Last week, we published a post illustrating how the Guardian continues to erase Hamas from its coverage of the war they launched over two years ago – the advancement of a narrative in which nothing the terror group has done since Oct. 7, 2023 matters, and which insists that Israel is the only party whose decisions are of any consequence.
Though this latest example of disappearing the genocidal Islamist extremist group from stories focusing on Gaza was written by the outlet’s chief Middle East correspondent Emma Graham-Harrison, it would be a mistake to focus too heavily on individual journalists. Rather, the outlet should be properly seen as a closed antizionist circle that’s impervious to any information challenging its pre-determined conclusion of Palestinian victimhood and Israeli villainy.
In fact, as we’ve documented previously, almost immediately after Oct. 7th, 2023, Guardian journalists and contributors began what we’ve described as the abuse of Oct. 7th memory: downplaying of the most savage antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust, while framing the story instead as one about Israel’s putatively disproportionate response, which, within weeks, they began claiming was “genocidal.”
In addition to the erasure of Hamas from the post-Oct. 7 battlefield, as illustrated by Graham-Harris’ article, an article over the weekend by William Cristou takes Hamas’ Guardian-assisted disappearing act a step further, by blurring, or even erasing, the simple fact that the war began as the result of an unprovoked massacre by the terror group, which killed 1,200.
The article (“Children and police officers among at least 30 killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza”, Jan. 31) frames the mere claim that 30 were killed – including “children” – as fact, omits that the source of the claim, Gaza’s civil defense agency, is controlled by Hamas, and includes the following graph:
This Hamas-friendly propaganda, which conveys to readers the lie that Israel’s act of self-defense was, in fact, a war of “aggression”, while omitting the mass murder, rape, sexual mutilation, torture, and hostage-taking on Oct. 7 by Palestinian pogromists, is not merely evident in the graph’s text, but in the article as well.
For instance, here’s the final paragraph [emphasis added]:
Most of Gaza has been levelled and basic infrastructure remains inoperable as a result of Israeli bombing over the past two years, which has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians. Last year, a UN commission of inquiry found that Israel had committed a genocide in Gaza.
Hamas’ invasion of southern Israel and their slaughter of men, women and children – not to mention the 472 Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza since Oct. 7 – is erased.
This is especially noteworthy because even the Guardian’s standard formula following sentences citing alleged Palestinian casualty numbers typically includes something like this: “The war was triggered by a Hamas incursion into Israel during which it killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians. It also took more than 250 hostages back to Gaza.”
Such total erasures of the party who started the Oct. 7 war and the resulting Israeli casualties has not been common, but has been evident in previous Guardian articles:
- A Feb. 5, 2025 analysis by their former Jerusalem correspondent Oliver Holmes.
- A March 3, 2025 piece by Jenna Amatulli, the deputy head of news for Guardian US.
- Another piece on March 3, 2025 by Benjamin Lee, the east coast arts editor at Guardian US.
- An Oct. 10, 2024 article by reporter Rachel Hall.
- A Feb. 4, 2024 article by Melissa Hellmann, their senior reporter on the Guardian US’s race and equity team.
In fact, the first post-Oct. 7 complaint we sent to the outlet’s Readers’ Editor pertained to this omission.
On Oct. 8th, 2023, we complained about an article that day by Coral Murphy Marcos, which noted that “retaliatory Israeli airstrikes in Gaza…have so far left 48 dead and 461 injured,” while failing to give the preliminary Israeli death toll – which was over 700 – from the Hamas massacre which necessitated the IDF retaliation.
We never received a correction, or even a response, from our complaints over the appalling omissions in all six articles.
Finally, though the Guardian doesn’t have the global impact of the British license-fee-funded BBC, it would be a mistake to completely dismiss the influence of the outlet, whose website receives roughly 250 million monthly visits.
The damage to Israel and the global Jewish community by their propagandistic – and, at times, simply cruel – re-writing of one of the most barbaric massacres of Jews in history into a story in which Jews are the perpetrators, while the terrorist mass murderers and their moral supporters in the pro-Palestinian movement escape opprobrium – is all too real, and, as we’ve demonstrated, is only getting worse.
This post originally appeared at CAMERA UK.