The Broadcasting Standards Authority of NZ have, in their wisdom, ruled that TVNZ's interviews with the Israeli Ambassador & the Head of the Palestinian Delegation to NZ weren't biased or inaccurate

This article was first published at When Life Comes Crashing In and is syndicated here with permission of the author

*‘That interview’ - Jack Tame talking with the Israeli Ambassador 6 months into the Gaza Genocide - Image Source: Screenshot - Q+A*

This ruling didn’t come as much of a shock but I did - and still do - feel a sort of tired rage nevertheless. I knew that it would be notoriously difficult to prove ‘bias’ and ‘unfairness’ - the BSA even has a warning on its website that it’s very rare for them to judge in favour of a complaint that alleges such things. I did, however, have slightly more hope that my complaints concerning the Israeli Ambassador’s blatant lies and racist smears might stick but alas, I was to be disappointed on that front too.

One defence put forward by TVNZ’s Complaints Committe for why the Israeli Ambassador was allowed to spout these lies and smears more or less unchallenged by the interviewer was that they were the Ambassador’s ‘opinion’ to which he was entitled. For some reason best known to themselves, however, TVNZ also decided to go in to bat for the actual veracity of the Ambassador’s opinions - a surprising move which IMHO directly undermined the broadcaster’s claims that it was ‘balanced’ and ‘fair’ and supported my contention that it was, in fact, biased (and quite obviously so) in favour of Israel.

As TVNZ put it - “Information is available from credible sources which supports Mr Yaakoby's viewpoint, and shows that there is a reasonable basis for him to hold this view, and that it is not misleading for viewers to be made aware of his viewpoint”.

They then proceeded to attempt to prove this “reasonable basis” for four of Mr Yaakoby’s particularly egregious claims - (1) Hamas uses human shields and despite Israel taking the utmost care this has led to a higher civilian death toll than Israel would prefer, (2) there was mass rape on October 7, (3) Palestinians ‘teach their children to hate Jews’ and (4) the starvation in Gaza was due to ‘Hamas looting aid’.

Given that I’ve shared several other responses and counter-responses to TVNZ and the BSA concerning this issue here on Substack I thought I may as well round off the story by sharing my response to TVNZ’s attempts to prove the Israeli Ambassador’s lies and smears were ‘reasonable’ and were supported by with ‘credible sources’. Warning - this is quite a lengthy piece so if you’re up for ploughing on you might want to make yourself a cup of tea and deposit yourself in a comfortable chair! If the whole thing’s too much for you could just read the bits that interest you - I have addressed each claim under separate headings. My one comfort is that I made the TVNZ Complaints Committee - and the BSA - work hard for their money!!

So, buckle up - and let’s go!

Mass Rape / Gang Rape Claims

As I noted in a response I submitted to the BSA in late July the reason I focused in on the accuracy – or lack thereof – of Mr Yaakoby’s claims about mass rape on October 7, despite there being multiple other false claims the Israeli Ambassador made during the course of the interview that Jack Tame failed to challenge him on, was because those claims have been absolutely central to galvanising – and maintaining – the support of Western populations for Israel’s assault on Gaza. Because of the role such claims play in the continuation of this ‘war’, accuracy in respect to these claims is absolutely crucial. Unfortunately New Zealand viewers, who would have absorbed all the media coverage of the rape as a weapon of war claims when they were first made, would have come away from the interview with Ran Yaakoby still presuming that mass gang rapes definitely did occur on October 7 – because Jack Tame did not even attempt to challenge the Ambassador on this contention.

The rape as a weapon of war claim – given worldwide coverage by the deeply problematic New York Times article Screams Without Words which I discussed at length in my original submission to the BSA here - became a particularly effective tool in re-galvanising support for Israel’s assault on Gaza – appearing as it did just at a time when global outrage against Israel’s actions was finally starting to look like it might bear some fruit. European allies of Israel were starting to express unease about Israel’s actions in Gaza. Even the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was starting to say things that were uncharacteristically strong for him. And, of course, South Africa was preparing to bring its case against Israel for the crime of genocide against Israel at the ICJ on 29 December. There was, in other words, a groundswell of opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza which looked like it may result in real – and effective – pressure for a ceasefire agreement to be negotiated.

And then – in December 2023 / January 2024 there were a flurry of extremely graphic and disturbing articles outlining alleged Hamas sexual violence on October 7, including the aforementioned’ ‘Screams Without Words’.

As noted above I have already discussed at length the debunking of Screams Without Words – but just for reference here are a number of in-depth reports that have dealt with the inaccuracies and journalistic malpractice in that article including by the The Intercept, The Grayzone, The Electronic Intifada, Mint Press News and – if all of those independent media outlets are not seen as sufficiently ‘credible’ – by The Times of London.

I will now turn my attention to the specific sources provided by TVNZ to back up its contention that the Ambassador had the right to make the claims he did and that Jack Tame was perfectly justified in not at least pointing out to him – and, most importantly, to the viewers, that these claims were contested.

First off the block was an article in The Guardian – published on January 18 – by Jerusalem-based writer Bethan McKernan.

I’ll start by discussing the most credible source relied upon by this article – a woman called Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, an Israeli women’s rights advocate. Here are some examples of how Halperin-Kaddari’s assessment that “there was no doubt” that premediated sexual violence was used as a weapon of war were proved to be essentially baseless. The source for Halperin-Kaddari’s comments in the graphic below is a BBC article – published on 5 December – which cited her more fully than the Guardian article provided by TVNZ but underlines the point that Halperin-Kaddari’s assessment of the type of sexual violence that occurred on October 7 was not backed up by evidence.

*Image Credit: @zei_squirrel - Twitter / X*

Another source of ‘evidence’ cited in this article for claims of mass rape on October 7 was the ‘cross-checking’ & ‘verification’ done by Western media outlets - including the Guardian itself. It was noted that “The New York Times and NBC have both identified more than 30 killed women and girls whose bodies bear signs of abuse, such as bloodied genitals and missing clothes, and according to the Israeli welfare ministry, five women and one man have come forward seeking help for sexual abuse over the past few months”. See below for how the United Nations Report subsequently found no evidence to support these claims.

Another source relied heavily on by the Guardian article provided by TVNZ was first responders, most prominently Zaka volunteers. Zaka has since been revealed to be a deeply problematic organisation - as revealed by an in-depth Haaretz report on January 31st.

As noted by the Intercept:

Given its prominence post-October 7, Zaka has been scrutinized by the Israeli press but not the U.S. media. A blockbuster Haaretz report found after October 7, senior military leaders sidelined Israel Defense Forces soldiers specializing in recovering bodies and preserving evidence and sent in untrained Zaka volunteers instead. Zaka reportedly turned massacre sites into a “war room for donations,” used corpses as fundraising props, “spread accounts of atrocities that never happened,” and botched forensics that are central to Israel’s claim that Hamas carried out a premeditated campaign of mass rape.

As the Intercept further points out

Zaka stories have been essential to justifying Israel’s all-out war against Gaza, which has killed around 30,000 Palestinians in less than five months. Speaking at the United Nations in December, Zaka deputy commander Simcha Greiniman broke down while describing alleged atrocities. He later told the same stories to a meeting of British parliamentarians.

Finally, another piece of ‘evidence’ provided in the Guardian article cited by TVNZ was from confessions extracted via torture:

Israeli intelligence officials, experts and sources with direct knowledge of interrogation reports of captured Hamas fighters believe units that attacked were beforehand given a text that drew on a controversial and contested interpretation of traditional Islamic military jurisprudence, claiming that captives were “the spoils of war”. This potentially legitimised the abduction of civilians and other abuses, without being an explicit instruction to do so.

This claim was particularly inflammatory given it referenced ‘traditional Islamic military jurisprudence’ thus providing fuel to the already raging fire of anti-Islam / anti-Muslim sentiment in the West and placing Hamas into the same basket as organisations like Isis. Using this evidence also gave the Guardian the dubious distinction of being one of the few mainstream Western media outlets to cite - repeatedly - confessions extracted under torture as evidence to prove mass rape occurred on October 7.

Incidentally, the reporter responsible for the Guardian piece provided by TVNZ, Bethan McKernan, also wrote an article claiming that “several incidents of sexual assault and rape from 7 October have been documented by Hamas body camera footage, CCTV, material uploaded to social media, and photographs and videos taken by civilians and first responders, according to several people involved in analysing the footage”. In their in-depth investigation the UN failed to turn up any tangible indications of rape in any of the photos or videos that they reviewed. Despite there being no evidence that this was true it was then repeated by other media outlets such as Politico - see below.

