Israel’s Willing Propagandists: What the Media Won’t Tell You When It Embeds With the Military

In October 2024, a handpicked delegation of journalists from some of the world’s largest and most influential news organizations — The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the BBC, among others — piled into convoys of Jeeps and armored vehicles. The Israeli military was about to take them for a ride: guided tours of occupied southern Lebanese villages, two weeks into Israel’s illegal invasion.

“We are, literally, in an area which still hasn’t been neutralized,” said Lt. Col Roy Russo, one of the BBC’s Israeli tour guides. Another Israeli officer described “face-to-face battles” with “terrorists” in the streets.

BBC reporter Lucy Williamson, wearing a bulletproof vest and a helmet, stood speechless for a moment, as if in awe, in the middle of a Lebanese village square recently bulldozed by Israeli tanks.

“Wow… Wow,” she exclaimed, picking her way through village streets choked with piles of concrete several meters high. “You can see the kind of fighting that has taken place here, just in the last couple of days or so.”

Looking at the burned-out balconies and decorative arches of family homes, now reduced to rubble by the Israeli military, she concluded: “Hezbollah were clearly well-prepared and well-armed.”

Williamson was committing more than just journalism that day. She and nine or so other reporters had embedded themselves not only inside army units, but also within a national project of extraordinary transnational violence: an unlawful invasion of a neighboring country, with no internationally recognized legal or political justification. They were reporting as the chosen guests of an extrajudicial occupying military power — a critical point that all of them would fail to mention in their coverage.

“This lack of context — historical, geopolitical, social — would be considered journalistic malpractice in most cases,” said Mohamad Bazzi, an associate professor of journalism and director of New York University’s Center for Near Eastern Studies. “Let’s take the case of Ukraine: If Russia staged a similar embed, it’s unlikely that Western journalists would agree to embed under such conditions, with Russian troops in Ukrainian territory.”

These reporters embedded themselves not only inside army units, but also within a national project of extraordinary transnational violence. They were reporting as the chosen guests of an extrajudicial occupying military power — a critical point that all of them would fail to mention in their coverage.

Lebanese lawyers and activists, as well as the political party and armed resistance movement Hezbollah, all issued statements against the media outlets. “Embedding with military forces during an illegal act of aggression and invasion of our sovereign territory cannot be considered a fair method of obtaining information,” said Lebanon’s Information Minister at the time, Ziad Makary, in a letter to the media outlets who participated in the tour.

Makary was citing section four of the International Federation of Journalists’ Global Charter of Ethics for Journalists, which reads, in part: “The journalist shall use only fair methods to obtain information, images, documents and data.”

Half a dozen journalists at the Beirut office of the BBC went on strike in protest of the news outlet’s participation in the invasion tour. “You cannot let a journalist ride in an occupation tank on our land!” said one of the six journalists, who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely. “We are protesting because our reputations as journalists, and the reputation of the institution we work for, has been greatly damaged because of this coverage.”

Today, Israel’s military is about to begin staging guided tours of Gaza for embedded members of the foreign press, after 22 months of barring foreign media from the area — and killing 246 of Gaza's journalists and media workers. The case of the Lebanon embeds raises a serious question for all journalists: is going on a military propaganda tour ever worth it? Can embedding with an illegal invading force — one that routinely targets and kills journalists — ever be a “fair method” of newsgathering, or an ethical journalistic practice? When does embedding with war criminals cross the line into legitimizing their crimes?

The Public Source conducted an in-depth media analysis of the coverage produced by the news organizations that chose to embed with invading Israeli forces last October. We identified multiple glaring omissions in their reporting, which relied almost exclusively on Israeli military sources, and uncritically repeated multiple false claims about Lebanon, Hezbollah, and the United Nations.

Almost all of the media outlets who went on the Israeli military’s tour present themselves as fair, balanced, and above all, objective purveyors of credible and accurate news. We found that their coverage was anything but: instead, it was riddled with unverified claims, factual errors, dehumanizing language, and calculated disinformation.

Most of all, the stories they produced omitted information so crucial as to make the end product journalistically worthless: in effect, it was state propaganda, faithfully recorded and repackaged, masquerading as actual news — but without any of the questioning, fact checks, or balance that distinguish legitimate newsgathering from public relations.

