Grotesque media lies are enabling the annihilation of Gaza

It’s been nearly six weeks since Joe Biden’s secretary of state solemnly proclaimed that “too many Palestinians have been killed ... and we want to do everything possible to prevent harm to them.”

Every week since, Israel has inched closer to the total destruction of Gaza — while the U.S. continues to provide unchecked military aid to Benjamin Netanyahu and empty words to the public.

What a farce.

The number of dead in Gaza has skyrocketed to almost 20,000, more than 7,000 of them children. Ninety percent of the population is displaced. Food, water, and fuel continue to be blockaded. Hospitals, schools, ambulances, and refugee camps have been bombed.

Yet the U.S. continues to single-handedly block a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire, and earlier this month, the Biden administration circumvented Congress to ram through an “emergency” sale of 13,000 tank rounds to Israel.

In this moment, The Intercept stands nearly alone among U.S. news outlets in reporting critically on how the U.S. is enabling Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. And that means our nonprofit, reader-supported model is more important than ever — because it allows us to deliver truly independent and honest reporting on Gaza, free from corporate and political pressure.

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The evidence is now overwhelmingly clear: This is not a war on Hamas. It is a joint U.S.–Israeli war against the people of Gaza who are trapped in an ever-shrinking killing cage.

Israel’s own president insists that there are no innocent civilians and that the “entire nation” of Gaza is responsible for the Hamas attack on October 7.

Or in the words of one Israeli intelligence officer, “Nothing happens by accident. When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets.”

Meanwhile, any attempt to place the Palestinian struggle in any honest historical context is shouted down with accusations of antisemitism.

Without question, the Hamas perpetrators of the horrors of October 7 should be held accountable. But that is not what this collective killing operation is about. It is a scorched-earth campaign to annihilate Gaza as a Palestinian territory, and journalists should stop pretending otherwise.

Sadly, more than two months into this wholesale slaughter of the civilian population of Gaza, people that Israel’s defense minister has called “human animals,” U.S. news outlets continue to defend the indefensible by passing along the Biden administration’s well-worn and twisted notion of Israel’s right to “self-defense.”

I co-founded The Intercept nine years ago in order to hold the U.S. foreign policy establishment accountable for its most grotesque lies. No corporate advertising-backed news outlet will do this kind of reporting, and our mission has never been more important than it is right now.

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