Incidentally, in the Politico piece, the writer - Daniel Lippman - also cited the report of an organisation called Physicians for Human Rights Israel - a report cited by many Western media outlets to support Israel’s claim that Hamas weaponised mass rape on October 7. The organisation itself later admitted this report was riddled with errors, as outlined in this article by Yes Magazine.

Ziv admitted credibility problems with sources and that she did not review all available evidence. She was “unaware” numerous sources had fabricated atrocity stories about Oct. 7. Ziv said, “Yeah, that’s a problem,” about a soldier she quotes whose claim of rape was changed by the government. She quoted volunteers from Zaka, a scandal-plagued organization that collected human remains after Oct. 7, but Ziv did not realize Zaka openly talks of inventing stories. When discussing claims that women’s sexual organs were deliberately mutilated, Ziv conceded, “OK, if there’s alternative explanations you can’t say that.”

The other media source cited by TVNZ to support the Ambassador’s claims as ‘reasonable’ was a BBC article published a few weeks earlier than the Guardian article I’ve already discussed above. The Guardian article essentially repeated many of the claims made in the BBC article and the same points as I have already made about the inaccuracies and journalistic failures of that article also apply to this one. Like the Guardian article the BBC article relied heavily on the testimony of first responders, in particular the Zaka group, who were responsible for many of the particularly lurid claims - since debunked - about atrocities committed on October 7.

Extra sources in this BBC article that were not cited in the Guardian article included May Golan – Israel's Women's Empowerment Minister, who told the BBC

that a few victims of rape or sexual assault had survived the attacks, and that they were all currently receiving psychiatric treatment. "But very, very few. The majority were brutally murdered," she said. "They aren't able to talk - not with me, and not to anyone from the government [or] from the media."

The writers of the UN report (which I will discuss in more detail below) were obviously not able to track any of those victims down, and nor, as far as I know, has anybody else.

Furthermore, May Golan, an Israeli politician who is not at all shy about expressing her hatred of the Palestinians, is perhaps not the most reliable person to cite in an article purporting to be providing evidence of mass rape on October 7. Golan is on record saying

I am personally proud of the ruins of Gaza, and that every baby, even 80 years from now, will tell their grandchildren what the Jews did.

And also

I literally don't care about Gaza … for all I care they can go out and swim in the sea … I want to see dead bodies of terrorists around Gaza.

Another source cited in the BBC article was Dr Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a legal expert at the Davis Institute of International Relations at Hebrew University who said:

It really feels like Hamas learned how to weaponise women's bodies from ISIS [the Islamic State group] in Iraq, from cases in Bosnia … It brings me chills just to know the details that they knew about what to do to women: cut their organs, mutilate their genitals, rape. It's horrifying to know this."

Again – this is a very inflammatory comment in which Elkayam-Levy attempts to position Hamas as being the same as Isis and as those who committed genocide and mass rape in Bosnia.

A few months later Cochav Elkayam-Levy was accused by Israeli media of scamming donors and spreading misinformation. The allegations appeared just days after Elkayam-Levy received the prestigious Israel Prize.

And here is what Ruth Halperin-Kaddari - whose name you may recognise as being one of the sources cited by the Guardian article discussed above - had to say about Elkayam-Levy in the Times article about ‘Screams Without Words’:

As time went on, however, Halperin-Kaddari grew increasingly anxious about the conduct and motives of her colleague — a close associate of the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu — whose work had included a legal manual on the force-feeding of prisoners. “I realised that I cannot accept the way she’s handling things — talking at some points irresponsibly without checking the credibility of information, repeating questionable accounts,” Halperin-Kaddari said. Among them was the apocryphal story about the pregnant woman and her foetus, which was also repeated by Michal Herzog, the president’s wife, in a still uncorrected Newsweek article. Elkayam-Levy also circulated photographs of murdered female soldiers that turned out to be images of Kurdish fighters in Syria. Halperin-Kaddari and her legal team quit the commission and turned to the UN for help. Elkayam-Levy has nonetheless remained the most prominent public voice on the sexual violence of October 7, winning the country’s highest civilian honour, the Israel Prize, in April.

Essentially all the big media outlets were just reporting on each other’s reporting about the mass rape claims – citing the same roster of discredited and unreliable sources and not bothering to fact check any of them. This resulted in a huge number of articles being written about the subject but very little actual light being shed on the subject. In fact a really good example of how these big media outlets are really just repeating each other’s copy is shown in the example below – where Beth McKernan essentially copy-pasted two paragraphs directly out of an earlier NBC News article (December 5, 2023) into her Guardian article of January 18 – the article provided by TVNZ to support their contention the Ambassador’s claims were ‘reasonable’.

The other sources TVNZ relies on to support its contention that the Israel Ambassador’s claims were ‘reasonable’ and thus Jack Tame was justified in not pushing back against them are the two United Nations Reports – the first being the report by Pramila Patten I have already mentioned above. These reports, by their own admission, were unable to independently verify the allegations they report on.

The following statement from the in-depth United Nations Report Detailed findings on attacks carried out on and after October 7 in Israel makes this very clear:

The Commission has reviewed testimonies obtained by journalists and the Israeli police concerning rape but has not been able to independently verify such allegations, due to a lack of access to victims, witnesses and crime sites and the obstruction of its investigations by the Israeli authorities. The Commission was unable to review the unedited version of such testimonies. For the same reasons, the Commission was also unable to verify reports of sexualized torture and genital mutilation. Additionally, the Commission found some specific allegations to be false, inaccurate or contradictory with other evidence or statements and discounted these from its assessment [emphasis mine]

As does the following from the Pramila Patten report:

As a result of the aforementioned challenges, it must be noted that the information gathered by the mission team was in a large part sourced from Israeli national institutions. This is due to the absence of United Nations entities operating in Israel, as well as the lack of cooperation by the State of Israel with relevant United Nations bodies with an investigative mandate. [emphasis mine]

Indeed – as pointed out by investigative journalist Jonathan Cook regarding the Patten Report

The media happily ignored the fact that Patten had no investigative mandate and that she heads what is in effect an advocacy group inside the UN. While Israel has obstructed UN bodies that do have such investigative powers, it welcomed Patten, presumably on the assumption that she would be more pliable.
In fact, she did little more than repeat the same unevidenced claims from Israel that formed the basis of the Times and Guardian’s discredited reporting.

Cook goes on to note:

At a press conference, [Patten] reiterated that she had seen no evidence of a pattern of behaviour by Hamas, or of the use of rape as a weapon of war – the very claims the Western media had been stressing for weeks.
She concluded in the report that she was unable to “establish the prevalence of sexual violence”. And further, she conceded it was not clear if any sexual violence occurring on 7 October was the responsibility of Hamas, or other groups or individuals.
All of that was ignored by the media. In typical fashion, a Guardian article on her report asserted wrongly in its headline: “UN finds ‘convincing information’ that Hamas raped and tortured Israeli hostages”.
Patten’s primary source of information, she conceded, were Israeli “national institutions” – state officials who had every incentive to mislead her in the furtherance of the country’s war aims, as they had earlier done with a compliant media.
As the US Jewish scholar Normal Finkelstein has pointed out, Patten also relied on open-source material: 5,000 photos and 50 hours of video footage from bodycams, dashcams, cellphones, CCTV and traffic surveillance cameras. And yet that visual evidence yielded not a single image of sexual violence. Or as Patten phrased it: “No tangible indications of rape could be identified.”
She admitted she had seen no forensic evidence of sexual violence, and had not met a single survivor of rape or sexual assault.
And she noted that the witnesses and sources her team spoke to – the same individuals the media had relied on – proved unreliable. They “adopted over time an increasingly cautious and circumspect approach regarding past accounts, including in some cases retracting statements made previously”.

I would also like to point out that in late April – as reported by The Times of Israel – the Secretary General of the UN made the decision to leave Hamas off the UN’s sexual violence blacklist. Guterres specifically references Patten’s assessment noting that it

not being investigative in nature and given its limited duration, did not draw conclusions on attribution to specific armed groups or determine prevalence of incidents of conflict-related sexual violence during and after the attacks of 7 October. Such a determination would require a fully-fledged investigation.

