Western reporters should by now know almost all journalists, doctors, nurses and teachers in Gaza are Hamas members, just as some UN employees are Hamas militants. - Chris Mitchell, The Australian, 18 August 2025.

With no examination of Israel’s claimed justifying evidence, the former editor-in-chief of Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian newspaper has condemned, to their collective deaths, Palestinian journalists, doctors, nurses, teachers and some, so far unquantified, UN employees in Gaza.

He writes that Western journalists (that he invariably labels as “left-wing”) have been amplifying “any malicious allegation against the Jewish state by Hamas or its health and media workers”.

In an “exclusive” interview broadcast on Sky News on 21 August 2025 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned those Western democracies, now including Anthony Albanese’s Australia, for having declared they would recognise Palestine as a state at the United Nations in September. These democracies were “weak” and had adopted a strategy of “appeasement”, comparing it to Britain’s 1938 Munich appeasement of Hitler’s Nazi regime. That is, Hamas equals Hitler. By allowing a Palestinian state along Israel’s borders, those countries now supporting Palestinian statehood were naive to think the total destruction of Israel would not then be enhanced and facilitated by Israel’s enemies and its terrorist proxies. Netanyahu asserted that “Western civilisation” was now at stake hence Israel’s determination to destroy Hamas in a final push to invade Gaza City, herding the civilian populace out “to safety” through check points.

Netanyahu’s talking points have been repeated in Australia in the Murdoch media through its Sky News monologues, editorials, many of its headlines and coverage as well as through its staff writers and commentators, including Chris Mitchell.

Yes. Accepted. It’s a free country with a free press. Mitchell and Murdoch can say what they like. But in conflict, propaganda is a weapon: a powerful one when it is realised that an entire world population can be swayed by video and eye witness accounts of atrocity.

As I observed in “ Journalism, propaganda and war” (P&I, 13 December 2023), in the 20th Century, when war was formally declared, the combatants immediately adopted press (media) censorship to protect and support the war effort. In the 21st Century formal censorship no longer applies with the digital revolution now globally used and misused, requiring constant scrutiny of information to detect misinformation or disinformation. In covering Gaza the media’s effectiveness has been censored by alternative methods, now includinNetanyahus says       g lethal ones. Israel has exercised censorship by refusing access to Gaza for accredited journalists, hindering accuracy in coverage. The world has relied on mainly Palestinian journalists or those who post online video, audio or eye witness pieces to camera. Smart phone video footage and eye witness testimony, now extensively accessible in longer TV documentary form and instantaneously breaking news, has overwhelmed IDF statements that it is striving to minimise civilian casualties as it targets Hamas militia.

Through the transmission of these images and reports, Netanyahu has been exposed as a liar.

As a result Israel stands accused by the international community of genocide in Gaza.

The evidence of genocide is probative. Probative means “tending to prove.” In many, if not most cases of missile strikes and shootings and now including calculated starvation of the populace by constraining food aid, the Gaza genocide is overwhelmingly, in my opinion, at the criminal standard of proof. This has moved the international community, but not so far the United States, to condemn’s Netanyahu’s denial and to call it a lie. Were a Nuremberg trial-like tribunal ever established to test the evidence against both Hamas and Netanyahu’s regimes, convictions for war crimes would surely follow.

But as things stand at the moment we are nowhere near any accountability.

Netanyahu says that just Israel’s ‘just cause’ flows from 7 October 2023. On that day the whole world was appropriately swayed by eye witness and video coverage of Hamas’ invasion, barbarity, massacre and capture of Israeli innocents.

But as Israel retaliated militarily, Chris Mitchell and the Murdoch media in Australia has found unremarkable the scale of that retaliation now running into the deaths or injury of tens of thousands of Palestinians. There is dispute about the casualty toll, and its proportionality, with 1200 killed on 7 October, as if a certified, comparable, or low body count would absolve Israel of the charge of mass murder and now the added allegation, via the United Nations declaration, of famine in Gaza, as further evidence of genocidal intent.

Chris Mitchell finds unremarkable video of skeletal children, lines of body bags, bloodied injured being rushed to what remains of Gaza’s hospitals, vast drone fly-over images of obliterated buildings, thousands in tents and tarpaulin shelters, the frenzy of outstretched containers waiting to be filled with food. TV newsreaders now intro their Gaza video packages with viewer warnings that what they are about to see is confronting or distressing. Images of bodies torn to pieces in bombings or shot in the head or chest are pixelated or blurred by video editors under editorial sensitivity direction. On social media there are no such constraints and the full gore of the body carnage has been posted with messages imploring followers not to turn away.

“Mass moral posturing, especially on social media, has destroyed the search for truth in journalism and politics”, Mitchell writes.

All Palestinians are Hamas members, supporters or sympathisers he observes. This ignores the historic context of this conflict. It is not a search for truth by this former editor-in-chief.

It is propaganda. Not journalism.

