According to the official US newspaper, Israel never intended to “wipe the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth” – it simply “weakened its (non-existent) system of safeguards intended to protect civilians.”
On Thursday, The New York Times published a multibillion-word article about the ongoing U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, titled Israel Relaxed Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many additional civilians. It can also be listened to on the newspaper’s website – if you have 28 minutes and 27 seconds to kill.
The word “genocide” appears exactly once in the article – and only as an allegation that Israel denies: “Israel, which has been accused of genocide in a case before the International Court of Justice, says it is complying international law by taking all possible precautionary measures to minimize civilian casualties.
And yet, as the article itself demonstrates, any such pretense of precaution was largely rejected on October 7, 2023, when the Israeli military issued an order giving mid-ranking officers unprecedented latitude to authorize attacks on Gaza. In previous conflicts with Hamas, according to the Times, “many Israeli strikes were approved only after officers concluded that no civilians would be harmed” – which would certainly be news to thousands of Palestinians of Gaza massacred by Israel in the last 20 years alone. .
The new order gave officers “the authority to risk killing up to 20 civilians” with each strike and meant the military could “target rank-and-file militants when they were at home, surrounded by relatives and neighbors, at instead of only when they were alone outside. One wonders how the Israeli army nevertheless managed to pulverize entire buildings in Gaza in every war preceding this one, only targeting militants “when they were alone outside.”
Welcoming their scoop, the article’s authors point out that the October 7 order had not been previously reported – as if the fact that Israeli officers were allowed to risk killing civilians was at all surprising in a genocide. But rather than presenting the genocide as fact, Western mainstream media obscures the bigger picture by, for example, preoccupying itself with in-depth investigations into Israel’s bureaucratic maneuvers to “relax” the rules of war.
More than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, although the actual death toll is undoubtedly significantly higher. According to Article II of the Genocide Convention, genocide means “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”, including “killing members of the group” or “causing serious bodily injury”. or mental harm to members of the group.”
But the mainstream media refuses to even take the word of Israeli leaders and the display of genocidal intentions day after day for almost 15 months. Knesset Deputy Speaker Nissim Vaturi, for example, took to the X platform at the start of the war to proclaim: “Now we all have a common goal: to wipe the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth. Shortly after, Israeli President Isaac Herzog suggested that civilians in Gaza were entirely legitimate targets: “It’s an entire nation that is responsible.”
Even though the Times report contains damning details about Israel’s behavior, in the end, it is still Hamas’s fault — and Israel is still allowed to remain in the self-proclaimed club of ethical and “civilized” nations. This allows the US newspaper of record to project a veneer of impartial criticism without fundamentally condemning Israel’s current campaign of mass extermination.
Thus the Times informs us that “unlike Hamas, which fires rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas, Israel and all Western militaries operate under a multi-tiered surveillance system that evaluates the legality of planned strikes.” Never mind that much of the Israeli military activity described in the article itself appears to qualify as indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas.
After the October 7 order, another order issued on October 8, 2023 allowed the military to “cumulatively endanger up to 500 civilians per day” during strikes. The article continues: “In any event, the limit was removed two days later, allowing agents to sign as many strikes as they believed legal. »
Other findings in the Times investigation also involve blatant indiscrimination, such as that the Israelis “often relied on a rudimentary statistical model to assess the risk of civilian harm, and sometimes launched strikes on targets for hours after locating them for the last time, thus increasing the risk of error.” “. Additionally, the military “strike at a pace that made it more difficult to confirm that it was striking legitimate targets” while adopting an “unproven system for finding new targets using artificial intelligence at scale.”
But after all, that’s what happens in genocide. If Times journalists had not been so determined to repeat the American establishment line on Israel and eliminate the G-word, perhaps they would have been less shocked to find that “on a few occasions, Senior (Israeli) commanders approved strikes against Hamas leaders that they knew would each endanger more than 100 noncombatants – crossing an extraordinary threshold for a contemporary Western military.
Meanwhile, while the Times gets bogged down in the details of Israeli military orders, Israel continues its goal of “wiping the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth” with the help of extraordinary amounts of money and aid. American weapons. And unfortunately, the media’s complicity in letting Israel commit genocide is nothing out of the ordinary.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
