The Western media’s insistence that the world needs “international journalists” to see the “true picture” of the conflict in Gaza has become a convenient alibi for Israel’s war on truth. This troubling narrative, amplified by figures like Piers Morgan and echoed in countless news cycles, relies on a dangerous and flawed assumption that Palestinian voices are inadequate, illegitimate, and partial. In essence, this is an orchestrated war on Palestinian voices themselves, a deliberate attempt to silence and discredit the very people living through the events being reported.
Since Israel renewed its genocide on the Palestinian people in October 2023, it has not only tried to decimate, depopulate, and destroy, but it has also tried to denounce witnesses of their crime. Many journalists have rightly surmised that the exclusion of international reporters and the killing of over 270 local Palestinian journalists is a deliberate ploy to gain “narrative control of how the world understands what happens” in Gaza.
The narrative war over Gaza is built on the assumption that the voices of occupied Palestinians are inherently suspect unless affirmed by a third-party, “impartial” source. It presumes that Palestinian testimony must be mediated through a Western lens to be considered “credible,” and that their own images, videos, and reports are somehow less truthful than those filtered through foreign editorial rooms. This is not journalistic integrity; it is narrative domination disguised as objectivity. It provides an alibi for Israel to delegitimize narratives from Palestinian journalists.
Palestinians do not need so-called international journalists to validate their suffering any more than Jews needed them to validate the Holocaust, or Africans to validate the crimes of colonialism. The truth and reality of the indigenous experience do not hinge on the approval or amplification of outsiders. It exists in the blood, the memories, the lives, and the land itself—whether or not foreign journalists ever step into that land or echo its cries.
While the appeal of a diverse, multinational coverage to drive closure, peace, and justice for Palestinians is understandable, it would be a mistake to assume that Western journalists are the sole bastions of truth or moral courage. Some have, for generations, validated racism and imperialism, justified wars and regime changes, and framed Israel’s militant Zionism—expressed through savage violence, occupation, and the dehumanization of Palestinians—as a defence of a supposed “right to exist,” as though they do not already exist.
Those so-called international journalists are not coming to do anything new. Since the genocide started in October 2023, they have parroted official Israeli statements without evidence, repeated unverified claims as though they were fact, and downplayed or ignored mounting documentation from Palestinian journalists and international human rights groups. They have rushed to amplify Israeli talking points only to quietly backtrack once the evidence contradicts those claims. And even then, their corrections came with none of the urgency or front-page weight given to the original misinformation.
In doing so, they have become little more than a mouthpiece for Israeli propaganda. Their coverage consistently centres on the doubts they cast upon Palestinian voices. They condone Israel’s accusations that those lived testimonies are Hamas propaganda, while treating Israeli propaganda as credible by default.
Since they claim both Israeli and Palestinian narratives as propaganda, Gaza remains a blind spot: an alleyway they can conveniently allow war crimes to thrive, while feasting on the lack of access to fill pages with speculations. These speculations always tilt in one direction, while simultaneously nitpicking the reports, images, and sacrifices of Palestinian journalists who risk their lives to document reality on the ground. In that choice of framing, silence, and selective skepticism, their complicity is laid bare.
After the execution of 15 Gaza medics and rescuers in April, these same international journalists tiptoed around the word “execution,” bending their sentences to accommodate official denials in a pretense of balanced neutrality. As the writer Ahmed Najar eloquently put it, Palestinians live in, “a system in which Palestinians are presumed guilty. A system in which hospitals must prove they are hospitals, schools must prove they are schools, and children must prove they are not human shields. A system in which our existence is treated as a threat – one that must be justified, explained, verified – before anyone will mourn us.”
Changing that system begins with trusting local Palestinian voices and centering their testimonies. It does not begin by airdropping in foreign correspondents to filter a genocide through the lens of their supposed impartial gaze. Local journalists do not need intermediaries to translate local reality into acceptable soundbites for foreign consumption. They report in the language of lived experience, with an urgency and intimacy no detached observer can match.
Every time the world insists on hearing the story only after it has passed through an international newsroom, it reinforces the same colonial hierarchy that has long dictated whose truth matters. To dismantle that system, we must not only amplify Palestinian voices but also recognize them as the primary sources of this history—unfiltered and untainted by anyone but themselves.
The war on Gaza is not a movie, and the narrative isn’t a script written by Palestinian journalists or Oscar-winning filmmakers. The bombings are not pyrotechnics. The shrieks are not soundtracks. The bodies are not props. The destructions are not visual effects. To delegitimize Palestinian voices is to relegate their narratives to the scope of Hollywood, treating their reality as a stage craft. If it were by any stretch, Israel made it so.
Yes, let the world see Gaza. Let those who have looked away for the past two years and the decades before October 7 finally open their eyes to the horrors played out in full view—a macabre reality streamed across social media. Everything to see has already been shown. These “international” journalists will not tell a story that local Palestinian and some Israeli journalists have not already told—at a far greater personal cost.
Above all, we must not mistake Western media access for justice or honesty. Their journalists may be glib and famous, but they are not—and will never be—superior to the courageous local reporters who have risked and given their lives to document Israel’s war crimes. If anything, they are complicit. Their latter-day moral reckoning does not erase decades of silence.
*The views expressed in this content are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of İdrakpost.
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