Throughout the current war in Gaza, I have forced myself to listen to Irish mainstream radio broadcasts, as a way of understanding how Irish public opinion is being formed.
It goes without saying that the coverage has been pathologically one-sided. In that respect, it is no different from so many broadcasters in Britain and the United States. But whereas our British and American cousins have a taste for polemic, Irish radio is deeply rooted in conformity. This gives the Irish coverage of the war a particular flavour, a sinister Invasion-of-the-Body-Snatchers feel.
Much of the coverage on Irish radio has taken the form of interviews with NGOs, international bodies, foreign correspondents and medical personnel. The segments are so strange as to constitute a new genre in radio – the devotional war interview. I always picture the interviewers with their heads tilted, gazing lovingly at these beatific interlocutors. As the interviewee lays out the suffering of the Gazans, and the iniquities of the Israelis, the presenter interjects with sighs, exclamations, asseverations and amplifications, all designed to express horror at the incomprehensible inhumanity of the Israelis.
The interviewers do not challenge the statements of their guests, no matter how dubious or ideological, and do not seek to balance them. The whole framing is crafted to portray the IDF as doing bad things in a vacuum. (As an aside, we might note here the limit at which the liberal project to explain away evil stops: the Israeli soldier.) The constraints and hard choices of warfare are almost never mentioned, and the word “Hamas” is avoided with the most assiduous delicacy. And the interviewees, many of whom represent institutions that have been caught in countless lies, are believed with the most perfect credulity.
It does not take much sociological analysis to surmise that deference to NGOs has replaced deference to priests in the Irish media. And that their new religion is fanatical anti-Israelism.
One of the shows I occasionally tune into is ‘Drivetime’ on RTE Radio One. Two weeks ago, on Tuesday and Thursday, I listened to large sections of the news and current affairs programme while on the road. What struck me forcefully was the contrast between the reporting on Gaza and every other issue covered.
On the two days in question, the show was co-presented by Cormac Ó hEadhra (pronounced O’Hara) and Claire Brock, the latter deputising for regular presenter Sarah McInerney. Ó hEadhra and Brock are both experienced, well-regarded journalists. When interviewing politicians or lobbyists, or even members of the public, they ask sharp, clever questions and cut through waffle. They probe the weak points of a person’s argument and introduce the opposite viewpoint. Certainly, there is a left-wing bias to their guests and their presentation of issues, and even more so to their assumptions, but a casual listener at least gets some rounded sense of the matter at hand and of the existence of various opinions.
When it comes to Gaza, none of these skills are on display. It is as if their journalistic instincts have been paralysed by some neurotoxic venom. The two interviews on Gaza I happened to catch on that Tuesday and Thursday are typical of the Irish media landscape. I could just as easily have chosen a different programme on RTE, or a show from a different station. Matt Cooper on Today FM brings more obnoxiousness to the subject, while Pat Kenny on Newstalk brings his own special brand of complacency, but they too lose all their critical journalistic faculties the second you say ‘Palestine’.
I have linked to the interviews below, so readers can verify for themselves whether I have characterised them fairly.
On 22 July, Claire Brock interviewed Nyka Alexander from the World Health Organization about the situation in Gaza. Her introduction begins, “Now, starving children …” – Talk about setting out your stall – “Now, starving children, personnel taken into custody, and supplies running on empty – that’s what the WHO in Gaza are facing the last few days.”
The interview that follows is extremely one-sided, and not primarily because of the guest. Alexander is measured and factual in her speech. To her credit, she even mentions the hostages twice. Some of her assertions are questionable, but Brock does not seek to challenge her interviewee, or even to clarify her statements for the benefit of curious listeners. Rather, she is single-mindedly focused on painting an apocalyptic picture and eliciting yet more details about the awfulness of the Israelis. To illustrate, I will focus on one exchange near the start of the interview.
Brock: From a World Health Organization perspective, there have been Israeli attacks on your staff and your main warehouse in the central Gazan city of Deir al-Balah. Tell us what’s happened there.
