How the UK media devalues Palestinian lives

“It may seem wrong that, after more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza have perished, it took the deaths of just seven international aid workers to stir Western governments into a sense of outrage, but that is the reality.”

Thus reads the front page of the British newspaper, The Independent. 

“These were not Hamas militants,” it continues. “They were not illicitly transporting Hamas commanders…The seven have become symbolic of the lawless and reckless manner in which Benjamin Netanyahu has prosecuted this war.” 

The Global North has drawn its red lines, and it is the deaths of World Central Kitchen charity workers from Britain, Australia, Canada, America, and Poland. Six months on, Joe Biden finally called for an “immediate ceasefire.” Across the pond, the UK government summoned the Israeli Ambassador and demanded an investigation into the deaths on April 2. Labour leader Keir Starmer condemned the strike and asserted “international law must be upheld,” and the Scottish National Party requested an immediate recall of parliament over arms sales to Israel. The SNP’s call follows a letter signed by over 130 parliamentarians last week urging the halt of arms exports to Israel. 

It is profoundly disturbing to see politicians value the lives of a handful of WCK workers over tens of thousands of Palestinians. Such currents are shared in the UK media. Although over two hundred aid workers have been murdered since October 7, and agencies such as the Palestine Red Crescent Society have been vocal that PRCS “team members have been repeatedly killed despite coordination efforts and wearing the RED Crescent emblem,” it is only with the death of British civilians that the British media has acknowledged Israel’s concerted targeting of aid workers.

In February, for example, the BBC’s coverage of the World Food Program’s withdrawal from northern Gaza in February cited “complete chaos and violence due to the collapse of civil order,” and the vague description “and then on entering Gaza City faced gunfire, “high tension and explosive anger,” as reasons for the cessation of aid deliveries. Assigning blame on Palestinian crowds, the article contains no mentions of unsafe conditions manufactured by Israel — which included a strike on a WFP aid truck three weeks prior — and does not recognize that the origin of the gunfire was confirmed to be from Israeli forces, according to footage verified by Al Jazeera. It also doesn’t mention the death toll of aid workers killed in Gaza thus far. 

In comparison, the most recent articles by the BBC leave no room for doubt, its headlines screaming “Charity boss accuses Israel of targeting aid staff ‘systematically, car by car’,” and “Britons killed in Gaza aid strike remembered as heroes.” The articles clearly designate blame (“three British victims of an Israel air strike”) and include comments from WCK founder José Andrés asserting Israel deliberately targeted the aid workers. 

Thus, Western lives are given greater value, their voices greater legitimacy, not only because 3 blood-stained British, Polish, and Australian passports are privileged over 30,000 Palestinian lives, but because Israel has systematically eroded the legitimacy of Palestinian voices.

Israel’s dogged and concerted blurring of the lines between civilian and combatant serves not only to enable its indiscriminate targeting of civilians but to reconstruct Palestinians as agents of a narrative rather than credible witnesses attesting to a genocide they are experiencing. Palestinian witness testimonies and the plethora of images and videos documenting the genocide as it unfolds are imbued with suspicion as, with broad brush strokes, “hasbara” paints tales of “Pallywood.” 

Similarly, Palestinian journalists are deeply mistrusted, and their conditions of work are not preserved, although they should be afforded protection under international law. The conscious obfuscation of the lines between Palestinian journalists in Gaza and Hamas combatants has permitted the killings of journalists at unprecedented levels, and most recently, the prohibition of Al Jazeera and the “free press” in the self-proclaimed “only democracy in the Middle East.”

Despite UN and Human Rights Watch confirmation that the Gaza Health Ministry’s numbers are broadly accurate, in combination with reports by prestigious medical journals and Israeli intelligence itself, the legitimacy of the Health Ministry’s toll is undermined through the use of the preface “Hamas-run” in international and British media. Palestinians are not allowed even to narrate their own deaths.

Thus, it is Israel’s murder of seven aid workers that is rendered both a heinous tragedy and confirmation of Israel’s disregard for civilian life rather than its total annihilation of al-Shifa Hospital and the massacring of at least 400 Palestinians, amongst them plastic surgery specialist Dr. Ahmad Al-Maqadma, whose mutilated bodies have been found bound and bulldozed. In an article titled “Three British ex-forces heroes…among the seven aid workers killed by Israeli airstrike,” the Daily Mail professes “deliberate attacks on civilians, including aid workers, are considered a war crime,” whilst conspicuously omitting such language of “war crimes” and “international law” to describe the IDF’s total eradication of al-Shifa Hospital, rendered a “raid” rather than a grave violation of Article 18 of the Geneva Convention. The Palestinians there are not “killed” by IDF troops, who withdraw as “mothers weep and bodies are recovered.” 

Such double standards are reflected across other UK news organizations, the passive language characteristic of news coverage of Gaza placing the onus of blame not upon the IDF, but vague instruments of fate. The language of “‘heroes” and “victims” who are “killed” in Israeli strikes is reserved for the WCK aid workers, whilst Palestinians are reduced to strewn bodies in the carnage of al-Shifa, who have “allegedly died.” 

“Mirror” headlines simultaneously run “Hero Brits (are) killed in Gaza air strike” with “‘Stench of corpses’ fill air of Gaza’s decimated al-Shifa hospital as Israeli troops withdraw.” And while death and destruction characterize coverage of al-Shifa, revelations such as “Israel’s deadly blunder…underlines the need for an urgent change in the relentless violence” and comments on the illegality of Israel’s actions — such as “the unlikely event that the extrajudicial killing of seven aid workers could be justified because of the presence of a single terror suspect” — are confined to the deaths of the British aid workers. 

It should not take the bodies of European aid workers to evidence that Israel violates international law and acts with impunity. Britain’s reactions are symptomatic of the invisibility with which they render Palestinians. Excluded from international law and fundamentally disbelieved and vilified, 32,000 deaths do not constitute a grave violation of international law or a perversion of a rules-based global order, nor a moral or ethical catastrophe. Rather, it is the death of 3 British civilians that has prompted the UK to reassess its relationship with Israel. Whilst heightened scrutiny and increased public pressure are positives, the fundamental paradigms that marginalize and oppress Palestinians have not changed.