“When you want to put everything under the lens that a crime occurred on October 7, and you refuse to see that so many people are being killed in such a criminal way, and you want us to be silent and not include context in our coverage, and not name what is happening as genocide,” said the Beirut-based BBC journalist, “then this is no longer journalism. This is propaganda.”

Failures like this are not rare. They are part of a long series of betrayals that have eroded public trust in news media, especially since the beginning of the so-called Global War on Terror. In fact, the very banality of this case study is what makes it most alarming: much of what passes for news about the Middle East, especially that which relies on access to powerful military sources, achieves a comparable level of disinformation.

The stories they produced omitted information so crucial as to make the end product journalistically worthless: in effect, it was state propaganda, faithfully recorded and repackaged, masquerading as actual news — but without any of the questioning, fact checks, or balance that distinguish legitimate newsgathering from public relations.

“The level of journalistic malpractice and suspension of journalistic rules is astounding,” said Bazzi. “We are seeing Israel held to a different standard in so many different areas of life — the suspension of international law, the double standards when it comes to law — and it’s important to call out these journalistic institutions on this.”

The Public Source reached out to the news outlets and the journalists whose work we analyzed in this piece on two occasions in October and December 2024. None of the individual journalists responded. Reuters, Fox News, and The New York Times responded via their publicity departments. You can read their responses here. [note:1]

“The War Was a Product”

The practice of journalists reporting alongside the military goes back to the mid-1800s, when the American military integrated journalists into its units in the Mexican-American War and the American Civil War. Correspondents provided firsthand accounts from the battlefield; some early war reporters were former soldiers. This practice continued into the 20th century.

But the Vietnam war changed the game. When U.S. commanders realized that witnessing a war firsthand might erode public support for it, they banned all press from their invasion of Grenada, and only offered limited access during the early 1990s invasions of Panama and Iraq. It wasn’t until 2003 that the U.S. military perfected embedding as a well-regulated propaganda tool, with “some 700 journalists,” according to the Pentagon’s then-Deputy Director for Press Operations, embedded in various units during its invasion of Iraq.

The late Danny Schechter — a veteran filmmaker, television producer and media analyst known as “the News Dissector” — reviewed reels of Iraq invasion news footage for his 2004 documentary film “Weapons of Mass Deception.” U.S. government officials, said Schechter, likened war planning to a marketing and distribution campaign: “To them the war was a product,” he said. “They sold it, we bought it.”

On rare occasions, embedded reporters did produce a fleeting report or photograph that called into question the U.S. role in the deaths of over half a million Iraqis, at minimum, and possibly up to a million. During an embed with U.S. troops in 2005, the late war photographer Chris Hondros captured an infamous image: a five-year-old Iraqi girl named Samar Hassan, howling in anguish and splattered in the blood of her parents after U.S. troops shot and killed them at a checkpoint.

“That stuff happens in Iraq a lot,” Hondros said later, meaning U.S. military shootings of Iraqi civilians at checkpoints, but “it almost never gets photographed.” A commanding officer asked Hondros to delay sending the pictures to his agency until the military could clear them. Hondros defied the request, risking his embed privileges, because he knew the pictures showed a reality of the war that most Americans didn’t usually see.

Such brief glimpses at the horror of war have done little to build public pressure and stop recent wars — probably because they are too often lost in a sea of propagandistic reporting that glorifies the invading military and its technology, while sanitizing their violent consequences.

“Sometimes the embed is the only way to see certain things or places — or even the crimes of the forces you’re embedded with, like Chris Hondros did when he captured the checkpoint shooting,” said Anne Barnard, a veteran newspaper reporter who spent over a decade based in the Middle East. “At the very least you get to document some of the struggles, lies, absurdities or mistakes that you’d otherwise never see firsthand. Just don’t leave your critical faculties behind.” Barnard, who was Beirut bureau chief for The New York Times from 2012–2018, cautioned that good reporting combines embedded access with context and additional reporting from all available sources — including unembedded reporters on the ground.

But unlike in the Vietnam War, such brief glimpses at the horror of war have done little to build public pressure and stop recent wars — probably because they are too often lost in a sea of propagandistic reporting that glorifies the invading military and its technology, while sanitizing their violent consequences. Military embedding in Iraq delivered thousands of reports that humanized the troops and justified their mission at the expense of the people they killed: the local population, whose deaths these reports often glossed over or minimized by balancing them against the lives of U.S. troops.

