university-educated professionals, wear Western-style clothes and usually speak English. I have seen British hacks, instinctively sceptical of anyone in a state-issued military uniform, become as credulous and undiscriminating as children when listening to a man or woman in a white coat wearing a concerned expression. They are seen as more credible, more worthy of trust than other people – a leftover, perhaps, from the class-ridden era in which a Brit who wanted a passport needed a signature from a doctor, lawyer or accountant.
The relevance to Gaza is clear enough.
The BBC and other mainstream news organisations seem only too happy to parrot the more outlandish casualty figures issued by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health and various accusations of Israeli war crimes made by unnamed ‘hospital staff’. The media also seem to rely on one medic in particular, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a surgeon whose social-media page is filled with posts sympathetic to Hamas’s 7 October attack. He has been quoted by every British outlet, from the Guardian to the Telegraph, as an impartial observer.
Deference to doctors is perhaps the more charitable explanation for the false report by Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, in November 2023. He claimed that Gaza’s Al-Ahli hospital had been ‘flattened’ by a deadly Israeli airstrike. But, as soon became clear, the hospital was very much still standing, no one had been killed and the explosion in its parking area was the result of a misfired Hamas missile. When the same hospital was later captured by the Israel Defence Forces, soldiers found scores of Kalashnikov assault rifles and RPG rocket launchers inside. Bowen then bizarrely suggested that such weapons are a normal sight in Middle Eastern hospitals.
It's not just doctors and health care workers. Even given the well-known Hamas monopoly of news information in Gaza, western reporters seem primed to accept the word of whoever wants to tell them about the latest Israeli atrocity.
Take the BBC's Lucy Williamson, for example. In December she breathlessly reported on the abuse of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Eighteen-year-old Mohammed Nazzal, hands bandaged and surrounded by his family, described to her how Israeli guards beat him and broke bones in both hands. The fact that the Israel Prison Service had a video of the lad being released with no sign of injury did nothing to prompt our intrepid reporter to reconsider. Here they were, a family of brave Palestinians, testifying about their suffering at the hands of the Jews. Why would such simple, noble folk lie to her? Of course she believed them.
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