Media – the chief casualty of narrative war

Since the atrocities of 7 October 2023, the information battlefield has been one of the most insidious in recent history. Instead of the empathy that should have been afforded victims of terror, Israel and Jewish communities around the world have been faced with news networks, university campuses, and demonstrations on streets of major cities propagating the Hamas propaganda party line.

Retired British officer, Major Andrew Fox, a military expert specialising in defence, the Middle East, and disinformation, made this clear when he was in Israel recently to share his perspective on Hamas casualty figures and the narrative war. Fox was a panellist at the Conference against Antisemitism recently hosted by the ministry of diaspora affairs.

Fox is also a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, a think tank that works across borders and party lines to combat extremism, advance democracy, and real human rights. He brought out a report in December 2024 analysing the purported death toll in Gaza.

For his report, a group of international scholars analysed news reports of Gaza war fatalities from February 2024 to May 2024. They examined 1 378 articles from major English-language newspapers and media outlets, specifically The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, CNN, BBC, Reuters, Associated Press, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Over that four-month period, 84% of those publications failed to make the critical distinction in total numbers between combatant deaths and civilian deaths, according to Fox.

“Only 5% of the surveyed media organisations cited numbers released by the Israeli authorities, while 98% cited fatality figures provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health [MoH],” according to the report.

“In 19% of media reports examined, numbers provided by Hamas-run institutions were used without citing any source, thereby suggesting that those figures were undisputed.

“Furthermore, fewer than one in every 50 articles mentioned that the figures provided by the Gazan Ministry of Health were unverifiable or controversial. Strikingly, the Israeli statistics had their credibility questioned in half of the few articles that incorporated them.”

This report raises serious concerns that the Gaza MoH figures have been overstated. “The data behind its figures contains natural deaths, deaths from before this conflict began, and deaths of those killed by Hamas itself. It contains no mention of Hamas combatant fatalities, and it overstates the number of women and children killed.”

The report, meticulously researched and referenced, gives a clear indication that Hamas is padding casualty numbers. In spite of this, many in the media seem to repeat, without question, whatever Hamas says. Why?

“The first reason is the human desire not to admit when they are wrong, and we don’t understand how powerful this is because it means that they have to admit that they have been wrong for the past 18 months. If your new agency’s credibility is reliant on inputs of cash, to admit you’re wrong, it’s not going to happen. It’s not financially feasible. The second reason is the power of the narrative and a story to be engaging and get people’s buy-in. Once you have achieved the dominance of your narrative, it’s difficult to present another narrative. The third reason is antisemitism. While everything isn’t antisemitism, certainly there are biases.”

Fox isn’t the only publisher of a report that backs Israeli claims with empirical evidence to be largely ignored. Earlier this month, respected historian Lord Andrew Roberts released the All Party Parliamentary Commission report into the atrocities of 7 October. The report lays bare the depravity of the attacks in excruciating detail with maps and references.

“Lord Roberts, an esteemed historian and the immediate reaction online is that [the report] is biased. Lord Roberts isn’t Israeli; Israel isn’t his area of focus; and everything is meticulously referenced. It has been utterly dismissed out of hand and that’s astonishing. Of course, there will be a strong counter campaign with Qatari money thrown at it. I had the same thing with my report. The final aspect is that the Palestinian campaign has 10 times the supporters that Israel does. It’s a numbers game ultimately.”

Antisemitism in the form of anti-Zionism or what some may even call “Israelophobia” seems to be institutionalised in a lot of the legacy media. One obvious example is the BBC, which has had to apologies several times for erroneous reports.

“It is institutional at the BBC. Twice this year, it has had to put out major apologies for breaching its own impartiality guidelines – when it platformed Hamas royalty in a documentary about kids in Gaza using kids whose family members are Hamas; or when it emailed the Israeli embassy asking for a speaker that was specifically anti-Netanyahu. There are three parts to an apology, “I am sorry, it’s my fault, and I will do better”. It hasn’t really done the third part at all. It is endemic and institutionalised,” says Fox.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has faced a lot of criticism from journalists about not giving them free movement in Gaza. Some say this strategy has impaired Israel’s ability to present the facts on the ground, but Fox says the IDF has good reasons for it.

“Journalists in war don’t just run around doing what they want,” he says. “If you give a journalist free rein in Gaza, they will either do what Hamas tells them, or they will be killed, and that will be blamed on the IDF anyway. From a military perspective, you don’t want anyone filming an air strike because they don’t have all the supporting data to report fairly without knowing what went into the targeting process.

“I flew to Israel with John McColl a retired four-star general and deputy former supreme allied commander of Europe, who was very anti-IDF. All week, he was pushing the IDF like a hawk, and then came home and wrote an OpEd saying that he was convinced that Israel was doing everything to protect civilians, and that’s what the IDF should be showing journalists. You can’t send journalists in with fighting troops, it’s too dangerous. Gaza is a 360-degree war – you have high rise buildings, ground level, and underground. As a soldier, I would probably refuse to take a journalist into that battle.”

Fox also expressed concern about the dangers of an information environment when people turn to social media for information because of the 24-hour news cycle, and often what is posted isn’t factual and hasn’t been verified. And, in the rush to make the news cycle, journalists also aren’t fact checking properly.