Just as in Lebanon and Gaza today, the vast majority of embedded reports from Iraq painted military intervention as a necessary solution, and those resisting invading forces as the problem. It worked: “Their storyline became a master narrative,” said Schechter, “defining Iraq as the problem and U.S. military intervention as the only solution.” Schechter concluded that the Pentagon’s media strategy was “sophisticated, clever and almost always covert.”

Media outlets played along, with few doing anything to expose the system. “The embedded journalists were largely propagandists,” wrote UCLA professor Douglas Kellner, in his exhaustive study of two U.S. invasions of Iraq, “who often outdid the Pentagon and Bush administration in spinning the message of the moment.”

Collateral Murder

If the U.S. military’s embedding campaign in Iraq was a propaganda success, the mainstream media’s willingness to play along was only one reason. There was another, darker factor: From the beginning, occupying forces often directed violence against journalists who worked outside the embedded bubble.

On April 8, 2003, as an American-led military coalition was invading Baghdad, a U.S. warplane carried out two airstrikes on Al Jazeera’s Baghdad bureau, which had sent its exact coordinates to the Pentagon weeks earlier, and killed correspondent Tarek Ayyoub. Later that day, an American tank fired a shell at the Palestine Hotel — which the Pentagon also knew was full of unembedded press — and killed Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk and Telecinco cameraman José Couso.

The U.S. military continued to target unembedded journalists throughout its occupation of Iraq, culminating in the infamous 2007 “Collateral Murder” killings of two Reuters employees, which WikiLeaks exposed in 2010. Of the 230 journalists who were killed between the 2003 invasion and the U.S. military’s withdrawal in 2010–11, coalition forces killed at least 16.

Today, Israel’s military holds the grim record for killing more journalists and media workers than any other force in the world. According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, Israel’s war on Gaza has killed more journalists than the U.S. Civil War, the two World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including Cambodia and Laos), the Balkan wars of the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 Afghanistan war — combined. In fact, Israel’s war has killed more journalists in 22 months than the Iraq war did in seven years: as of press time, 246 journalists and media workers in Gaza alone, according to Gaza’s government press office (other organizations, counting other theaters, put the war’s total death toll as high as 270). The Israeli military killed almost all of these journalists.

In fact, the date the Israeli military chose for one of its media tours of southern Lebanon marked a grim anniversary, one that all of the Western reporters embedded with Israel curiously failed to mention: On Friday, October 13, 2023 — just days into the war — an Israeli tank opened fire on a group of Lebanese journalists and clearly marked press vehicles. The tank launched two 120 mm tank shells into Lebanon, directly at the journalists — clearly marked “PRESS” — from across the UN-demarcated Blue Line that separates Lebanon from occupied Palestine. The first shell instantly killed Reuters reporter Issam Abdallah. Moments later, a second shell pierced a nearby vehicle, which belonged to an Al Jazeera team, and wounded six other journalists. One of the six wounded, Agence France-Presse photographer Christina Assi, later had to have her right leg amputated.

By directly targeting local and international media, Israel’s military violence effectively imposed an almost total news blackout on Western media reporting from southern Lebanon. And so, by the time Israel’s military offered its October 2024 embeds, Western media were eager to attend.

A little over a month after Issam Abdallah’s killing, on November 21, 2023, Israeli forces killed two more Lebanese reporters whose deaths went largely unnoticed by Western media: TV correspondent Farah Omar and videographer Rabih al-Maamari, in the southern Lebanon town of Tayr Harfa, located about a mile from the border. Both worked for Al Mayadeen, a Beirut-based satellite channel founded by former Al Jazeera staffers.

Israel’s government often issues barely veiled death threats against journalists by accusing them of being or working with “terrorists.” Barely a week before killing Omar and al-Maamari, Israel had banned Al Mayadeen’s  website and operations in Palestine. Then-Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant labeled its employees “terrorists masquerading as journalists.” Al Mayadeen released a statement linking the “intentional killing of our beloved colleagues Farah and Rabih” to the ban — and implying that Israel was attempting to silence the network by killing its reporters.

It worked. By directly targeting local and international media, Israel’s military violence effectively imposed an almost total news blackout on Western media reporting from southern Lebanon (local reporters, as always, continued to risk their lives in order to do their jobs). And so, by the time Israel’s military offered its October 2024 embeds, Western media were eager to attend.