What I am trying to drive home here is that the claims the Ambassador was making were – and still are - highly contentious and Jack Tame should have – at a bare minimum – acknowledged this, particularly given the inflammatory nature of these particular claims and the way in which they have been used by Israel and the entire Western political and media class to defend and to excuse the carnage being wrought by Israel in Gaza.

Jack Tame – and his employer TVNZ – should also have been aware at the time of the interview with the Israeli Ambassador that large Western media outlets stood accused, even by their own staff, of anti-Palestinian / pro-Israeli bias and that a lot of what had been reported in those outlets about mass rape on October 7 had been found to be, at best, extremely problematic and, at worst, outright lies.

Even more egregious is the fact that not only did Jack Tame not challenge the Ambassador’s highly contested claims he also failed to point out to the Israeli Ambassador that there was a huge body of evidence that Israel has consistently been documented to have been committing the very same crimes the Ambassador was accusing Hamas of – not just after October 7 but for years before October 7.

Jack Tame and TVNZ should have been aware, particularly given their respect for the United Nations, of a UN report published on February 19th which detailed a number of credible allegations of sexual abuse of Palestinian women by the IDF yet Tame did not see fit to mention this.

We are particularly distressed by reports that Palestinian women and girls in detention have also been subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers. At least two female Palestinian detainees were reportedly raped while others were reportedly threatened with rape and sexual violence,” the experts said.
Photos of women detainees in degrading circumstances were also “reportedly taken by the Israeli army” and uploaded online, they added.
The experts were also concerned that an unknown number of Palestinian women and children, including girls, have reportedly gone missing after contact with the Israeli army in Gaza.

There are countless other reports from many other organisations documenting sexual abuse against Palestinian prisoners. Here are just a tiny fraction of them:

OMCT-SOS Torture Network put out an alert on 26 June, 2002 reporting inhuman and degrading treatment, including sexual harassment of Palestinian women and girls detained in Neve Tertze Women’s Prison.
Save the Children issued a report in 2020 detailing the impact of military detention on Palestinian children in which documented violence and abuse – including sexual abuse - of children in the Israeli prison system.
A UN Human Rights Council report in June 2023 documented discrimination, harassment and degrading treatment including invasive strip searches, sexual abuse and threats in the Israeli prison system against Palestinian men, women and children. The report concluded that these violations “may amount to international crimes prosecutable under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and universal jurisdiction”.

TVNZ should also be aware that the same UN report it relies so heavily upon to support its contention that it was ‘reasonable’ for the Ambassador to claim that Hamas carried out multiple rapes on October 7 also reported the following:

65. The Commission documented many incidents in which ISF systematically targeted and subjected Palestinians to SGBV online and in person since October 7, including through forced public nudity, forced public stripping, sexualized torture and abuse, and sexual humiliation and harassment. These incidents took place during ground operations in conjunction with evacuations and arrests. Based on testimonies and verified video footage and photographs, the Commission finds that sexual violence has been perpetrated throughout the OPT during evacuation processes, prior to or during arrest, at civilian homes and at a shelter for women and girls. Sexual acts were carried out by force, including under threats, intimidation and other forms of duress, in inherently coercive circumstances due to the armed conflict and the presence of armed Israeli soldiers.
103. frequency, prevalence and severity of sexual and gender-based crimes perpetrated against Palestinians since 7 October across the OPT indicate that specific forms of SGBV are part of ISF operating procedures.
104.SGBV constitutes a major element in the ill-treatment of Palestinians, intended to humiliate the community at large. This violence is intrinsically linked to the wider context of inequality and prolonged occupation, which have provided the conditions and the rationale for gender-based crimes, to further accentuate the subordination of the occupied people. The Commission notes that these crimes must be addressed by tackling their root cause; through dismantling the historically oppressive structures and institutionalized system of discrimination against Palestinians, which are at the core of the occupation.

Note that there is absolutely no equivocation in these statements. Note also that the Commission points out that specific forms of sexual and gender-based violence are part of ISF operating procedures. In other words, rape and sexual abuse are being used – by Israel – as a weapon of war. The very accusation that Israel has thrown at Hamas and which has been repeated over and over and over again in Western media can also be directed at Israel – and there an overwhelming body of evidence to support it.

I acknowledge that this report was released after the interview but given TVNZ uses it to defend the Ambassador, and Jack Tame’s failure to hold the Ambassador to account, it is relevant to mention its findings here. As I said above there was already ample evidence concerning the systemic use of sexual and gender-based abuse and violence by Israel towards Palestinians at the time of the interview and Jack Tame should have been aware of this. The Ambassador certainly would have been fully aware of it and should have been made to answer for it given the fact he brought up the subject of rape and sexual violence.

What I’m trying to say here is that in order to be ‘fair and balanced’ – particularly in light of the way in which the Hamas rape stories have been used since the story first broke in late December 2023 to justify and defend Israel’s actions in Gaza – Jack Tame should have, at the bare minimum, informed Q+A viewers that the claims the Ambassador was making were – as I have detailed above – highly contentious. He should also, in the interests of ensuring balance and fairness, have asked the Ambassador his thoughts about the many accusations of sexual abuse and rape levelled against Israeli soldiers.

Such a line of questioning would have shed valuable light on the issue at hand by alerting viewers to the fact that while Israel has accused Hamas of weaponizing sexual violence against Israelis – without providing any corroborating evidence – there is a considerable amount of documented evidence that Israel regularly weaponises sexual violence against Palestinians – not just after October 7 but also for many years before that date. At least then the audience would have realised that this isn’t just a simplistic Israel-good-and-not-at-all-rapey versus Palestinians-evil-and-very-rapey situation.

And despite TVNZ’s high opinion of the level of understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict amongst Q+A viewers, this Israel-good / Palestinians-evil view does tend to be the basic understanding of the vast majority of people. In fact I can attest to this from personal experience. I know a lot of very highly educated people – many with advanced degrees, many who work in high-level professional jobs – and I have been astonished at the level of ignorance shown by most of them about this issue. One woman I know thought it was the Palestinians who were ‘genociding’ the Israelis, another woman thought Israel had been in the Middle East for thousands of years and that the Palestinians were ‘trying to take their land’.

Unfortunately, however, Tame’s deep respect for the Ambassador’s ‘freedom of expression’ and his assumptions that the Ambassador was making ‘reasonable’ claims meant that an extremely simplistic Israel-good/victim – Palestinians-bad/aggressor impression was what ended up being conveyed. And this, in the context of Israel being in the process of committing what had already been judged by the ICJ to be a plausible genocide against the Palestinian people, is an egregious failure on Tame’s part.

As Craig Mokhiber points in an interview with independent journalist Katie Halper the acceptance – and the continual repetition – of the mass rape / gang rape claims by politicians (Kamala Harris did it in the the presidential debate for example) and media is not just bad reporting it is essentially manufacturing consent for genocide. To quote Mokhiber directly:

The atrocity propaganda that has been generated since the 7th of October is generated specifically and knowingly for a particular purpose by the Israeli government … to pave the ground for atrocities to be committed against Palestinians. In other words [the atrocity propaganda] is necessary to dehumanize the Palestinians [and to] create a sense of revulsion in the western public so that Israel can commit genocide with Western support … and everyone participating in this is contributing to the genocide.

Hamas Use Human Shields

The ‘Hamas uses human shields’ claim has been repeatedly used by Israel to defend itself from accusations of deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure such as schools and hospitals during of its ‘operations’ in Gaza including the current one, and to pass the blame for the mass civilian deaths it has inflicted on the population of Gaza onto Hamas.

Indeed, Amnesty International says as much in a 2009 report, noting:

This approach may have also contributed to a culture of impunity among [Israeli] troops, giving a message that unlawful attacks and other violations of international humanitarian law could be blamed on Hamas.

In order to make its case that the Ambassador’s views were ‘reasonable’ and thus didn’t require challenging by Jack Tame, TVNZ cite several sources. The first is a standard comment by the UN Secretary General about Hamas using civilians as human shields in order to balance out his criticism of Israel in which he noted that “continued bombardment are hitting civilians, hospitals, refugee camps, mosques, churches and UN facilities - including shelters. No one is safe”. TVNZ then cite a similarly vague comment by the head of the European Union – Joseph Borrell who criticises Hamas for ‘the use of hospitals and civilians as human shields’.

