On the last day of 2024, when the UN human rights office released a critical report on Israel’s destruction of hospitals in Gaza, one would have expected the next day’s headlines to feature these horrific findings prominently, but that didn’t happen, Howard French, a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in Foreign Policy.

The report noted that “the destruction of the health care system in Gaza, and the extent to which patients, staff and other civilians have been killed in these attacks, is a direct result of the disregard for international humanitarian law and human rights law.”

French says he began New Year’s Day listening to the BBC’s Newshour, which did indeed report the story in the first part of its broadcast. But when he checked major American newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, he found no mention of the UN report. The same was true of the newscasts he scanned, as well as radio and public television broadcasts.

According to French, the lack of widespread coverage underscores a broader trend in American media outlets' reporting on Israel's war on Gaza.

It is noteworthy that during the fifteen months of war, many analysts have condemned the Biden administration for failing to criticize the Israeli tactics that have brought utter destruction to Gaza; for losing its voice on the moral tragedy of the military killing of more than 45,000 people, most of them women and children; and even for using its authority to silence criticism of Israel, as when it pushed a U.S.-funded organization to withdraw a report on impending famine in northern Gaza. But the administration is not alone. The American media has also badly downplayed the bleak nature of this crisis.

This was evident in the muted or absent coverage in early December, after Amnesty International, a human rights organization that is treated with great respect when it reports on non-Western countries, accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. Its report concluded that Israel “deliberately imposed harsh living conditions on Palestinians in Gaza with the aim of destroying them over time.”

It is noteworthy that in most cases, Israel's rejection of the content of the Amnesty International report, which accused it of committing genocide in Gaza, was based on the report itself or the substance of the violations of international law listed by the organization itself.

On December 26, the New York Times published a lengthy investigation showing that Israel had relaxed its rules of war and allowed mid-ranking Israeli officers to make decisions to indiscriminately bomb Palestinian civilian communities if they believed Hamas operatives might be present. But this kind of damning coverage of Israel's war on Gaza is rare in the American media.

“To find more serious coverage of the nature and cost of this war, one must look abroad, to outlets like the Israeli newspaper Haaretz,” French says.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on January 1, 2025, that in a recent cable, unnamed Israeli military officers told Haaretz that their division’s goal was to forcibly displace some 250,000 Palestinians remaining in northern Gaza. The officers said their commander, Brigadier General Yehuda Vach, told them: “Only the loss of territory will enable the Palestinians to learn the necessary lesson from the massacre Hamas committed in southern Israel on October 7.”

Haaretz also reported that Vach said that “they needed to make things difficult for the [humanitarian aid] convoys that entered and harassed them” and that “there are no innocent people in Gaza.” Haaretz’s reporting recalls an earlier high-profile incident in the toll of severe human rights criticism of Israel since the war began. In June, Aryeh Neier, a Holocaust survivor who co-founded the leading U.S.-based human rights organization Human Rights Watch in 1978, wrote in the New York Review of Books that he had come to the conclusion that Israel was carrying out genocide against the Palestinians.

According to Haaretz, it was Israel’s policy of obstructing humanitarian aid that convinced Neier, who wrote: “As early as October 9, 2023, senior Israeli officials announced their intention to prevent the delivery of food, water and electricity, which are essential for water purification and cooking. Defense Minister Yoav Galant’s words became infamous: ‘I have ordered a complete blockade of the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.’” The statement expressed the view that seemed to guide Israel’s approach throughout the coming war: that the entire population of Gaza was complicit in Hamas’s actions on October 7.

As the UN report this week noted, Israel repeatedly justifies the death and destruction in Gaza by saying it is targeting only Hamas members. Yet, as Neier wrote, “obstructing humanitarian aid is unlikely to directly affect Hamas fighters.” He added: “All access to territory in Gaza is controlled by the Israeli military, which has denied entry to Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations and international organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Limiting the ability of these organizations to gather information and produce detailed reports on the conflict does not insulate Israel from criticism of its abuses.”

Human Rights Watch made its own assessment last month (18/12/2024), concluding that Israel is committing “acts of genocide.” This came after South Africa filed its main legal claim accusing Israel of genocide with the International Court of Justice in The Hague in October. Fourteen other countries have announced that they intend to support South Africa’s case, which Israel has dismissed as a “blood libel.”