Reward and Punishment

Most of the journalists who attended the October embeds were based in Israel, not Lebanon. That’s important because foreign journalists who want to report from Israel have to sign a document agreeing to abide by the military censor in order to get a press visa. And under Israel’s emergency law, which dates back to the British Mandate, all journalists reporting on “security issues” have to clear stories with the Israeli Military Censor before publication.

The military censor was always an undemocratic institution; but since it launched its ongoing genocide, the Netanyahu government has used the censor in an increasingly aggressive and propagandistic manner, suppressing and redacting the highest number of articles in over a decade, and weaponizing it internally as a political tool to silence criticism or punish news outlets that don’t play along.

Press freedom watchdogs consider this kind of prior restraint a violation of press integrity, and so do many media outlets. Perhaps for this reason, Western media outlets are often coy or vague about disclosing their cooperation with Israel’s military censorship to their readers. But in November 2023, CNN disclosed that it had agreed to submit all of its material and footage to the military censor in exchange for highly coveted permission to enter Gaza under military protection.

And after attending the October 2024 embeds, the Associated Press posted this disclaimer on its video story: “++PLEASE NOTE THIS MATERIAL WAS SHOT BY AN AP VIDEOGRAPHER EMBEDDED WITH ISRAELI FORCES. AS A CONDITION OF THE EMBED, THE AP AGREED TO SUBMIT THE MATERIAL TO THE ISRAELI MILITARY CENSOR, WHICH DID NOT MAKE DELETIONS++”

But the AP’s claim that its reporting was somewhat free from censorship or “deletions” — a caveat included in several of the embedded reports — glosses over the Israeli government’s two most powerful forms of censorship: its tight grip over what journalists are actually allowed to see, and which media outlets it chooses to invite on such trips.

The October war tours were not embeds in the usual sense of the word, where a journalist accompanies a military unit on routine military exercises like patrols and raids. Rather, they were one-time embeds on a single event, with no military objective, organized solely for public relations. This made them an awkward hybrid between a traditional embed and the kind of all-expense-paid publicity trip that journalists refer to as junkets, freebies, and dog-and-pony shows.

Corporations and even governments often underwrite these trips in return for favorable coverage. The bargain is almost always implicit: violate it by writing a critical story, and you won’t be asked back. Most news outlets tout their strict rules against accepting invitations to expenses-paid trips, supposedly in order to avoid this unspoken quid pro quo.

The AP’s claim that its reporting was somewhat free from censorship or “deletions” glosses over the Israeli government’s two most powerful forms of censorship: its tight grip over what journalists are actually allowed to see, and which media outlets it chooses to invite on such trips.

But since the war on terror era, Western militaries have increasingly used embeds themselves as a system of reward and punishment. As Western governments normalize the state-sanctioned murder of journalists, they dangle the implied promise of safety for embedded journalists — and the implied threat of attack for the unembedded. And so, in southern Lebanon, the Western news outlets that embedded with Israel’s invading forces were getting something infinitely more valuable than free plane tickets or drinks: access.

The Tour

On October 13, 2023, the Israeli military minders shepherded their flock of journalists through “a rustic nature trail,” as The New York Times described it — in fact, the dense Mediterranean shrubbery of Labbouneh, a forest of pine and oak trees that extends for several kilometers along the Blue Line. The invading forces had shaved bare vast tracts of the rolling hills, flattening Labbouneh’s lush greenery with bulldozers.

The media outlets that the Israeli military handpicked to attend its October embeds included The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Telegraph, The BBC, Fox News, The Associated Press, Reuters, The Financial Times, and Agence France-Presse. The news reports they produced, across nearly a dozen disparate news organizations, contain striking similarities in language, tone and sourcing.

As Western governments normalize the state-sanctioned murder of journalists, they dangle the implied promise of safety for embedded journalists — and the implied threat of attack for the unembedded.

None of the embedded reporters reflected upon the gaping asymmetry of the battlefield: the thousands of tons of heavy machinery, fortified bases, massive walls, and observation towers on the other side of the border, pitted against lightly armed squatting sites. And while almost all noted October 7 as a starting point for the current Israeli violence, none noted a critical bit of context: this was the fourth such Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the last four decades.

