements, accusing it of “supporting terrorism.”

“Netanyahu is trying to silence a critical, independent newspaper,” Haaretz wrote in an editorial. “Haaretz will not balk and will not morph into a government pamphlet that publishes messages approved by the government and its leader."

Despite the backlash, Haaretz and a small number of other Israeli media outlets have continued their critical coverage of Netanyahu and the war, offering perspectives and reporting seldom seen in Western media.

“It’s really interesting. Every time I go out of Israel, I see that international media are more cautious than we are,” Meron Rapoport, writer for +972 and Local Call, told AJR. “Because we are in the heart of the storm, and you have this liberty that maybe you don't have outside.

“The moment you write something against Israel and call it genocide or ethnic cleansing, you are quite quickly accused of being anti-Semitic. It's a little difficult to accuse us, Jews who live here in Israel and are Israeli citizens, of that.”

Systematic Double Standards in Western Journalism

In 2024, ten journalists who covered the war on Gaza for CNN and BBC, revealed to Al Jazeera the inner workings of those newsrooms from October 7 onward. They talked about systematic pro-Israel bias in coverage, consistent double standards and frequent violations of journalistic principles.

Senior figures in the newsroom were accused of failing to hold Israeli officials to account and of interfering in reporting to downplay Israeli atrocities as well as publishing false Israeli propaganda despite advance warnings from staff.

“You see Haaretz using words like genocide, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and Jewish terror to describe settlers and settler violence in the West Bank against Palestinians,” added Rad. “You see none of that language on the Western side. It just doesn't exist. It will never be described that way in the West.”

A report published by L’Humanite, based on research by Techforpalestine and its Media Bias Meter tool, analysed 13,394 articles on the war as reported by five French newspapers. It found that the terms "Palestinians" appeared in” less than half of the articles on the ongoing war”. 

“Regarding the war, I’d say that the main Israeli outlets really accept almost unconditionally the army's version,” added journalist Meron Rapoport. “Apart from Haaretz, Local Call, +972, there’s almost zero criticism on the way Israel conducted the war, the mass killings, or the ethnic cleansing. If it is mentioned, it’s only as a quote.”

This bias is reflected in Western media narratives as well, said Rad, who described reporting from that part of the world “is basically the equivalent of propaganda”.

Rad explained that the Western media narrative is carefully curated to align with the policies of governments that support Israel, including the U.S., U.K., and Germany. “Rather than presenting unbiased news, coverage is often tailored to justify these states' positions. And that's what makes it propagandistic. You're creating a narrative rather than giving the news,” she added.

A quantitative content analysis carried out provided “concrete, measurable evidence that mainstream western broadcast news outlets demonstrate significantly more sympathy towards Israeli victims than Palestinian victims and perpetrated violence”.

“Findings suggest that Western broadcast Instagram reporting was decidedly pro-Israel,” Mohamad elMasry said in his report.

He noted that “studied outlets consistently favoured Israeli and pro-Israeli sources over Palestinian and pro-Palestinian sources; highlighted Israeli victims while neglecting Palestinian victims; and framed Israeli violence as self-defence while framing Palestinian violence as aggression.”

Another analysis done by The Nation last year on CNN and MSNBC’s first 100 days of reporting on the war on Gaza “showed a consistent double standard” in their coverage, with “Palestinians receiving far less sympathetic and humanizing coverage than either Israelis during the same period or Ukrainians during the first 100 days after Russia’s invasion”.

“Narrowing our scope to the first 30 days of each conflict, we see those emotive words such as “brutal”, “massacre”, “slaughter”, “barbaric” and “savage” were overwhelmingly used to describe the killing of Israelis and Ukrainians, and almost never that of Palestinians,” the report added.

Haaretz was also among the first media outlets, in Israel and globally, to launch an investigation into the army ordering the Hannibal Directive on October 7.

In July 2024, it published its long-form piece building up from the documents and testimonies it had obtained to reveal the Hannibal operational order, which directs the use of force to prevent soldiers being taken into captivity, was employed at three army facilities infiltrated by Hamas, potentially endangering civilians as well”.

A few days later, some Western media outlets, including the Guardian republished it using Haaretz investigation – albeit with a tone of scepticism - but most of the leading outlets opted to stay silent.

In March this year, Declassfied UK published a report citing journalists from BBC, Sky, ITN, Guardian and the Times disclosing the extent of “anti-Palestinian prejudice in their newsrooms”.

“The Israeli narrative always reigned supreme and instructed the coverage at Sky News, no matter how inaccurate,” one journalist was quoted as saying in the report. Another, reporting on the state of affairs at the BBC, said: “The use of the word genocide is effectively banned, and any contributor who uses this word is immediately shut down”.

There has been no comment from any of these organisations on the latest accusations.

An earlier investigation by Drop Site revealed BBC’s Middle East Editor Raffi Berg’s bias and links to intelligence agencies, with staffers accusing him of favouring Israel.

As reported by Al Jazeera Journalism Review, over 1,500 journalists from dozens of U.S. news organizations signed an open letter last year condemning Western media’s coverage of Israel’s actions.

The letter criticized Israel’s targeted killing of reporters in Gaza and accused newsrooms of using “dehumanizing rhetoric that has served to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians,” suppressing Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim perspectives, and employing “inflammatory language that reinforces Islamophobic and racist tropes.”

In January this year, the Intercept reported that “every CNN journalist covering Israel and Palestine must submit their work for review by the news organization’s bureau in Jerusalem prior to publication, under a long-standing CNN policy”.

The report cited CNN as saying the policy was in place to ensure “accuracy in reporting on a polarizing subject”. But it goes to show how coverage of this “polarizing subject” is under the shadow of a bureau that is working under a permission to operate by the Israeli government and the army.

The Western bias has persisted during the prisoner exchange between Hamas and Israel as part of the ceasefire agreement. Media coverage largely focused on the release of Israeli captives held in Gaza, while the release of hundreds of Palestinians, many detained arbitrarily in Israeli prisons, received little to no attention.

“When journalists turn away from describing events as they are or ignore some voices in favour of others, it can make the process of seeking justice all the more difficult,” Nobel Peace Prize winner and Yezidi human rights activist Nadia Murad aptly stated.