NYT ‘investigates’ genocide, uncovers nothing but ‘loosened standards’ | Media

According to the US document, Israel never intended to ‘wipe the Gaza Strip off the face of the Earth’ – it simply ‘weaken its [nonexistent] protection system intended to protect civilians’.

On Thursday, The New York Times published a million words to be exposed on the ongoing Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip supported by the United States called Israel loosened its rules for bombing Hamas fighters, killing many more civilians. It can also be listened to on the newspaper page – if you happen to have 28 minutes and 27 seconds to kill.

The word “genocide” appears exactly once in the article – and only as a claim that Israel denies: “Israel, which has been accused of genocide in a case before the International Court of Justice, says it is complying with international law by taking all feasible precautions to reduce civilian casualties.”

And yet, as the article itself shows, any such pretense of precaution was essentially thrown to the wind on October 7, 2023, when the Israeli military issued an order that gave mid-ranking officers unprecedented latitude in authorizing strikes on Gaza. In previous clashes with Hamas, according to the Times, “many Israeli strikes were authorized only after officers concluded that no civilians would be harmed” — which would certainly be news to thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. slaughtered Israel only in the last 20 years.

The new order gave officers “the power to risk killing up to 20 civilians” in each strike and meant the military could “target ordinary militants while they are at home surrounded by relatives and neighbors, rather than just when they were out alone”. One wonders how the Israeli military nevertheless managed to destroy entire residential buildings in Gaza in every war leading up to this by only targeting militants “when they were alone outside”.

Patting themselves on the back for their exposé, the article’s authors point out that the October 7 order had not been previously reported—as if the fact that Israeli officers were authorized to risk killing civilians was somehow surprising in a genocide. But instead of reporting the genocide as fact, the Western corporate media instead obfuscates the bigger picture by engaging in things like extensive investigations into Israel’s bureaucratic maneuvers to “loosen” the rules of war.

More than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 2023 the real number of dead is undoubtedly significantly higher. According to Article II Genocide Conventiongenocide means “acts committed with the 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 or mental harm to members of the group”.

But the corporate media refuses to take even the Israeli leadership itself at their word for this and flaunting genocidal intentions day in and day out for almost 15 months. Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Nissim Vaturi, for example, took to Platform X at the beginning of the war to declare: “Now we all have one common goal – to erase the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth.” Shortly thereafter, Israeli President Isaac Herzog called proposal that the civilians in Gaza were absolutely legitimate targets: “The whole nation is responsible there.”

While the Times report includes damning details regarding Israel’s behavior, at the end of the day Hamas is always to blame – and Israel is always allowed to remain in the self-proclaimed club of ethical and “civilized” nations. This allows the newspapers of the United States to project a panel of honest criticism without fundamentally condemning Israel’s current campaign of mass extermination.

Thus the Times informs us that “unlike Hamas, which indiscriminately fires rockets at civilian areas, Israel and all Western militaries operate under a multi-layered surveillance system that assesses the legality of planned attacks.” Never mind that much of the Israeli military activity described in the article itself could qualify as indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas.

Following the October 7 order, a second order issued on October 8, 2023, allowed the military to “cumulatively endanger up to 500 civilians per day” in strikes. The article continued: “In any case, the restriction was lifted two days later – allowing officers to sign as many strikes as they believed were legal.”

Other findings from the Times investigation also implied blatant indiscrimination, such as that the Israelis “often relied on a crude statistical model to assess the risk of harming civilians, and sometimes launched attacks on targets hours after they were last located, increasing the risk from a mistake. “. In addition, the military “struck at a pace that made it difficult to confirm that it was hitting legitimate targets” while also adopting “an unproven new target-finding system that used artificial intelligence on a massive scale.”

But that, after all, is what happens in genocide. If the Times reporters hadn’t been so committed to parroting the American establishment’s line about Israel and the disappearance of the G word, they might have been less shocked to discover that “on several occasions the higher [Israeli] commanders authorized strikes on Hamas leaders that they knew would each endanger more than 100 non-combatants – crossing an extraordinary threshold for a modern Western military.”

Meanwhile, while the Times bogs down the details of Israel’s military orders, Israel continues its goal of “wiping the Gaza Strip off the face of the Earth” with extraordinary quantities American money and weapons. And unfortunately, media complicity in allowing Israel to get away with genocide is not at all uncommon.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.