Alexander: So, Sunday night, we received an evacuation order, which comes from the military, saying that hostilities are going to increase in this area and you must get out, so we received those notifications, and then the fighting started. I’ve just been reading through some of the notes from colleagues about a staff residence we had. First, the third floor, the upper floor was hit by some kind of projectile. Then the second floor, then there was fire on the ground floor. Then a drone, which was inside the space, said: ‘Do not leave.’ So can you imagine sheltering on the ground floor, where you live, with fire coming at you. Everyone was sheltering in the bathroom and told not to leave. Then soldiers came on the premises, separated the men from the women, told the women to evacuate, the women and children, kept the males, strip-searched the males, released nine of them, detained four, eventually just kept one, um, and they took him away in handcuffs in his underwear. It’s really frightening and it’s really sad.
There are several questions that a sharp-minded journalist would want to ask here. And because Brock does in fact match that description, on other issues, her response is instructive. But first, the obvious questions:
How much time elapsed between the evacuation order and the start of the fighting? If the health workers did not evacuate punctually, why not? Who were the combatants? Which group was firing the projectiles? Was the person who was detained suspected of any wrongdoing? Did he have any known connection to Hamas or another terrorist organisation?
Beyond these questions to her interviewee – and acknowledging that in a short radio segment there is not enough time for every question one might want to ask, every line of inquiry one might want to pursue – there is the big question that Brock should have asked herself. I will dramatize the thought process, but really it would just be an instinctual flash in the mind of an alert, truth-tracking interviewer:
“Hang on a sec! My notes said this was an Israeli attack on the staff. That’s what I called it just now. But what she’s just described is more like a firefight, followed by an arrest. And it sounds like the Israelis went out of their way to warn and protect civilians, under challenging circumstances. This is interesting! I should dig into this stuff!”
Brock’s actual response was:
I mean, it’s incredible to think that that’s what can happen to health officials in the region. And that person who was held for some time, are they out, are they still being held?
The concern for the detained health worker (who was indeed still being held) is entirely honourable, but only a journalist who is incapable of imagining that a health care worker in a corrupt society could do wrong – which is to say, somebody who is in the wrong profession – or who was ideologically committed or predisposed to glossing over any potential wrongdoing by a Gazan health worker, could make that their only question. In terms of probing for the truth, it is not difficult: You would ask an IDF spokesperson whether they had any specific charges against the health care worker and question the necessity of the strip searching and the detainment. And you would ask a WHO spokesperson why their health care worker was detained. Is it possible, for example, that their organisation has been infiltrated?
Instead, we are left with a general impression of IDF malfeasance, even though Alexander’s account is ambiguous in multiple ways. It would seem that IDF soldiers, presumably at significant personal risk, evacuated the health workers and brought the women and children to safety before interrogating the men. And if strip-searching can certainly be a tactic of humiliation, it can also be a necessary precaution. In fact, if there were solid grounds for suspecting that the detained health care worker was, say, a Hamas operative, then it is not clear to me that the IDF did anything wrong at all. Indeed, it seems to have successfully protected civilians in a situation where the enemy was close by and there were firefights.
The WHO’s own statement, released the day before the interview, is vague and makes liberal use of the passive voice. It does not explicitly say who attacked the residence and the warehouse. It references the Israeli military twice – once as issuing the evacuation order and then as entering the residential premises. It does not mention Hamas or any other terrorist group.
On the basic level of establishing the facts, there is much that Brock could have done if she had engaged her journalistic skills. That is what makes her response, and the interview as a whole, so jaw-droppingly weird. To anyone who has not been zombified by Palestinian propaganda, the behaviour of our journalists is positively uncanny.
This weirdness is dialled up further in the second interview, conducted by Cormac Ó hEadhra two days later. Again, I’ll quote the presenter’s preamble:
We go to Gaza now. The Commissioner-General of UNWRA, quoting a colleague, said today that people in Gaza, where the supply and distribution of aid is controlled by Israel, are neither dead nor alive; they are walking corpses, he said. A fifth of the children in Gaza City are malnourished and more than one hundred people, most of them youngsters, have reportedly died of hunger there, the UN has said. I’m joined now by Caroline Willeman, who’s project coordinator with Médecins Sans Frontières in Gaza and is currently in Gaza City. Caroline, you’re very welcome to the programme.