One of the places they stopped that day was just 4 kilometers from where Israel had killed Issam Abdallah exactly one year earlier. Yet none of the journalists thought fit to mention that the military regime escorting them had targeted and killed their own colleagues just a 15-minute ride from where they were standing. This omission speaks volumes about Western corporate media’s dehumanizing subjectivity: had Hezbollah killed a Western colleague, instead of Israel killing a Lebanese one, they would probably have found it worth noting.

Instead, all reported the same three unsubstantiated central arguments: that Hezbollah had been planning to invade Israel in order to carry out an October 7-style attack; that Israel must eliminate Hezbollah’s infrastructure before that happens; and that the United Nations is a threat to Israel’s safety. All three arguments, delivered by Israeli military and political operatives, featured prominently and repeatedly in the text and videos.

In fact, voices from or supporting the Israeli regime were so pervasive — from generals, ground commanders, foot soldiers, official statements, and policies, as well as think tanks — that they appeared in nearly every single newspaper paragraph or script sentence produced by the embedded media.

The New York Times piece “Just Over the Border from Israel, a Hezbollah Cache of Explosives and Mines” quoted, referenced, or did both with Israeli security sources in 20 of its 25 paragraphs; The Washington Post article “On IDF tour of southern Lebanon, signs of Hezbollah tunnels and arms,” quoted or referenced Israeli sources in 25 out of 30 paragraphs; The Wall Street Journal “Inside Israel’s Ground Offensive in Lebanon” quoted Israeli officials in 24 out 29 paragraphs. And in just 3 minutes and 30 seconds, the BBC’s report quoted Israeli sources over a dozen times.

Voices from or supporting the Israeli regime were so pervasive — from generals, ground commanders, foot soldiers, official statements, and policies, as well as think tanks — that they appeared in nearly every single newspaper paragraph or script sentence produced by the embedded media.

In just over a dozen reports, only a few offered an outside critique of Israel’s violent assault on Lebanon: the BBC’s print article mentioned Amnesty International’s criticism of Israel’s evacuation warnings, which it called inadequate; and the Associated Press attempted to balance out Israel’s claims by quoting a Lebanese military analyst (a retired brigadier general who actually reinforced Israel’s message, by comparing Hezbollah’s underground tunnels to those of Hamas in Gaza). Ironically, Fox News was the only outlet to quote a Lebanese civilian — briefly — at the report’s end: “The situation got very bad,” said Fatima, a young woman holding a baby. “They began hitting our village, and said we had to leave the village, so we fled.” Fox’s Trey Yingst was also the only embedded reporter to challenge Israeli officials about their displacement of Lebanese civilians.

Instead, the vast majority of correspondents on the embed  transmitted the Israeli military’s talking points without pushback or commentary, including its most incendiary claim: that Hezbollah was preparing to invade northern Israel, instead of the other way around.

“All the Equipment You Need:” The Telegraph

“This is one of 700 Hezbollah drop points,” said Telegraph Middle East Correspondent Jotam Confino, crouching in front of a thin sheet of corrugated metal, covered in camouflage mesh and lifted a few feet off the ground — the type of patchwork shelter you might find on a reality show about survival in the woods. On top of it, the Israelis had arranged a series of props: a couple of military uniforms, one helmet, a pair of boots, and a pocket-sized solar charger and cable, akin to the gimmicky USB phone chargers for sale on Amazon. (Most have low reviews).

Confino’s “drop point” was probably an observation post of the border, something that Israel has in abundance just over the fence. But instead of pointing that out, The New York Times quoted Israeli military minders who called it evidence of Hezbollah’s “meticulous preparations to carry out its long-threatened plan to invade northern Israel.”

The New York Times, citing one of the Israeli commanders, wrote that Hezbollah had “about 100” such outposts in one square kilometer (a little under half a square mile); The Wall Street Journal, like The Telegraph’s Confino, quoted Israeli estimates of 700; and the Associated Press quoted an Israeli military official who said they had found “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds.”

The idea that boots, a helmet, and some light matériel are “all the equipment you need” to invade the region’s only nuclear power might strike some as deserving of outright skepticism. But if there was irony here, Confino did not see it: he repeated the Israeli military’s claims, without question, and the rest of his fellow embeds did likewise.

“You see here explosive devices, you got boots, you got helmets,” said Confino, gesturing toward this makeshift campsite — “all the equipment you need if you are planning to invade the Israeli border, which is what the Israelis said that they [Hezbollah] were going to prepare.”

