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Media Find Ways to Minimize Israel's Murder of Paramedics Belén Fernández ([link removed])


NBC: Israeli military walks back account of the killing of Gaza medical workers after video appears to contradict its version

NBC (4/7/25 ([link removed]) ) presented evidence that killed 15 aid workers and buried their bodies along with their vehicles as an IDF "mistake."

Israeli soldiers on March 23 massacred ([link removed]) 15 Palestinian medics and rescue workers near the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, where Israel’s ongoing US-backed genocide ([link removed]) has officially killed more than 50,000 ([link removed]) Palestinians since October 2023. The slaughter took place before dawn, as a convoy of ambulances and a fire truck from the Palestinian Civil Defense service endeavored to respond to a lethal Israeli attack on another ambulance, which had itself been attempting to rescue victims of an Israeli airstrike.

Eight Palestinian Red Crescent paramedics, six Civil Defense workers and one UN staff member were murdered by Israeli gunfire. Their mutilated bodies were bulldozed into a mass grave, their vehicles crushed and buried as well.

The initial Israeli narrative ([link removed]) was that nine of the emergency responders were militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and that the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously...without headlights or emergency signals.”

As it turns out, however, all headlights and emergency signals were very much on—not that it’s fine to massacre people for driving with no lights, of course. When, after a week of negotiations with Israeli occupying forces, another convoy was finally permitted to access the mass grave and unearth the bodies, the mobile phone of massacre victim Rifat Radwan was found to contain ([link removed]) footage ([link removed]) of the lead-up to the assault, which shows the clearly marked rescue vehicles advancing with emergency lights on. A barrage of Israeli gunfire then persists for more than five minutes, as Radwan’s screen goes black and he bids farewell to his mother.

Following the release of the video footage, Israel conceded that perhaps its version of events had been partially “mistaken ([link removed]) ”—but only the claim about the headlights being off. The number of alleged “terrorists” on board was furthermore downgraded from nine to six ([link removed]) , the other fatalities naturally being labeled human shields ([link removed]) and therefore fundamentally the fault of Hamas.

Anyway, no one committing a genocide really cares about the precise identities of 15 people; mass indiscriminate killing is, after all, the whole point of the undertaking. Since Israel broke ([link removed]) the ceasefire with Hamas on March 18, the United Nations calculates ([link removed]) that more than 100 children per day have been killed or injured in Gaza.


** Ludicrous headlines
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NYT: Video Shows Aid Workers Killed in Gaza Under Gunfire Barrage, With Ambulance Lights On

The New York Times' lead (4/4/25 ([link removed]) ) says the aid workers were killed "when Israeli troops hit them with a barrage of gunfire"—but the headline omits Israel altogether, and the subhead treats Israel's responsibility as a UN accusation.

Notwithstanding reality, the Western corporate media somehow could not bring itself to report this particular massacre of medics without beating around the bush. The New York Times (4/4/25 ([link removed]) ), for example, ran the following ludicrous headline: “Video Shows Aid Workers Killed in Gaza Under Gunfire Barrage, With Ambulance Lights On.” There was no room, apparently, to mention the role of Israel in said gunfire barrage, although the syntax implies that the ambulance lights may have perpetrated the killing.

The article’s subheadline specifies that “the UN has said Israel killed the workers”—and yet the singular attribution of this opinion to the United Nations is entirely confounding, given that the very first paragraph of the article itself states that the video “shows that the ambulances and fire truck… were clearly marked and had their emergency signal lights on when Israeli troops hit them with a barrage of gunfire.”

For its part, NPR (4/5/25 ([link removed]) ) went with its own similarly diplomatic headline: “Palestinian Medics Say a Video of Gaza Rescue Crews Under Fire Refutes Israeli Claims.” CNN (4/6/25 ([link removed]) ) opted for: “Video Showing Final Moments of Gaza Emergency Workers Casts Doubt on Israeli Account of Killings.”

NBC News (4/7/25 ([link removed]) ) reported that the Israeli military had “walked back its account of its killing of 15 paramedics and emergency workers in southern Gaza last month after video emerged that called into question its version of events”; the Washington Post (4/6/25 ([link removed]) ) concurred that that Israel had “backtracked on its account...after phone video appeared to contradict its claims that their vehicles did not have emergency signals on.”

The Guardian (4/5/25 ([link removed]) ), meanwhile, went as far as to assert that the cell phone footage, which “appears to contradict the version of events put forward” by the Israeli military, “appears to have been filmed from inside a moving vehicle” and features “a red fire engine and clearly marked ambulances driving at night, using headlights and flashing emergency lights.” Imagine if all news reports were written in such roundabout fashion, e.g., “State officials say that what appears to be a bridge collapsed on Thursday into what appears to be a river.”