Before moving on, let us briefly note the one-sided framing, the hysterical language, and the compromised and partial sources. (If you think UNWRA and MSF are impartial organisations guided only by the finest humanitarian concerns, then your news sources have failed you.)
The interviewee this time is much more impassioned and ideologically anti-Israel in her answers. If Ó hEadhra had brought his customary acuity to the interview, this would not have been problematic. If Willeman had been challenged at various points, perhaps she would have delivered informative and persuasive replies. Certainly her account of the dire medical situation in Gaza, and of the hunger, is alarming and at least partially rooted in fact.
(Note, here, that I am not calling for a confrontational interview, much less a disrespectful or insensitive one, but something like the alert, objective, impartial, critical, more or less truth-seeking journalism that Ó hEadhra habitually practices, albeit with a left-of-centre bias.)
As before, I will home in on one exchange to illustrate the whole tone of the interview and the general attitude of Irish journalism towards this issue.
Willeman has made reference to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) and to people getting shot as they went to collect food. As the briefest of sketches of the background here, I would offer the following: The GHF has been established by the Israelis and the Americans as a way of delivering aid that prevents it being stolen by Hamas. UNWRA, the UN agency that previously controlled aid, has resisted this move with arguments, propaganda and in some cases – I mean this as an objective, attested fact – falsehoods. Some people have been shot and killed going to GHF sites. Solid information is hard to get, but it seems clear that the IDF has been egregiously responsible for some of these shootings. Hamas, meanwhile, has been doing its utmost to disrupt the GHF. In some ways this resembles a turf war.
Theoretically, the nuances of this, the murky facts, the claims and counterclaims, should be meat and drink to a journalist. But instead of tucking in, Ó hEadhra gets emotional:
It’s truly shocking and it’s amazing to say that at this point, when we’ve seen so many shocking things, from violent assaults to cold-blooded killings, but when you look at the various news agencies, I’m looking at the BBC right now, and the front page, an infant who is ghostlike, is being held by a woman; another with their ribs protruding; and I look at the New York Times front page, and there’s a child among a group, holding a pot crying desperately for food, with a pot, and they really look like they’re penned in, and I’m sorry to say this, but that they’re penned in like animals. That’s what they look like, really.
I will come back to this statement later, as Ó hEadhra will reiterate his impassioned appeal. For the moment, Willeman gratefully takes the baton and runs with it. When she has finished, Ó hEadhra returns to the theme of the GHF. And the exchange here is a kind of miracle:
What about the US-Israeli controlled Gaza Humanitarian Foundation? Is that of any use?
Talk about putting your thumb on the scale!
Eh, so they function in the south, while I work in the north, but I have many MSF colleagues working in the south. There is nothing humanitarian about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Humanitarian aid is delivered in a neutral way, not by a party to the conflict, and in this case a party [to] the conflict who has shown genocidal intent in their actions. And we have seen what has been happening since day one at these distribution sites. People are put into what is like a cattle area, almost, desperate people, and again they’re being shot at, they’re being killed, they are being maimed; it is a disgrace to even consider calling this a humanitarian foundation.
There are many, many questions that a truth-seeking journalist could ask here: If children are starving to death, surely what matters is that they get food, not who distributes it? Isn’t there an argument that UNWRA, which has been shown to have intimate ties with Hamas and is trenchantly anti-Israel, is not a neutral party to the conflict? Wouldn’t it be better if no aid was stolen by Hamas, so that more food can get to hungry Gazans? Much less importantly, but of non-negligible interest to the listeners of Drivetime, wouldn’t it be better for Irish taxpayers, who help fund UNWRA, if the money we gave the organisation was not spent on aid that got stolen by Hamas? How is the fact that Israel is delivering aid to Gazans reconcilable with your claim of genocide? Isn’t it highly unusual, if not unprecedented, for a belligerent to provide food, medicines and vaccines to the civilian population of the enemy it is fighting? Isn’t Hamas trying to violently disrupt the GHF sites, causing dangerous situations there? Isn’t the queuing system at the aid sites designed to prevent stampedes, making them safer places for women and children in particular?