The idea that boots, a helmet, and some light matériel are “all the equipment you need” to invade the region’s only nuclear power — no tanks, no artillery, no air cover — might strike some as deserving of mild journalistic inquiry, if not outright skepticism. But if there was irony here, Confino did not see it: he repeated the Israeli military’s claims, without question, and the rest of his fellow embeds did likewise.

“Conquering the Galilee”: The New York Times

Both The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post cited the Israeli military’s invocation of October 7 in their opening paragraphs as justification for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. “You can just imagine if something like what happened on Oct 7, [2023] happened here,” Israeli General Yiftach Norkin told The Washington Post.

But New York Times reporter Isabel Kershner went even further. Despite the usual boilerplate disclaimers that the paper “could not independently verify” the military’s claims, Kershner treated this theoretical Hezbollah threat as an established fact. The supposed impending Hezbollah attack, she wrote, uncritically paraphrasing Israeli military officials, “could have been much more devastating than the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7 last year.”

Kershner also repeated Norkin’s claims that Hezbollah leadership “spoke openly about conquering the Galilee.” As if to fact-check Norkin’s claim — and legitimate it — Kershner added: “Mr. Nasrallah had made public statements vowing to take over parts of the Galilee, in northern Israel, for more than a decade.”

To bolster this claim, Kershner linked to a 13-year-old report on a speech Nasrallah gave in 2011. But what she neglected to mention is that Nasrallah had threatened to invade Israel only in the case of a war — and, crucially, that he made this threat in response to explicit Israeli threats to invade Lebanon. In other words: while Nasrallah’s statement was effectively “we will invade them if they invade us,” Israel’s argument was “we had to invade them because they might have invaded us.”

Nasrallah’s actual words were: “Be ready for the day, should war be forced upon Lebanon, where the resistance's leadership will ask you to take over the Galilee.” [Italics added.] As Reuters reported at the time, Nasrallah’s speech came in response to threats from incoming Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who had just toured the border in order to publicly warn Israeli troops stationed there to be ready to invade Lebanon again.

Kershner has a long history of cozying up to Israeli officials in her reporting. In the early to mid-2000s, her husband headed an “information strategy” program, dedicated to burnishing Israel’s image, at a government-funded Israeli think tank — a think tank that Kershner often quoted, without any disclosure to New York Times readers.

And like at least two other New York Times staffers, Kershner has a son who served in the Israeli military while she was assigned to cover Israel — a conflict of interest that might have disqualified them from the beat, or at least required a full disclosure, if the Times had followed its own guidelines for ethical journalism.

“Bent on Destruction”: The Associated Press

Kershner was not the only October embed to construct a story around Israel’s hypothetical Hezbollah invasion. The Associated Press also repeated Israeli claims, without question, that Nasrallah “had signaled in speeches that Hezbollah could launch an attack on northern Israel.”

The AP even used the tour’s talking points as bold subheadings in its story, transforming the news article into a bullet point summary of an Israeli press release: “Hezbollah built a network of tunnels in multiple areas of Lebanon;” “Hezbollah’s tunnels could be hindering Israel’s mission;” and “Israel believes Hezbollah was planning an Oct. 7-style invasion.”

Instead of questioning this claim, the AP further substantiated it by adding that, in May 2023, Hezbollah had “staged a simulation of an incursion into northern Israel with rifle-toting militants on motorcycles bursting through a mock border fence bedecked with Israeli flags.”

What the AP failed to note is that Israel routinely stages similar exercises itself — on a much grander scale. In fact, Israel has constructed an entire simulacrum of an Arab city in order to stage mock invasions of Lebanese and Palestinian towns: the $45 million, 60-acre “mini-Gaza,” or Urban Warfare Training Center, built to mimic Lebanese and Palestinian urban landscapes, complete with storefronts, apartment buildings, mosques, and even Arabic graffiti. (The AP even did a photo essay on it.)

And while the AP defined Hezbollah as “a group bent on destruction of Israel,” it never noted that Israel has threatened to not only destroy Lebanon, but send it “back to the stone age,” as numerous Israeli generals have said.

Israel even has a name for this strategy: the infamous “Dahieh Doctrine,” which Israel developed in the aftermath of its 2006 war on Lebanon, enshrines disproportionate force against civilian targets.

