In recent months, Salo Aizenberg has published a series of obituaries from Telegram channels affiliated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Palestinian Mujahideen Movement and Hamas, exposing terror operatives who had previously posed as journalists, humanitarian workers, healthcare workers, or civilians. In one such example, Aizenberg identified an obituary notice indicating that World Central Kitchen (WCK) employee Ahed Azmi Qadih, for whom the Genocide in Gaza website lists a fatality, was a senior commander of the Mujahideen Movement who participated in the Oct.7, 2023 attacks.
Whether the result of inauthentic coordinated activity, hostile state-sponsored disinformation campaigns or foreign information manipulation, it is paramount that British media outlets conduct their own due diligence on the provenance of their sources and avoid drawing uncritically from terror-affiliated sources.
On July 9, The Guardian published an article by Seham Tamtesh and Julian Borger, foregrounding allegations that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) had carried out a “field execution” of Ahmad Esleem [AKA Ahmad Nasser Saleem], a Palestinian aid driver for WCK.
A Palestinian driver bringing food aid from the World Central Kitchen (WCK) into Gaza has been killed by an Israeli soldier “in a field execution”, according to witnesses and the local truckers’ association, which said it may suspend operations in protest.
Ahmad Esleem was shot in the head on Wednesday when an aid convoy stopped because of a breakdown to one truck soon after entering Gaza, according to three accounts. Israeli soldiers ordered the drivers to dismount and one of them shot Esleem in the head when his hands were raised.
From the outset, the article rests on three uncorroborated eyewitness accounts. Yet much of its quotable material comes not from the witnesses themselves. Rather, it comes from two relatives of the victim whose vivid, present-tense and first-person-inflected descriptions read as eyewitness testimony despite neither having been present at the scene.
Both are identified primarily by their institutional title: the deputy head of the Association of Transport Companies in Gaza and the owner of Qamri Trading and Public Transport Company. These titles function less as evidence of proximity to the events than as a credibility shortcut. Readers are conditioned to treat an official designation as a marker of reliability, even when it signals professional standing rather than eyewitness presence.
To further compound this, both men’s quotes are rendered in scene: present-tense, sensory, and continuous with the surviving drivers’ own testimony. They additionally lack any hedging attribution, such as “according to the drivers” or “as relayed to him.” Stripped of that distinction, the quotes read as testimony rather than a secondhand account, and the credentials preceding them prime the reader to accept them as such.
The substitution need not be deliberate; spokespeople relaying secondhand information is commonplace in daily reporting. What is unusual, however, is the mismatch between role and register. A spokesperson’s function conveyed in an eyewitness’ language, allowing the authority of the title to stand in, largely unnoticed, for the fact of presence.
Further, the “execution” framing in the headline, and repeated at least twice more in the body, reflects the witnesses’ characterisation rather than an independently adjudicated fact, one that the IDF itself disputes. That dispute, however, is not introduced until the eleventh and twelfth paragraphs, only after the reader has been given the witnesses’ accounts as the operative narrative.
Here are the paragraphs citing the IDF version of events:
On Wednesday, IDF troops identified three aid truck drivers who had stopped along the Philadelphi corridor and exited their trucks contrary to established procedures”, a military spokesperson said.
IDF troops operating in the area detained the drivers for questioning. Simultaneously, the driver of another truck that had stopped at a nearby roadblock ran toward the troops, they said. The troops initiated the suspect apprehension protocol and, after perceiving an immediate threat, opened fire toward the driver.
As a result of the fire, the driver was injured. The troops provided him with initial medical treatment at the scene. He was later transferred, in coordination with the Red Cross, for further medical treatment.
Of note, the IDF’s statement maintains that Esleem was “injured,” given “initial medical treatment,” then “transferred, in coordination with the Red Cross, for further medical treatment.” Viewed thus, the language describes a survivor, not a fatality.
Whilst WCK released an official statement announcing Elseem’s death, The Guardian’s embedded hyperlink to a photograph of Esleem on arrival at hospital relies solely on material from the Palestinian Information Centre (PIC). Established in 1997, the PIC – one of the first launched by Hamas – remains a central conduit not only for disseminating the terror group’s agenda and narrative, but also its operational messaging.