Any one of those questions would have transformed the interview. But Ó hEadhra’s response is another emotional outburst, a curious non sequitur, an appeal once again to the visual:
It is truly shocking. No matter which – and I actually invite people, when they have time, I invite you to skip from news agency to news agency, and you can take your pick, and it’s clear what the world is seeing now. It’s seeing desperate images of people, penned in like animals, as I say, it’s the only description that I can come up with, children who are gaunt, protruding ribs, ghostlike, crying for food, and there is aid being piled up on lorries, isn’t that correct, Caroline? On the border. Why isn’t it getting in at this point?
(It will surprise nobody that in the ensuing conversation, neither Willeman nor Ó hEadhra make any reference to the UN refusing to distribute tons of aid left to rot in the sun at the Kerem Shalom crossing.)
It’s clear what the world is seeing now?
Actually, no.
A few days later, it was revealed that the emaciated child (Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq) whose image was featured in almost every major news outlet as evidence of child starvation in Gaza – including the New York Times, CNN, Sky News, the Daily Mail, the Guardian, and the Times, having initially been published on the front page of the Daily Express – was actually suffering from serious genetic disorders. It was this poor child’s image that was all over the world’s media on July 23 and 24 (the latter being the date of the Drivetime interview with Caroline Willeman). Subsequently, it was shown that other images that were being widely disseminated by the media as evidence of starvation were also of children with serious pre-existing health conditions.
The New York Times and the BBC – the two grand old news institutions Ó hEadhra specifically cited – not only published the photo of Muhammad, but featured stories about him that disguised his serious health issues. In the end, the New York Times was forced to issue a correction.
This was followed by revelations in the German newspapers Süddeutsche Zeitung and Bild that the images of desperate Gazan women and children waving pots were actually staged by photojournalist Anas Zayed Fteiha. Just a meters away, as Fteiha neglected to show, there were men waiting for and receiving food. Moreover, the pictures taken by other photographers of the same scene clearly show that those waiting for food are not penned in at all – like animals or otherwise.
These images went around the world and were published by the likes of the BBC and CNN.
Furthermore, Fteiha is not some neutral reporter, but an activist who is part of a network that promotes international “resistance” against Israel. He also works for the Turkish state-run news agency Anadolu, which is firmly under the thumb of Turkish president Erdoğan, a rabid hater of Israel.
Indeed, the images of Muhammad – including the one softly lit and stylised to look like a Pietà – were also licensed to Anadolu. And a photo of a different child which (still) accompanies the clip of the Caroline Willeman interview on Drivetime (see link below) was also distributed by the Anadolu agency. This latter photo may nonetheless be authentic, but it would only be prudent not to take Anadolu’s word for it. (The same photo appeared on the cover of the German magazine Stern – see article linked below for discussion of photographer and agency.)
While it is easy to be wise after the fact, this ignores the responsibility of news agencies to do due diligence, and to be sceptical of frankly dodgy sources. And it also ignores the deliberate concealment, in some cases, of information about Muhammad’s underlying health issues.
While there is very much more that could be said about the dishonesty and carelessness of the world’s media in relation to these images, that would be outside the scope of this essay. It is more germane here simply to note that pretty much all the images that Cormac Ó hEadhra begged us so emphatically to heed were more or less fraudulent.
Returning to his two emotional appeals, we can see them now in their full strangeness. They appeal to three things:
a) Emotion
b) Authority
c) Visual evidence
Take your pick, left (BBC) or right (Daily Express), wherever we look, we see newspapers and broadcasters that – irresponsibly in all cases, and dishonestly in some – disseminated anti-Israeli propaganda. These authorities failed when it came to the Muhammad image, while a solitary British-Jewish journalist David Collier uncovered the truth. Collier did that terribly old-fashioned journalistic thing – he looked behind the image. He exercised his powers of reason. He questioned the surface presentation of things.