The New York Times on April 7 produced its own follow-up headline ([link removed]) , “Video Shows Search for Missing Gaza Paramedics Before Israelis Shoot Rescuers”—thanks to which readers were presumably too busy trying to parse the grammar to think about anything else.


** 'Not seen as fully human'
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Al Jazeera: Israel kills, lies, and the Western media believe it

Ahmed Najar (Al Jazeera, 4/6/25 ([link removed]) ) : "Their story is not just about one atrocity. It is about the machinery of doubt that kicks in every time Palestinians are killed."

In the case of Israel, corporate media have institutionalized the practice of dancing around the straightforward statement of fact, which is why we never see headlines like “Israel Massacres 15 Palestinian Medics in Rafah,” or, obviously, any acknowledgement that Israel is currently perpetrating a genocide in Gaza (FAIR.org, 12/12/24 ([link removed]) ). Thanks in large part to Israel’s oh-so-special relationship with the US, which happily bankrolls its crimes against humanity, the media have long grotesquely skewed reporting in Israel’s favor in order to validate the whole arrangement.

As Palestinian political analyst and playwright Ahmed Najar ([link removed]) writes in a recent op-ed for Al Jazeera (4/6/25 ([link removed]) ), the slaughter of the 15 medics and rescuers in Gaza matters because “their story is not just about one atrocity.” It’s about an entire system

in which Palestinians are presumed guilty. A system in which hospitals must prove they are hospitals, schools must prove they are schools and children must prove they are not human shields.

A system in which, “when Palestinians die, their families have to prove they weren’t terrorists first.” Najar concludes: “When Palestinians are not seen as fully human, then their killers are not seen as fully responsible.”

Western media insistence on giving ample space to Israel’s patently absurd arguments naturally doesn’t help matters—as when the Associated Press (4/6/25 ([link removed]) ) allows an anonymous Israeli military official to contend that there was “no mistreatment” in the killing of the 15 medics. How could there ever be “mistreatment” in a genocide?

In its dispatch on how Israel “walked back” its account of the killing, NBC (4/7/25 ([link removed]) ) quoted the Israeli military as saying that soldiers weren’t trying to “hide anything” by burying the 15 corpses, which is kind of like allowing someone caught holding up a bank with an AK-47 the opportunity to state that they weren’t trying to “steal anything.” From a journalistic standpoint, it makes no sense to grant credibility to a clearly disingenuous narrative. From a propaganda perspective, unfortunately, it does.


** 'Good reason to be anxious'
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MSF: Strikes, raids and incursions: Over a year of relentless attacks on healthcare in Palestine

As Doctors Without Borders (1/7/25 ([link removed]) ) noted, Israel has killed hundreds of healthcare workers as part of its war on Gaza.

In the end, the slaughter of these 15 men should come as no surprise; as of January, Israel had already killed more than 1,000 ([link removed]) health workers in Gaza in a little over a year, while engaging in repeated attacks on hospitals ([link removed]) and an obscene decimation of medical infrastructure. On April 1, the UN reported ([link removed]) that 408 aid workers had also been killed since October 2023, including 280 UN staff.

Killing medical personnel and emergency responders has long been Israel’s modus operandi. Recall Razan al-Najjar ([link removed]) , the 21-year-old Palestinian nurse fatally shot by an Israeli sniper in Gaza in 2018, when Israel claimed ([link removed]) that unarmed Palestinian protesters were conducting “kite and balloon terrorism.”

Or recall Israel’s Operation Cast Lead ([link removed]) , which kicked off in Gaza in December 2008 and killed 1,400 Palestinians over a span of 22 days, among them 300 children. The brief assault left 16 medics dead ([link removed]) and damaged more than half of Gaza’s hospitals. The Guardian (3/24/09 ([link removed]) ) quoted the Israeli army as reasoning that “medics who operate in the area take the risk upon themselves”—to hell with the Geneva Conventions.

To be sure, war crimes are all in a day’s work for Israel—and covering them up is, it seems, all in a day’s work for the corporate media. In a dispatch about how Israel "acknowledged flaws' in its "mistaken" account of its killing of the rescue workers, the New York Times Isabel Kershner ([link removed]) (4/6/25 ([link removed]) ) cited Israeli military affairs analyst Amos Harel on how the Israeli soldiers who did the killing “had ‘good reason to be anxious,’ and that it would be wrong to assume immediately that the case was one of ‘murder in cold blood.’”

Naturally, it would be inhumane to assume that any aspect of genocide might transpire in cold blood. And as Israel continues its quest to normalize total depravity, Western journalism is becoming ever more cold-blooded, too.
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