At the time both these statements were made these men would have been relying purely on the Israeli Defence Force and the Israeli government for their information on the activities of Hamas in Gaza. Given the very long track record of the IDF and the Israeli government of playing fast and loose with the truth I would suggest all such claims should be taken with a very healthy kilogram or two of salt and certainly should not be treated as ‘evidence’ until fully investigated.

In the next section headed “Q+A and Jack Tame has advised that they are aware of the following concerning the human shields issue” TVNZ then repeats the UN Secretary General’s comment - with exactly the same link and repeats the EU leader’s comment with a link to a Reuters article - as opposed to the AP link the provided in the previous section. They also provide another link to the AP piece - already provided above. These three pieces of ‘evidence’ that Hamas uses human shields are exactly the same as the pieces of evidence already cited in the section above.

Does TVNZ think repetition of the same pieces of ‘evidence’ adds to its case that Hamas does, in fact, use human shields? Just saying the same thing over and over again doesn’t actually give the point they’re trying to make more weight. Particularly given that none of the sources cited by TVNZ provide any actual evidence that Hamas uses human shields.

They also cite a NATO document which, despite boldly claiming that Hamas uses human shields, actually provides little evidence to support that claim – as I pointed out in detail in a previous response I submitted to the BSA in late June / early July [discussed in a previous Substack post here]

Finally TVNZ cite several “reputable news channels reporting on Hamas using medical facilities for military purposes (and thus using the civilians in the hospitals as human shields”.

The first was a report by CBS – November 2023 – reporting IDF claims that ‘photos show Hamas rockets at UN facilities’. Given the number of times Israel has been caught out falsifying photographs and lying about such things it is safe to say that anything Israel says about Hamas placing its rockets anywhere should be viewed with some scepticism. This observation is supported by the case of Al Shifa hospital – referred to in two of the articles from ‘reputable news channels’ TVNZ cited – CNN and the Wall Street Journal to support its contention the Ambassador was ‘reasonable’ to claim Hamas uses human shields.

There are a large number of reports detailing the problems surrounding the claims about Al Shifa Hospital and they tell a significantly different story to the two articles cited by TVNZ.

*Al Shifa Hospital just before the IDF laid siege to it - Image Credit: Al Jazeera*

Firstly there was an in-depth investigation by the Washington Post which concluded that

the evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center, according to [their] analysis of open-source visuals, satellite imagery and all of the publicly released IDF materials.

The Post pointed out that according to legal and humanitarian experts this raises critical questions about

whether the civilian harm caused by Israel’s military operations against the hospital — encircling, besieging and ultimately raiding the facility and the tunnel beneath it — were proportionate to the assessed threat.

The Post’s analysis shows:

The rooms connected to the tunnel network discovered by IDF troops showed no immediate evidence of military use by Hamas.
None of the five hospital buildings identified by Hagari appeared to be connected to the tunnel network.
There is no evidence that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards.

Then there was the legal analysis by Elise Baker of Just Security – a Forum on law, rights, and security based at the New York School of Law. Baker pointed out that “there is no argument that Israel has targeted hospitals in Gaza. The debate is why”. She pointed out that

Israeli officials have attempted to justify targeted attacks on health care with claims of military activity in hospitals and ambulances. However, to date, there is virtually no evidence of military activity that would justify the full-scale, prolonged attacks that have systematically dismantled Gaza’s health care system.

She then looks at the Al Shifa Hospital attack as a case study noting

The Israeli military published numerous claims of Hamas military activity within and around the hospital, alleging it contains underground meeting rooms, living quarters, and storage facilities that can house several hundred people and are connected to a broader network of Hamas tunnels. After issuing warnings, the military then encircled, shot at, and raided the hospital on Nov. 15, forcing the hospital to cease normal operations and evacuate staff and patients. The Israeli military stated after their raid that Hamas fighters were not within the hospital when its forces entered, but it published alleged evidence of prior Hamas activity and an “operational command center” at the hospital.

Baker concluded that “ this ‘evidence’ falls far short of proving that Israel’s assault on al Shifa Hospital was justified under international law”.

An investigation by independent media outlet the Electronic Intifada similarly found no evidence to support Israel’s claims that there was a Hamas base under Shifa Hospital. This report further notes that

in the hours before Israeli forces raided al-Shifa, White House spokesperson John Kirby claimed that the US has “information” that Hamas and Islamic Jihad “use some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including al-Shifa, and tunnels underneath them to conceal and to support their military operations and to hold hostages.”
[Kirby] alleged that militants “operate a command-and-control node from al-Shifa in Gaza City. They have stored weapons there, and they’re prepared to respond to an Israeli military operation against that facility.”
Kirby told reporters that the US’ information “comes from a variety of intelligence sourcing” but did not offer specific evidence.

A Human Rights Watch Report also noted that

Despite the Israeli military’s claims on November 5, 2023, of “Hamas’s cynical use of hospitals,” no evidence put forward would justify depriving hospitals and ambulances of their protected status under international humanitarian law”. In other words – no evidence was found that Hamas was using the hospital as a base or the civilians there as ‘human shields’.

*Al Shifa after Israel’s attack - Image Source: Twitter / X*

Israel’s two-week siege on Al Shifa Hospital left it in ruins and once the dust had settled it was revealed that multiple atrocities were committed during the attack. It was reported in Progressive International that according to witness testimonies

the Israeli army shot patients in their beds and doctors who refused to abandon the sick, separated people into groups with differently-colored bracelets, and executed hundreds of civil government employees.

The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor estimated that at least 1,500 people had been killed, injured, or reported missing, “with women and children making up half of the casualties.” Euro-Med also confirmed that at least 22 patients were shot while in their hospital beds, while the number of displaced persons sheltering at the hospital who were forced to evacuate southward was estimated to include 25,000 people.

As was pointed out in the article in Progressive International referred to above:

Despite the army’s claims about the al-Shifa operation’s strategic and military importance and the number of alleged Hamas and PIJ members it had arrested and killed, it obfuscated the real intended purpose of the operation, which was to destroy the health system in northern Gaza and worsen the already disastrous humanitarian conditions. The entire compound is now unfit for use. Even the morgue, containing countless bodies of the slain, was burned down.

Since destroying Al Shifa Israel has gone on to completely or partially destroy nearly every hospital in the Gaza strip in a systematic fashion – rendering all 36 non-functional. A large part of the reason they were able to do this was because of the cover they were provided by Western media organisations running the line that each hospital they targeted were ‘Hamas bases’ and that the civilians there were being used as ‘human shields’. Israel is still running this line now about refugee tents, UN shelters and schools – they’re all Hamas bases or hiding Hamas operatives or Hamas weapons.

That TVNZ would seek to defend the Israeli Ambassador’s claims as ‘reasonable’ by using Al Shifa as evidence that Hamas uses ‘human shields’ is, frankly, more than a little disturbing. A media organisation like TVNZ should have known that the Al Shifa claims had been subjected to rigorous scrutiny and have been found to be essentially baseless. A media organisation like TVNZ should also know that truth can be abused in war time in order to provide cover for unpalatable actions and that Israel has been repeatedly found guilty of doing so, not just since October 7 but for many years before that date.

According to Israel every piece of civilian infrastructure – even refugee tents in Rafah – are Hamas bases or Hamas weapons caches and that the civilians in these places are being used as ‘human shields’. And according to Israel this gives them the right to destroy that infrastructure and kill the civilians sheltering there. Our Western media – including TVNZ – have been enthusiastically assisting Israel to run this line. Western media are, in other words, assisting Israel to dodge responsibility for war crimes and if those war crimes are found by the ICJ to amount to genocide, which is looking more and more likely, then Western media outlets are essentially guilty of assisting Israel in that genocide.

I would also like to point out before closing on this subject that Israel itself has a long track record of using Palestinians as human shields – as discussed in this report by B’Tselem.

Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as human shields, ordering them to perform military tasks that risked their lives. As part of this policy, soldiers have ordered Palestinian civilians to remove suspicious objects from roads, to tell people to come out of their homes so the military can arrest them, to stand in front of soldiers while the latter shoot from behind them, and more. The Palestinian civilians were chosen at random for these tasks, and could not refuse the demand placed on them by armed soldiers

B’Tselem further notes that

This use of civilians is not an independent initiative by soldiers in the field, but the result of a decision made by senior military authorities. During the second intifada, and particularly during military incursions into Palestinian population centers, such as Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002, use of Palestinians as human shields became open military policy.