Also unremarkable is the evidence of censorship by the deliberate killing of journalists. Of motivating concern to Mitchell is the media coverage of the latest deaths of Al Jazeera journalists in a missile strike confirmed by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) as precision targeted and justified. Mainstream television, radio and text media throughout the world has prominently reported on the deaths of journalists, some with accusations that the IDF targets them, and that their deaths are not just collateral casualties, similar to doctors, nurses, teachers and aid workers, as the IDF try to hunt down Hamas militia said to be deliberately shielded within the Palestinian populace.

Mitchell declared that reports by the BBC, and Australia’s ABC, that there was “no evidence” to support Israel’s claim the slain Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif, was a Hamas operative, were a “lie”. Mitchell’s substantiation for his “lie" accusation was a report 18-months previously from UK based investigative journalist David Collier. Collier had published what he claimed to be the Hamas “associations” of Gazan journalists whom “the International Committee to Protect Journalists had claimed were killed by Israel for simply doing their jobs”.

Collier said: “In fact many were using journalism to hide their military roles”.

When, on 19 August 2025, I searched david-collier.com website for any reference to Anas al-Sharif there was no result.

I emailed Collier directly with a respectful request to provide any evidence that al-Sharif was a Hamas operative or sympathiser. There was no response. Collier declares his support for the state of Israel and as a “100% zionist” in a frank and ethically transparent description of his life which formed his views while living and working there with the tag line: “Investigative Journalist Exposing Extremism and Anti-semitism”.

On 21 August 2025 Collier posted a new article, quoting an IDF statement, asserting al-Sharif headed up a Hamas cell and “of advancing rocket attacks against Israel”.

An Israel Defence Force spokesman, Avichay Adraee, on 24 July 2020 said al-Sharif was a member of Hamas’s military wing, Al-Qassam, since 2013 and was now working during the conflict “for the most criminal and offensive channel”.

Al-Sharif’s employer has rejected the IDF claims that al-Sharif, 28, and a prodigious television front line reporter rising to daily prominence during the Gaza conflict, was at any time an undercover operative or militia member of Hamas.

The International Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), cpj.org, is a not-for-profit organisation which established a research database categorising missing, killed or imprisoned journalists worldwide from 1992. Its board and advisory committee comprises prominent journalists from media organisations across the world, including 2021 Nobel laureate Maria Ressa from the Phillipines. It publishes its methodology in case-by-case assessments which can be corrected or changed as more evidence is gathered and as public campaigns are mounted by its network of supporters to bring those claimed to be responsible for the killings to account.

In the “killed” category are “type of death”: crossfire/combat; dangerous assignment (riots or demonstrations) or … murder.

The killing of Anas al-Sharif on 10 August 2025 is categorised by the International Committee for the Protection of Journalists as “murder”.

Murder is defined as “the targeted killing of a journalist, whether premeditated or spontaneous, in direct reprisal for the journalist’s work”.

Al Jazeera, the Qatari based and bankrolled global media outlet, has condemned the killing of their entire Gaza City staff as “yet another blatant and premeditated attack on press freedom”.

“The order to assassinate Anas al-Sharif, one of Gaza’s bravest journalists, and his colleagues, is a desperate attempt to silence the voices exposing the impending seizure and occupation of Gaza” they said.

The CPJ says the IDF has a longstanding, documented pattern of accusing journalists of being terrorists without providing any credible proof.

Investigative journalist David Collier rejects this, now repeating IDF claims that Palestinians dressed up as “Press”, and posted photographs, that he and the IDF claimed were al-Sharif ‘selfies’, while socialising with Hamas leaders.

His 150-page report, posted 18-months ago, contests CPJ’s methodology and, through his search of a large number of the dead Palestinian journalists’ social media account timelines, presents screen shots of some of what he says are their pro-Hamas or anti-Israel biases some using anti-semitic or hateful rhetoric.

Chris Mitchell used this material to condemn the Palestinian journalists (or bloggers if you do not accept they were, by definition, journalists) to their collective deaths.

And then on 25 August in The Australian Mitchell summarised for readers what seemed to be the Murdoch media’s editorial judgment: It’s all false. There is no starvation in Gaza; those skeletal children suffer other diseases; Hamas, not IDF, shoots Palestinians at aid centres. He claimed “evil Hamas” had tricked Western media and urged Netanyahu to finish the job.

The Committee for the Protection of Journalists has documented the deaths and stands by its verification methodology:

“Israel is engaging in the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that CPJ has ever documented. Palestinian journalists are being threatened, directly targeted and murdered by Israeli forces, and are arbitrarily detained and tortured in retaliation for their work. Media infrastructure in Gaza is systematically destroyed, and censorship has been tightened throughout the West Bank and Israel.”

On 25 August news broke that five journalists were among 20 killed at Nasser Hospital in an Israeli military strike. The five were reported to have worked for Reuters, the Associated Press and Al Jazeera according to their employers when publishing their names.

Netanyahu announced an investigation into what he called a regrettable and tragic mishap.

“Israel values the work of journalists, medical staff and all civilians,” he said.

The death toll of journalists in this conflict now stands at 197.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.