Open-source research found that the photographer credited in the Arabic text on the Palestinian Information Centre’s website is صوير ابراهيم سلامة [English: Ibrahim Salama]. A subsequent search on X also identified a similar photograph, purportedly of Esleem’s body, in which Salama is likewise credited. Further research found that Salama is affiliated with the Qatari-owned Al Jazeera network. He has also previously eulogised deceased Hamas operatives masquerading as journalists, including Anas Al-Sharif, while representing Hamas affiliates as “civilians.”
In the above post, written in Arabic, Salama excoriates Israel’s alleged killing of “civilians,” characterising them as “martyrs,” yet his video footage reveals body bags adorned with the Hamas flags.
Put in perspective, The Guardian not only amplified claims sourced from a Hamas-affiliated website but has also lent credence to a photojournalist whose impartiality is already in question by virtue of his affiliation with PIC, and whose social media activity suggests a prior investment in advancing an anti-Israel narrative.
At the time of writing, there is no independent corroboration from either the IDF or the Red Cross confirming Esleem’s death. CAMERA UK contacted the Red Cross to corroborate the sequence of events and Esleem’s death, but has not yet received a response. If The Guardian’s presumption of guilt levelled at the IDF rests solely on Hamas-affiliated sources and uncorroborated testimonies, and its reporting is itself materially indistinguishable from Quds News Network’s coverage of the same story, then at what point has The Guardian ceased to provide independent reporting and become instead a passive vehicle for disinformation?
In what follows, The Guardian continues to frame previous instances of alleged IDF misconduct within a chronological, cumulative portrait of Israeli military impunity, such that Esleem’s purported death reads as the natural culmination of a pattern of perceived arbitrary killings.
On 21 May, two Palestinian drivers were alleged to have been shot in similar circumstances to Ahmad Esleem. According to local accounts, Muhammad al-Heela and Mahmoud Awad were detained by Israeli soldiers for some days and then released near a roundabout in Rafah, and were then shot by their captors after they had walked a few metres away.
The previous month, Israeli soldiers shot dead two drivers working for the UN child protection agency Unicef as they were filling their water trucks at an established distribution point at Mansoura in northern Gaza. Questioned on the incident, the IDF said its soldiers had “perceived a threat”, without providing further details.
In April 2024, seven WCK employees were killed by an Israeli airstrike on a convoy in southern Gaza. The victims were from the UK, Australia, Poland and Palestine, and one was a US-Canada dual citizen.
As one might anticipate, any mention of Hamas is conspicuously absent when explaining the IDF’s heightened security posture. Hamas is referenced only once throughout the entire article, implicitly framing Israel’s military targeting of humanitarian workers as arbitrary and deliberate, devoid of any context that Israel’s securitised posture is a response to Hamas having routinely disguised its combatants in civilian clothing, medical coats, press attire and humanitarian aid markings.
In August 2025, for instance, Hamas operatives reportedly disguised themselves as humanitarian workers by bearing a counterfeit WCK logo.
Similarly, as CAMERA UK noted in July, a recent string of obituaries published on Hamas and PIJ Telegram channels have since confirmed that a number of individuals previously reported as journalists were in fact terror operatives, prompting the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) to review its own casualty database. In June, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) Inspector General investigation found that 101 UNRWA employees doubled as Hamas combatants, commanders and intelligence officers, several of whom participated in the Oct.7, 2023 attacks.
Whilst civilian suffering is undoubtedly tragic, and any genuine misconduct would be rightly investigated, the IDF is nevertheless engaged in asymmetric warfare against Hamas, whose combatants embed themselves within civilian infrastructure precisely to ensure that, once Israel strikes these terrorist cells, the court of public opinion has already pronounced Israel guilty.
By The Guardian’s own admission above, the IDF confirmed a “perceived threat” in relation to the deaths of the two UNICEF drivers in April. Yet if the outlet is willing to amplify allegations against Israel while dismissing the evidence and documentation the IDF submits, the question these allegations invite is a pointed one: what recourse does Israel have? Is it left to oscillate in an impossible bind, incessantly demonised regardless of the evidence it presents?