This is something that Jack Tame, as an experienced journalist, should have known and furthermore should have challenged the Ambassador about – given the Ambassador’s use of the ‘human shields’ claim to defend Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Palestinian Children Being ‘Taught to Hate’

According to TVNZ – “Information is available from credible sources which supports Mr Yaakoby's viewpoint, and shows that there is a reasonable basis for him to hold this view, and that it is not misleading for viewers to be made aware of his viewpoint”.

I will now go on to discuss the two ‘credible sources’ TVNZ cited to support this position.

A report by the Georg Eckhert Institute

TVNZ provided a short English-language FAQ based on this report – which was originally in German – which presented a potted version of the report’s findings but upon looking into this further I discovered that the study – which analysed 156 Palestinian textbooks – found what the authors referred to as “anti-Semitic motifs” in just two of those 156.

This was pointed out by a number of sources including in a report on UNRWA by an Independent Review Group appointed by the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General, in consultation with the UNRWA Commissioner following Israel’s accusations that UNRWA employees were the involved in October 7 attacks –

Upon review of three major international assessments and academic studies on the issue of Palestinian Authority textbooks, two identified bias and non-compliant content but did not provide evidence of antisemitic reference. A third, the Eckert report, identified two examples that displayed antisemitic content but noted that one had already been removed; the other has been significantly altered.

One of the textbooks referred to as containing antisemitic material was a religious education book for Muslim children – specifically about the teaching of Quranic stories about the Prophet's conflicts with Jewish tribes - while the other was a social studies textbook. Here is the image that was in the social studies textbook:

Martin Konečný – of EuMEP (European Middle East Project), an independent civil society hub in Brussels promoting just & fact-based EU policy on Israel/Palestine, noted on X that he

asked several Israeli experts who variously said the removed caricature was incorrect, maybe inflammatory - or just metaphor for Israel's undermining of Status Quo on the holy site. But none saw a link to antisemitism.

Konečný noted that this “further shows how flawed this whole discusion [sic] is”.

The second source cited by TVNZ to support their contention that the Israeli Ambassador’s claim that “Palestinian children are taught to hate” is ‘reasonable’ is a document submitted to the UK Parliament in 2023 by a group called IMPACT-se – formerly known as CMIP. IMPACT-se is an Israeli NGO which monitors school textbooks used in the Middle East to determine if they are critical of Israel. If such criticisms are found the organisation then pressures the governments in question to change the textbooks in order to remove this criticism.

Akiva Eldar, a journalist working for Haaretz, provides an insight into this organisation in an article in published in Haaretz back in 2001 (What Did You Study In School Today, Palestinian Child?", Haaretz, 2 January 2001 – only accessible online via the Haaretz archive for $2.50) noting:

In recent years Marcus [Sheff – CMIP’s CEO then and IMPACT-se’s now] has been making a living translating and disseminating defamatory communications against Israel, extracted by his staff from Palestinian publications. Marcus, a settler, used to work for David Bar Illan, Benjamin Netanyahu's PR chief, and served on the Joint Israeli Palestinian Anti-Incitement Committee. Marcus's center routinely feeds the media with excerpts from "Palestinian" textbooks that call for Israel's annihilation. He doesn't bother to point out that the texts quoted in fact come from Egypt and Jordan”

*Marcus Sheff testifying before the US Congress about the October 7 attack*

Furthermore, the work of this organisation has been criticized as “tendentious and highly misleading” by Nathan Brown, Professor of Political Science at George Washington University, and Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has also published his own studies on this subject.

In an independent report he prepared on this Palestinian textbooks for the Adam Institute in 2002 (Democracy, History and the Contest over the Palestinian Curriculum, Brown noted

Critics charge that the Center's real purpose is to launch attacks on the Palestinian National Authority, and it would be difficult to contest such a conclusion." (p.3)

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Center was far more interested in criticizing the PNA than in an honest assessment of the changes produced in Palestinian education by the Oslo Accords. (p.4)

Brown also notes that “virtually every discussion in English on Palestinian education repeats the charge that Palestinian textbooks incite students against Jews and Israel” and goes on to say

it may therefore come as a surprise to readers that the books authored under the PNA are largely innocent of these charges. What is more remarkable than any statements they make on the subject is their silence — the PNA-authored books often stubbornly avoid treating anything controversial regarding Palestinian national identity, forcing them into awkward omissions and gaps. [emphasis mine]

Brown, while not uncritical of Palestinian textbooks, concluded that

the Palestinian curriculum is not a war curriculum; while highly nationalistic, it does not incite hatred, violence and anti-Semitism. It cannot be described as a peace curriculum either, but the charges against it are often wildly exaggerated or inaccurate.

According to Brown this organisation’s method

was to follow harsh criticisms with quotation after quotation purporting to prove a point. However, a close reading revealed that many quotations did not support the strong charges. And those that did came not from the 1994 books that I had read but from the Jordanian and Egyptian books that the PA was working to replace. Criticizing the PA for interim use of the books was certainly fair. But the CMIP neglected to mention that the Israeli government distributed the same books in East Jerusalem schools while it refused to distribute the innocuous 1994 “National Education” supplements (because they were clearly written by the PA meaning that their use might have undermined Israeli claims to sovereignty in all of the city). Nor did the report mention the dramatic changes in the supplementary 1994 books. Similarly ignored was a richly documented Palestinian project to devise its new curriculum. A 600-page official report mercilessly criticizing existing educational practices had been published in 1996. In 1997, the Palestinian legislature and cabinet approved the Ministry of Education’s plan—based partly on the 1996 report—to write the new curriculum. Neither document contained anything anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic, so the CMIP showed no interest.
In short, the CMIP reports read as if they were written by a ruthless prosecuting attorney anxious for a conviction at any cost. I realized from the research of Israeli academics (and also from my own children’s experience in an Israeli school for a year) that a hostile and highly selective report on Israeli education might produce a similarly misleading result.

Furthermore, a report prepared for the EU notes

Information gathered by the EU missions on the ground, as well as independent studies carried out by Israeli and Palestinian academics and educators that have examined the new textbooks, show that:
Quotations attributed by earlier CMIP [now known as IMPACT-SE] reports to the Palestinian textbooks are not found in the new Palestinian Authority schoolbooks funded by some EU Member States; some were traced to the old Egyptian and Jordanian text books that they are replacing, some to other books outside the school curriculum, and others not traced at all. While many of the quotations attributed to the new textbooks by the most recent CMIP report of November 2001 could be confirmed, these have been found to be often badly translated or quoted out of context, thus suggesting an anti-Jewish incitement that the books do not contain.
New textbooks, though not perfect, are free of inciteful content and improve the previous textbooks, constituting a valuable contribution to the education of young Palestinians. Palestinian Authority Ministry of Education has accepted the need for ongoing review, revision and improvement.
Therefore, allegations against the new textbooks funded by EU members have proven unfounded.

The IMPACT-se document provided by TVNZ was a submission to the UK Parliament – something which IMPACT-se does very regularly. The UK Government, however, is on record has having serious reservations about the accuracy of an earlier IMPACT-se report – “IMPACT-SE report on the Palestinian Elementary School Curriculum 2016-17”.

As noted by Conservative MP Alistair Burt in his response to a written question:

The UK Government was very concerned at some of the allegations outlined in the IMPACT-SE report. We are therefore working to commission a robust study into the new Palestinian textbooks. Our assessment is that the IMPACT-SE report was not objective in its findings and lacked methodological rigour. For example, some claims were made on the basis of a partial or subjective reading of the text, some findings are presented out of context, and there was limited information available about the sampling approach to select textbooks to analyse [emphasis mine]

Given all the above I would strongly suggest that it would be wise not to take anything IMPACT-se has to say about Palestinian schoolbooks too seriously.

And just to further drive home the fact that it is not at all ‘reasonable’ for the Ambassador to claim that Palestinians are ‘taught to hate’ and that it was not at all excusable for Jack Tame not to challenge the Ambassador on this inflammatory and highly contested claim I will briefly cite the findings of perhaps the largest-scale study done into this subject.