“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on," said then-Major-General Gadi Eisenkot, who is now a member of Israel’s Knesset, to an Israeli newspaper in 2008. “We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases. This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”

“Hezbollah's Nature Reserves”: The New York Times

The Israelis were “clearing trees and brush from the steep Lebanese slopes, hoping to remove the threat of well-concealed Hezbollah fighters breaching the border,” noted Washington Post correspondent Steven Hendrix, relaying Israel’s rationale for its deforestation without question. He later added that Israeli soldiers told him they will remain in this area “until they have scrubbed the strip of weapons, fighters and vegetation.”

The Wall Street Journal also echoed the Israeli military’s line that its troops uprooted trees and bushes along the border in order to “hunt for bunkers and to remove cover for Hezbollah operatives.” And as usual, New York Times correspondent Isabel Kershner outdid herself, noting that “bulldozers had cut through the bush, long known in Israel as ‘Hezbollah’s nature reserves.’”

"This kind of coverage feeds into overall dehumanization of Palestinians, and now Lebanese in the south. It readily accepts the narrative that these towns are devoid of real people.” —Mohamad Bazzi, journalism professor

In fact, the phrase “Hezbollah’s nature reserves” is derogatory slang coined by Israeli soldiers in one of their previous invasions. Like “Hezbollah-land,” “Hezbollah stronghold,” or “land of tunnels,” it divorces the land from its people, not to mention from Lebanese national sovereignty.

Western media’s repeated use of terms like this conjures an image of a land empty of civilians and civilian infrastructure — a militarized zone that is fair ground for takeover and destruction. “This kind of coverage feeds into overall dehumanization of Palestinians, and now Lebanese in the south,” said Bazzi, the journalism professor. “It readily accepts the narrative that these towns are devoid of real people.”

What the embedded reporters failed to mention, for all their colorful descriptions, was law. Article 54 of Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1977 explicitly forbids the destruction of agricultural lands, natural habitats, food, drinking water installations, and farming equipment, as well as any other “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population” — for any motive.

Israel’s “scorched earth strategy,” noted Hussein Chaabane of the Lebanese watchdog group Legal Agenda, shows an intent to make this geographical area into a militarized buffer zone, uninhabitable by civilians, “such that destruction becomes a goal in and of itself, thereby disproving the claim that it is merely collateral damage.”

The BBC: “Morphing From Civilians Into Combatants”

“This is what we call an exchange zone,” an Israeli officer told Williamson, the BBC correspondent, showing her another cache of small arms — sleeping bags, body armor, rifles and ammunition, all of it small enough to be hidden inside a barrel. “They’re morphing from civilians into combatants. All this gear is designed to manoeuvre into [Israel] and conduct operations on the Israeli side. This is not defensive equipment.”

Williamson did not reveal which town she visited, because the Israeli military censored this information “for military reasons.” But Legal Agenda’s geo-mapping investigation later identified it as Blida, where the invading Israelis flattened one of the oldest mosques in the country.

At no point did Williamson ask who forced the villagers to leave and destroyed their homes. Instead, she relied only on Israel’s claims: “The army told us they found dozens of booby-trapped houses here and demolished them,” she reported. To back up this claim, her Israeli military minder showed viewers neatly piled boxes containing munition rounds that she describes as “sophisticated anti-tank missiles, shoulder-launch rockets, and nightscopes.”

But we got no equally breathless mention of Israel’s stockpile of nuclear warheads, nor of its vast arsenal of cutting-edge land, air, and sea missiles, gunships, tanks, and aircrafts.

At no point did Williamson ask who forced the villagers to leave and destroyed their homes. Instead, she relied only on Israel’s claims: “The army told us..."

Dozens of well-armed bases and listening outposts dominate the hilltops with massive antenna structures, reportedly eavesdropping on Lebanese villages. From these positions, Israeli troops have repeatedly fired on Lebanese citizens over the years, targeting villagers, soldiers, UN troops, even shepherds and sheep who get too close to the fortified concrete walls.

Although the embedded reporters went to great lengths to provide an inventory of Hezbollah’s relatively light weapons, they did zero parallel accounting of the far more destructive heavy projectiles Israel has launched from the border area. These include howitzer shells and tank cannons, as well as internationally banned weapons such as white phosphorus and cluster munitions — both of which erased dozens of villages and farms and displaced over 1 million people.