Since the beginning of this war, commentators have been prefacing their opinions with phrases that are some variation of: “We see the appalling images on our phones every day …” I have seen and heard these utterances made by politicians, journalists, writers and activists. As if, in 2025, we all see the same images. As if the images we see are not curated. As if images are never staged, or framed, or doctored. As if we have entered a post-logos TikTok world, where the image is the ultimate ground of reality. A world in which a radio presenter appeals pathetically to images his listeners cannot see.
Many of the images of Gazan suffering are of course accurate, honest portrayals of what they depict. But what are we to make of all the claims of children dying of starvation when the images the media portrays of starving children are dishonest? In the camera phone age, why are there not many images of starving children without serious underlying health conditions? Asking and investigating factual questions like these, without falling for the propaganda of either side, is surely the solemn duty of the serious media, especially in wartime.
There is little doubt that grave hunger exists in Gaza. And that Hamas, the IDF and UNWRA all bear some responsibility. But so, in fact, do the world’s media. Whenever Hamas has felt under pressure during this war, it has flooded the world’s information spaces with shrill propaganda. It has done so knowing that many in the West have a visceral hatred of Israel, and will believe anything about Israel, no matter how absurd, that its messages will be propagated without critical scrutiny. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation presents a huge threat to Hamas, which was previously able to steal aid with impunity, hoard it, profiteer off it, and use it to control Gazans. Hamas exploited the current hunger crisis to demonise the GHF and turn global public opinion even further against Israel.
It was during this brief period that three of the weakest and most cynical leaders in the Western world – Macron, Starmer and Carney – made announcements about recognising a Palestinian state. This came as negotiations were almost finalised that would have seen a ceasefire and most or all of the remaining Israeli hostages released, and the flooding of Gaza with aid. With all the pressure off its shoulders, and pleased as punch at securing this recognition of statehood without having to concede a single thing, Hamas duly broke off the negotiations. Shortly afterward Islamic Jihad released a harrowing video of a gaunt and weeping Rom Braslavski, and then Hamas released a video of an emaciated Evyatar David digging his own grave.
The world’s media, with the notable exception of the New York Post, was much shyer about splashing those images on its front pages.
In the two Drivetime interviews I discussed here, there was no mention of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Perhaps just a strange coincidence, you might say, but it fits a pattern across Irish media. Do not mention Hamas, or other Palestinian Arab terrorists, and portray the actions of the Israelis as arbitrary acts of evil against innocent Palestinians.
I must emphasise again just how uncanny this is – beyond-the-looking-glass, fruity-loop, Twilight-Zone weird. Like all those RTE pieces – and indeed statements by Simon Harris – about the murder of Private Seán Rooney which avoid naming his murderers, Hezbollah.
Or maybe sinister is a better word?
Ultimately, the behaviour of the Irish media reminds me of one of those old hypnotist tricks. Having put volunteers into a trance, the performer tells them that whenever he says a particular word, they will act in a certain way – I don’t know, like a chicken, or somebody who is carrying a hot bowl of soup on their heads – with all the hilarity that ensues. In the case of almost all the Irish media, that word is ‘Palestine’, which instantly turns rational, inquiring journalists into simpering facilitators of some of the world’s baddest hombres.
Links for reference
https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/drivetime/2025/0722/1524829-drivetime-tuesday-22-july-2025/ (interview with Nyka Alexander from 1:37:10)
https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/drivetime/2025/0724/1525232-drivetime-thursday-24-july-2025/ (interview with Caroline Willeman from 06:14)
https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22533218/ (clip of interview with Caroline Willeman)
https://david-collier.com/the-truth-behind-the-viral-gaza-famine-photo/
Update to this piece: The Free Press has carried out an excellent investigation into the viral photos of starving children. The findings are a shocking indictment of the dishonesty of Western media outlets. See: https://www.thefp.com/p/they-became-symbols-for-gazan-starvation