This study was commissioned by the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, and funded and reviewed by the US state department (Victims of Our Own Narratives: Portrayal of the “Other” in Israeli and Palestinian School Books). This study examined 3,000 texts, illustrations and maps in books used in Palestinian, Israeli state and Israeli ultra-Orthodox schools. All data was sent to Yale for analysis. The study was "transparent, open, collaborative, rigorous and scientific," according to the leader of the study, Bruce Wexler (Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University), and produced four main findings:

Dehumanising or demonising is rare in both Palestinian and Israeli books.
Both Israeli and Palestinian books present "unilateral national narratives" that show the other as an enemy.
Information about the other's religions, culture, economic and daily activities is inadequate or absent.
Negative bias in presentation of the other is significantly more pronounced in Israeli ultra-Orthodox and Palestinian school books than Israeli state books.

Note that it is just as easy to accuse Israel of ‘bias’ on this front as it is to accuse the Palestinians but that neither side’s textbooks were found to incite hatred or to demonise or to dehumanise the other. And, finally, regarding ultra-Orthodox textbooks in Israeli schools a study by Professor Professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan - a lecturer in language education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education ‏(I.B. Tauris, 2012) found

While Orthodox Jewish textbooks present Arabs — all of them — as evil forces, a sort of biblical Amalek we must eliminate with the help of God, Palestinian textbooks never resort to such discourse. They respect Judaism as one of the three monotheistic religions but relate — as accurately as they can under so much censorship — the true and horrid facts of life under Israeli military rule.

The claim that Palestinian textbooks incite hatred and violence against Israel is one that is pursued by Israel for a variety of political and propaganda purposes – in particular Israel’s ongoing efforts to undermine UNRWA (but that’s a long story for another day) and is not supported by the weight of the scholarly evidence. Jack Tame should have known this was a highly contentious and inflammatory claim and, as such, he should have, at the very least, made his audience aware that this was the case, particularly in the context of the Israel’s current assault against Gaza and it’s partially successful effort to defund UNRWA, thus further exacerbating the humanitarian crisis there.

As Sana Seed, media, cultural critic and journalist pointed out on X

What is so insidious about this particular propaganda is that the mention of children is so intentional. A long-standing talking point of Israel has been that Palestinian children are taught to hate Jews. This is meant to justify the slaughter of 5000 Palestinian children.

She goes on to note that

Palestinian babies are considered “demographic threats”, Palestinian children are consistently characterized as ‘ticking time bombs of terror’. The propaganda is blatantly false, but the repetition of a lie is meant for it to become true — as Goebbels famously said.

*Source: Twitter / X - There are many such posts all over this platform*

Hamas Looting Aid

One of the main Israeli talking points in order to avoid taking the blame for the blocking of aid into Gaza and for the subsequent famine has been that Hamas has been ‘looting’ the aid. Given the absolutely horrific situation inside Gaza I would be very surprised if there was no looting – just as I would be very surprised if there was no sexual abuse on October 7 – but this does not mean that representatives of Israel should get away with trotting out this line in order to dodge responsibility for the humanitarian disaster in Gaza. There has also, as I outline further below, no evidence it is actually Hamas – or ‘gangs’ affiliated with Hamas – actually doing the looting.

What must always be taken into account when weighing up the credibility of claims such as this one is that Israel is highly motivated to avoid taking the blame for the dire humanitarian crisis that its attack on Gaza – and its blockade of aid – has caused and that accusing Hamas of looting aid is highly useful for heading off such accusations – in the same way that accusing Hamas of using civilian infrastructure as a base and civilians as ‘human shields’ is a useful way of heading off accusations of deliberately killing civilians and damaging civilian infrastructure.

I’ll now look briefly at the sources TVNZ supplied to support its position that the Ambassador was ‘reasonable’ to make this claim and that Jack Tame was thus justified in not attempting to push back against it in any way.

Three of the sources cited were articles from the BBC, the Washington Post (though the link provided by TVNZ was from a re-pub of that article in the Herald) and Business Upturn Asia in June of this year – all of which essentially reported the same story – and relied on the same quotes from head of OCHA in Gaza, Georgios Petropoulos.

TVNZ cited the following from the BBC article:

The looting has become quite profound,” says Georgios Petropoulos, head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Gaza. He estimates that last Tuesday, three-quarters of the goods on board lorries entering from the crossing were stolen.
UN officials say the vehicles are systematically attacked and stopped by armed gangs, particularly those smuggling cigarettes, which are sold on the black market in Gaza for exorbitant amounts. Lorries bringing fuel into Gaza have also recently been targeted.
As Israel’s military offensive has removed Gaza’s Hamas government, there is no plan for how to fill the power vacuum. There are few police officers left working in the Palestinian territory. It is not clear if organised crime cartels are affiliated to Hamas or Gazan clans.

Just a reminder, all this is occurring within the context of a dire humanitarian crisis, as reported by Oxfam in early June, 2024

Israel’s relentless air and land bombardment and deliberate obstruction of the humanitarian response is making it virtually impossible for aid agencies to reach trapped, starved civilians in Gaza, Oxfam said today, as the latest ceasefire deal negotiations continue.
A lethal combination of closed border crossings, ongoing airstrikes, reduced logistical capacity due to evacuation notices and a failing Israeli permission process that debilitates humanitarian movement within Gaza, have created an impossible environment for aid agencies to operate effectively.

As I have already noted above, given the humanitarian situation in Gaza and given the fact that Israel’s military offensive had removed Gaza’s Hamas government, it would be surprising if there wasn’t looting and other criminal activity going on. Georgios Petropoulos, head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Gaza, is certainly a credible source and if he says there was looting in Gaza, then it’s pretty certain there was looting in Gaza. Importantly, however, neither he, nor any of the other ‘unnamed officials’, said that it was Hamas doing the looting. In fact it was specifically noted in the BBC article and in the Business Upturn Asia article that “it is not clear if organised crime cartels are affiliated to Hamas or Gazan clans”. It should be noted here that the Israeli Ambassador specifically accused Hamas of being involved in the looting.

I would also like at this point to remind TVNZ – and the BSA – that simply reporting three different articles that all use exactly the same source does not contribute to building a case that it is ‘reasonable’ to claim Hamas is engaged in looting in Gaza – particularly when none of the articles actually prove that it was, in fact, Hamas responsible for the looting.

The next two articles – one in the BBC and one in USA Today – cited were from early May and both focused on efforts by the US to get aid into Gaza via its much touted – and ultimately disastrous – ‘humanitarian pier’. Here are the two quotes cited to support TVNZ’s contention that the Ambassador was being ‘reasonable’ to claim that Hamas was looting aid in Gaza:

1st quote – from BBC – May 17 - Can US floating pier improve Gaza’s critical aid pipeline?

But given the threats faced by aid convoys, which have been looted by gangs, mobbed by desperate civilians, and shot at by the Israeli military, how safe will this operation be?
“Our assessment is clearly that we can operate safely under current conditions,” Vice-Adm Cooper said.
“We’ve worked very closely with the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] to develop a series of protocols and best practices.”
But following a series of episodes, including an Israeli drone strike on 1 April which killed seven aid workers from the organisation World Central Kitchen, officials admit the wider operation is not without risk.

And the 2nd quote - USA Today – May 22, 2024 - Hijacked: Humanitarian aid trucks traveling to Gaza had shipments seized

Humanitarian aid trucks traveling to the war-torn Gaza shore were hijacked before reaching their destination, according to the Pentagon. For months, the Pentagon has touted its efforts to bring desperately needed aid to Palestinians facing dire shortages of food and medicine amid Israel’s war on Hamas. The first shipments of aid began arriving late last week.

These sources refer vaguely to ‘looting’ and ‘hijacking’ by unnamed parties but neither provide any evidence to support the Ambassador’s claims that Hamas are looting in Gaza.

TVNZ then cites the Israeli position on aid in a report on a debate at the UN which focused on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the danger of attacks against UNRWA further exacerbating that situation.