Wall of Propaganda

Less than two weeks after the October war tour, an Israeli airstrike killed three more Lebanese journalists, at 3:30 a.m., while they were sleeping: cameraman Ghassan Najjar and broadcast engineer Mohammed Reda, both of whom worked for Al Mayadeen, and Wissam Qassem, a cameraman for the Hezbollah-owned television channel Al Manar. In its messaging to Western media, Israel initially claimed it struck “a Hezbollah military structure” while “the terrorists were located inside.”

In fact, all three journalists were fast asleep at the Hasbaya Village Club, a guesthouse that was hosting over a dozen local reporters. United Nations peacekeepers had relayed the hotel’s location to Israeli forces, in keeping with the internationally recognized protocol known as deconfliction. A Human Rights Watch investigation found that the bombing — carried out with a US-manufactured Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kit — was most likely a deliberate attack on civilians, and yet another apparent war crime. 

In their seminal 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman argued that the mass media’s failure to question state violence reinforces or normalizes it — thereby “manufacturing” consent to that violence.

By failing to question Israel’s numerous false claims, let alone the legitimacy of its invasion, the media outlets that participated in the October 2024 tour helped Israel to manufacture consent for a series of Israeli war crimes in Lebanon: killing almost 4,400 people, including journalists and healthcare workers; leveling large swathes of the south, even wiping several villages off the map entirely; raining white phosphorus on civilian areas; and destroying the lives and livelihoods of entire communities for generations to come.

Less than two weeks after the October war tour, an Israeli airstrike killed three more Lebanese journalists while they were sleeping. In its messaging to Western media, Israel initially claimed it struck “a Hezbollah military structure” while “the terrorists were located inside.”

“Media corporations, particularly Western media corporations, have played a facilitative role — not just a separate observer role — in crimes perpetrated by the Israeli regime,” said the attorney and former senior United Nations human rights official Craig Mokhiber, who publicly resigned from the UN in October 2023 to protest its failure in the current genocide. “These companies are knowingly complicit in the perpetration of things that are defined as crimes in international law; they are morally culpable, beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

Mokhiber argues that when media agree to military censorship as a condition of embedding with the Israeli army, they abdicate their ethical responsibility to make public any information they have about the perpetration of war crimes (or even plans for war crimes). “At that moment, they cease to be journalists,” Mokhiber told The Public Source, “and they become a part of the propaganda machine of the Israeli military.”

Mokhiber wants the international community to hold Western media organizations accountable for their complicity with Israel’s war crimes — not  just morally, but also legally. There is some precedent for this: the post-World War II Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines “Direct and public incitement to commit genocide” as a punishable act. In 1945, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg indicted and later executed Julius Streicher, the publisher of the antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer (The Attacker), for incitement to hatred and violence. Over half a century later, a United Nations tribunal prosecuted three Rwandan media executives for crimes against humanity for hate-filled radio broadcasts before and during the Rwandan genocide.

There’s another precedent in the United States: in the past, newspapers spread racial terrorism and even prompted lynchings of African-Americans by spreading lies about them, such as false allegations that they raped white women. Some of those newspapers are only now beginning to apologize for their role in promoting these crimes.

When media agree to military censorship as a condition of embedding with the Israeli army, "they cease to be journalists and they become a part of the propaganda machine of the Israeli military." —Craig Mokhiber, international human rights lawyer

Since the October War began, the Western journalistic establishment has shredded much of what little credibility it still had after the Iraq war by publishing similar material — such as the now-debunked and discredited stories that Hamas fighters and Gazan civilians beheaded babies and systematically raped Israeli women. “You hear a lot of complaints from editors about misinformation, that the public doesn’t trust the media,” said Bazzi. “I argue their actions are part of the problem. They are contributing to the demise of traditional media. They’re eroding their own credibility in the attempt to protect Israel and the US. They are willing to lose that credibility — in the long run, that is what is happening.”

Mokhiber is urging the public to hold media civilly accountable — at least in the court of public opinion — by boycotting mainstream outlets, canceling their subscriptions, and supporting independent media outlets instead.

“They say the first casualty of war is the truth,” Mohkiber told The Public Source. “And in a situation like this — where you have the most powerful, well-financed, most visible media outlets actually aligned in the crimes that are being perpetrated by the Israeli regime — you have a very special challenge of getting the truth out, despite that wall of propaganda that's been built up so powerfully in recent years. And luckily, since there are alternative sources like social media and independent media, that actually is happening.”