Here are the first few paragraphs from the report of that debate, just to provide the context within which Israel is claiming Hamas is looting aid

“It’s a relentless and often-hourly struggle,” said Antonia Marie De Meo, Deputy Commissioner-General for Operational Support of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). More than 2 million people remain “trapped in an endless nightmare of death and destruction at a staggering scale”, dominated by fear, thirst, hunger, disease, dehumanization, lack of basic sanitation and repeated displacement. Moreover, blatant disregard for international humanitarian law is now commonplace in the Gaza Strip.
On that, she reported that the Agency’s offices in Gaza are “destroyed beyond recognition”, more than 560 displaced people have been killed while sheltering under the UN flag and, just recently, two UN convoys sustained fire despite authorization from the Israeli military. Further, visa refusals hinder humanitarian work and recent Israeli legislation threatens to ban UNRWA operations in East Jerusalem, revoke privileges enjoyed by the Agency since 1949 and designate it as a terrorist organization. “We cannot afford this to become a new standard for future humanitarian operations in conflict zones around the world,” she stressed.
“The campaign against UNRWA, attacks against its premises and legislative efforts to declare UNRWA a terrorist organization to end its operations are utterly unacceptable and endanger our operations,” added Muhannad Hadi, Deputy Special Coordinator, Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in the Office of the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process. Almost 10 months into this crisis, a safe enabling environment for the provision of humanitarian assistance still does not exist inside Gaza. “The commitment or willingness of the aid workers is not the issue — it’s the inability to achieve our mandate, and that is beyond our control,” he emphasized.
In the following debate, Council members voiced alarm over the bleak situation in which civilians in Gaza find themselves. Many also pointed out that attacks against civilians — including humanitarian workers — are prohibited under international law and underscored the need for an immediate ceasefire. Additionally, some expressed support for UNRWA, condemning continuing attempts to slander or hinder the Agency’s vital work.

Here is Israel’s response to all this:

Israel’s representative, detailing his country’s “extensive humanitarian efforts in the Gaza Strip”, said that Hamas has twisted much of the aid intended for civilians into weapons of war. He also stated that the UN not only falters in its duty to coordinate aid distribution, but that “UNRWA is complicit in the perpetuation of this conflict”. Noting that 115 hostages are still held captive by “Hamas Nazis”, he emphasized that the “most crucial element for the end of this conflict has been excluded from this conversation”.

Israel provides absolutely no evidence for any of its claims about Hamas “twisting aid into weapons of war” or of UNRWA “being complicit in the perpetuation of the conflict” so I’m not sure why TVNZ saw fit to include this as part of its case for the ‘reasonableness’ of the Ambassador’s claims concerning Hamas looting. Indeed, that Israel would seek to deny that the horrifying situation outlined in the first few paragraphs of this report had anything to do with them and would attempt to sheet it home to UNRWA (which they have been attacking, baselessly, for years for a number of inter-linked reasons which I won’t go into here) and to “Hamas looting” is not in the slightest bit surprising and any such claims should be viewed with a very healthy dose of scepticism.

TVNZ then note that “Q+A has provided the following information on the issue”

December 29, 2023

On Friday, Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy accused UNRWA of covering up for Hamas’ alleged hijacking of aid in Gaza, describing the UN’s aid mechanism as “woefully unsuccessful.”

Comments I have already made in relation to statements by the Israeli government and the IDF also apply to this statement. No evidence is provided and given the Israeli government is highly motivated to avoid taking responsibility for the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza by attempting to pass the blame onto Hamas and UNRWA such statements should be treated with extreme caution.

Additionally, even more caution should be applied to statements by the particular government spokesman Q+A cite. I’m not sure if Q+A – or TVNZ – are aware of this but as reported by the Jerusalem Post in late March 2024, Eylon Levy was fired from his position as the official English language spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s Office because he was caught out lying to the UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron about the amount of aid getting in to Gaza. Prior to his dismissal Levy was already on thin ice for posting a video at the beginning of the war that turned out to be fake and for mocking Nasrallah and his speechwriter instead of calming tensions.

*Eylon Levy - Image Credit: Jerusalem Post*

There has also been a Complaint issued by the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians to Scotland Yard’s War Crimes Unit about Eylon Levy. The Complaint includes

allegations of abetting, inciting, and conspiring with the Government of Israel to commit the crimes of intentionally using starvation as a method of warfare and wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health to Palestinian civilians of Gaza.
Examples of the individual’s ‘accessory liability’ to abet, incite and conspire to commit the alleged crimes includes a plethora of examples of statements, split into three broad categories: statements aimed at delegitimisation of the UN humanitarian aid agency UNRWA, hate speech against Palestinians and Muslims, and statements inciting unlawful attacks, including on medical facilities and professionals.
Evidence includes witness testimonies from nineteen doctors who have worked in Gaza since October 2023. As well as evidence provided by witnesses in the statement, the use of starvation as a weapon of war has been outlined elsewhere by actors including UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk and groups including Oxfam and Human Rights Watch.

Given Eylon Levy’s track record for lying and the fact there is a complaint against him for incitement to crimes against humanity I don’t think TVNZ should put too much store in anything he has to say about Hamas looting or anything else for that matter.

The second article cited by Q+A is an article by Reuters.

Israeli officials … say they have increased aid access to Gaza. Israel isn’t responsible for delays in aid getting into Gaza, they say, and the delivery of aid once inside the territory is the responsibility of the U.N. and humanitarian agencies. Israel has also accused Hamas of stealing aid.

Q+A acknowledge that “this allegation has not been externally verified but as Ran Yaakoby is a representative of the Israeli government, it's reasonable to expect him to parrot what his government believes”.

Yes, it is quite ‘reasonable’ to expect Mr Yaakoby to ‘parrot what his government believes’ - I agree, but as I have said a number of times over the course of my correspondence with both TVNZ and with the BSA - it is not reasonable for someone interviewing the representative of a country currently standing accused of genocide in the ICJ to simply let him away with ‘parroting what his government believes’. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - would Jack Tame let the Russian Ambassador away with ‘parroting what his government believes’ without challenging him?

Finally Q+A cite two articles – one by Reuters and another by the Washington Times. Both articles rely largely on quotes from State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller claiming that after first being attacked by settlers at the border the aid was transferred to a humanitarian group and was then “intercepted and diverted by Hamas”.

Given Miller would almost certainly have been given this information by Israel Miller’s claims that the aid was “intercepted and diverted by Hamas” can’t be taken any more seriously than the information presented in the earlier article which TVNZ admitted hadn’t been externally verified.

Furthermore, along with his Deputy, Vedant Patel, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller has made quite a name for himself amongst journalists at State Department press briefings for never being willing to acknowledge any wrong-doing on Israel’s part and for his continual deference to Israeli ‘investigations’ to determine what happened every time Israel is accused of committing yet another atrocity - e.g., the death of Hind Rajab, the attack on the World Kitchen convoy, the recent death of the American activist on the West Bank among many, many other such instances - and then for dodging follow-up questions about how those investigations are progressing.

Miller is also on record as having dismissed a report of a US Statement Department official saying there was undeniable evidence Israeli soldiers are raping Palestinian women by saying “I did see that report. It’s not accurate”. He also repeatedly and falsely called the World Kitchen attacks a ‘mistake’ and refused to comment when asked what he thought about Netanyahu showing a map which had no West Bank on it.

Finally, it must also be acknowledged that the United States is an enthusiastic supporter of Israel’s operations in Gaza - supplying massive amounts of weapons and reiterating at every opportunity the mantra ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’ -which, as an occupying force it actually does not according to international law. This support is largely due to Israel’s geostrategic importance to the United States but the United States’ unflinching support of Israel must be borne in mind when weighing up the credibility of any information about Israel - or about Hamas - that comes from a US politician or spokesperson.

In summary TVNZ provided no evidence to support their contention that it was ‘reasonable’ for the Israeli Ambassador to claim that Hamas were looting aid and that that looting was, furthermore, contributing to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Jack Tame, as an experienced journalist, should have known that there was no actual evidence to back up the Ambassador’s claim and because this claim has been used multiple times by Israel in order to defend itself from accusations of using starvation as a weapon of war he should have challenged the Ambassador on this claim.

One of the most egregious instances of Israel’s use of the looting claim was when they used it to dodge responsibility for what became known as the Flour Massacre. Misleading photos & info were tweeted out by Israel supporters such as Dr Eli David, Israeli spokespeople constantly referred to ‘Hamas looting’ as being one of the reasons the tragedy occurred – for example here, and Israel’s official spokesman Eylon Levy claimed in a post on X on March 23 that UNRWA were “a Hamas front that covers up Hamas stealing aid from civilians”.

I would also like to point out – speaking of looting – that as early as January of this year – months prior to the interview with the Israeli Ambassador – there had already been dozens of reports accusing the Israeli army of widespread looting across Gaza, including millions of dollars in money, dead Palestinian bodies, and archeological artifacts. And also on the subject of looting – for the last 10 months there have been countless videos proudly shared on social media by Israeli soldiers who had filmed themselves stealing money, food and other valuables from the homes of Palestinians who had been ‘evacuated’ to a ‘safe zone’1.

And, while on the subject of getting aid into Gaza, it was also common knowledge at the time of the interview with the Israeli Ambassador that hundreds of Israeli activists had been blocking aid from getting in to Gaza as reported here by Middle East Eye.

Concluding Comments

As I have noted at several points along the way in this document none of the sources provided by TVNZ backed up its contention that the Israeli Ambassador’s claims were ‘reasonable’ – and that it was thus ‘reasonable’ for Jack Tame to fail to challenge him on those claims. Every single one of the claims addressed in this document were highly contested – and some of them were without any supporting evidence at all. A journalist of Jack Tame’s experience should have known this going in to the interview and should have challenged the Ambassador on these claims – at the very least he should have alerted the viewers to the fact the claims were contested. Instead he either let them go without challenge or he actually agreed with them in the case of the ‘human shields’ claim.

As I have also noted several times – the claims at issue here are all central to Israel’s efforts to excuse and defend its current deadly assault on Gaza – an assault considered by many experts to be a genocide and by the ICJ to be at least a plausible genocide - and this was back in January of this year. That Jack Tame allowed those claims to be made by a man representing a state accused of genocide without challenging them – or even alerting viewers to the fact that there were ‘other views’ – is a gross dereliction of journalistic duty and is indicative of a strong pro-Israel / anti-Palestinian bias on the part of Jack Tame and TVNZ.

END OF FINAL SUBMISSION TO BSA REBUTTING TVNZ’S CLAIMS

So … after going to a considerable amount of time and effort to write this rebuttal to TVNZ’s efforts to support the Israeli Ambassador’s claims you can probably imagine how I felt when the BSA informed me that they had ruled in favour of TVNZ. I vented my spleen by firing off the missive below to my liaison person at the BSA. I’ll share it here given I’ve shared the original complaints and various iterations thereof here so I may as well finish the story!

Hi [Name]

Thank you for letting me know.

I am not in the slightest bit surprised - I never expected the BSA to uphold my complaint given the current media environment and the narrative being pushed by Israel and its powerful ally the United States but I felt morally compelled to make it anyway because it was the right thing to do.

I am - of course - disappointed in the outcome, despite my low expectations, so forgive me if I vent a little before bowing out and leaving all of you at the BSA to your knitting. The following isn’t directed at you in particular - of course - you are just a functionary in an organisation and you’re just doing your job which is to liaise with complainants and - ultimately - let them know the outcome of their complaints. I’d appreciate it if you would do me the courtesy of reading the following but I do not expect or require any sort of response from you.

One day, in the fullness of time, the behaviour of Western media during what will go down in history as one of the worst crimes of the 21st Century, will be called out for what it actually is - complicity in genocide. I’m not sure how much you, personally, know about the multiple times Western media has been called to account for the egregious bias of its coverage of this genocide - not just by Palestinians and their supporters but also by journalists from within its own ranks - but I would like to point out to you that TVNZ’s two interviews with the Israeli Ambassador and then with the Head of the Palestinian Delegation to New Zealand fit very snugly into the utterly shameful pattern of Western media running cover for Israel’s crimes against humanity and demonising Palestinians and their resistance since Israel began its genocidal onslaught on the Gaza Strip.

The BSA ruling felt like an extra kick in the teeth given it arrived while we were all being exposed to yet another - and in this case particularly obvious - episode of media malfeasance where the entire Western media, in lockstep (including our dear "non-biased" TVNZ & various other NZ media outlets), attempted to portray the response of Moroccan Muslims in Amsterdam to a display of racist hooliganism on the part of Israeli soccer fans (who were pulling down Palestinian flags, assaulting taxi drivers & yelling “Death to Arabs” and “There are no schools in Gaza because we killed all the children”) as a ‘pogrom’ against the Jewish people akin to Kristallnacht. More and more information is coming out which is showing these media outlets up for just how shoddy and biased their reporting actually was on this issue and I hope at least some of them get more than just a slap across the wrist with a wet bus ticket for such egregious - and dangerously inflammatory - journalistic malpractice.

I’m sure TVNZ will be feeling very smug that the ruling has come down in their favour - though they no doubt knew they’d be fine right from the start because it seems no-one is allowed to criticise Israel and get away with it at this moment in time. I do, however, take some small pleasure in the fact that I made TVNZ’s complaints team work damn hard to fight my complaint as did all the others who also complained. That final document TVNZ put forward in their defence (and which I eviscerated - much good it did me) was, quite frankly, shocking in the way that it exposed not only the bias of those at TVNZ but also their utter lack of understanding of the Israel-Palestine issue and - perhaps most shocking of all - their total media illiteracy. They were citing articles that had been comprehensively debunked, they were citing articles that were citing each other, they were citing articles which didn’t even support the actual claims they were trying to make, they were citing reports from organisations with absolutely no credibility - and yet they were presenting all this as if they genuinely believed it supported the claims the Israeli Ambassador was making - almost all of which were then, and remain now, insupportable.

The level of incompetency and the lack of intellectual rigour on display in these various attempts at rebuttal were - or damn well should have been - downright embarrassing given TVNZ is one of NZ’s major public broadcasters. I would have expected a much higher standard from the complaints team of such an organisation but then, if the outcome of this particular complaint is anything to go by, why should they bother to aim high when scraping the bottom of the barrel obviously does the job perfectly well?

As I write this, right now in Northern Gaza the final stages of Israel’s extermination campaign of the Palestinian people is being carried out. There’s hardly any information coming out of there any more - because Israel has killed nearly all the journalists - but what information there is suggests that the situation is beyond catastrophic. It is being reported the Israeli army is separating mothers from children before forcing them to march south, they’re executing civilians in ditches and they're directly targeting hospitals and medical staff. Israel is also deliberately withholding food and medical aid - consigning those left in Northern Gaza to death by starvation untreated injuries and illnesses. It is beyond what any of us in the cosseted, spoiled West could even imagine. It is, not to put too finer point on it, a holocaust.

And then, this morning I woke to reports of two doctors Professor Nizam Mamode and Doctor Rohan Talbot who had spent time volunteering in Gaza testifying to the UK Parliament about the deliberate targeting of civilians by Israeli drones. Here’s just a tiny snippet to give you a taster of what’s going on there:

What I think I found particularly disturbing was that a bomb would drop on a crowded tented area and then the drones would come down and …. [… there was a long pause here while the surgeon tried to collect himself, visibly traumatised by what he was recounting… ] … So the drones would come down and pick off civilians … children. And we had description after description … this is not, you know, an occasional thing … this was day after day after day operating on children who would say “I was lying on the ground after a bomb had dropped and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me”. And that’s clearly a deliberate act and its a persistent act, deliberately targeting civilians day after day …

I dearly hope at least a few of those at TVNZ wake up one day and realise what an abomination they’ve helped to support and make some reckoning with that realisation. It’s not just the interviews that I made my complaints about that were biased you realise - it is - with a few tiny exceptions - the entirety of TVNZ’s output on this issue. But TVNZ are, as I noted above, no different from any other mainstream Western media outlet on this so it’s naive of me to expect anything else from them.

As for those of you at BSA who had to deal with this complaint against TVNZ from myself and others, I must admit, I felt a bit sorry for you. You were between a rock and a hard place and you did what most organisations such as yours would do and played it safe. Given the difficulty of proving bias and fairness, or lack thereof within the context of a particular TV programme I’m sure you’re all feeling you did your best. My apologies if I don’t concur, which I obviously do not, but I don’t really blame you. You’re all just doing your jobs which is how, of course, injustices are so often allowed to happen and go so rarely punished. Power almost always wins - at least in the short term. But, the arc of the moral universe is long and it bends towards justice - to paraphrase Martin Luther King - and I am hopeful that one day, sooner rather than later, justice will come to both the Palestinian people and to Israel and all those who supported it in its genocidal campaign - including TVNZ .

1 Within the last week or so it was revealed by Haaretz that that the armed gangs looting aid in Gaza have been doing so under IDF protection and are affiliated with terrorist groups like ISIS. According to Haaretz these gangs operate just 100 meters from IDF tanks and troops, who only fire at civilians or policemen entering the area but never at those gangs

Karyn Taylor-Moore is a recovering academic psychologist & a long-time leftist anti-imperialist from Ōtautahi

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Concluding Comments