PART TWO: FURTHER SANITIZING HAMAS’S ACTIONS
This is the second of a three-part series examining Rolling Stone’s coverage of the war in Gaza that started on October 7, 2023. You can see Part One here.
For a magazine that is supposed to be dedicated to music, as was discussed previously, Rolling Stone’s coverage of the war in Gaza seemed … obsessive. It’s not possible to discuss every article, every distortion, every falsehood that the magazine published. But the main theme underlying the coverage from the beginning of the war was, as it has been for some time at Rolling Stone, to portray Israel’s actions negatively while deflecting blame for for terrorism or for anything Hamas has done. By the start of November of 2023, the narrative according to Rolling Stone had already been set: While the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians was bad, it was after all Israel’s own fault, and the country’s response to the attack was the real problem.
And during that month that magazine continued to further sanitize Hamas’s actions:
- Reporter Miles Klee attended the Los Angeles screening of the 45-minute video that Israel has compiled of raw footage of the attack, much of it filmed and broadcast by attackers themselves, but the November 9 article he wrote was more concerned with the pro- and anti-Israel protesters outside of the event than with giving actual details of what he saw in the movie.
- On November 19, the magazine decried that “Israel’s bombardment of Gaza rages on,” as well as the IDF raid on Shifa hospital. It failed, however, to note that under international law, hospitals lose protected status when used for military purposes and therefore any casualties resulting from the raid were the fault of Hamas, which was using the hospital for its operations. While writing that “the Israeli government has claimed” the hospital was a center for military operations, writer Peter Wade omitted that the Biden administration corroborated this claim – on November 14, ABC news quoted U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby telling reporters, “Hamas and the … Palestinian Islamic Jihad, PIJ, members operate a command and control node from Al-Shifa in Gaza City. They have stored weapons there, and they’re prepared to respond to an Israeli military operation against that facility.”
- A November 28 article parroted Hamas casualty figures, writing that the war has “killed more than 15,000 Palestinians, including more than 6,000 children,” without noting that, as the Associated Press had explained earlier that month, Hamas does not distinguish between civilians and fighters, and that it uses child soldiers. Interviewing families of hostages as well as Palestinian civilians, as with much of Rolling Stone’s October reporting, this article, again by Jesse Rosenfeld, quotes Israelis who oppose the actions of their own government, but does not quote Gazans who criticize theirs.
At the same time the magazine continued to portray anything Israel did or even the ADL’s support for Israel negatively. There was a 2800-word hit-piece on the ADL on November 26 and a November 10 article about David Saranga, who manages the digital bureau of the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a division that runs Israel’s social media accounts, which attempted to undercut most of Saranga’s comments and mocked him with the title, “Israel’s Social Media Chief Swears His Wild Campaign Is Working.”
And this was just crazy: On November 15 Rolling Stone rationalized the viral movement of people who lauded Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” as “a sign of how polarized and angry Americans have become over a Middle East conflict that has already claimed thousands of lives, and the role the U.S. has played in the region for decades.”
Rolling Stone also has an ongoing pattern of highlighting celebrities’ statements and actions opposing Israel but ignoring or minimizing celebrities that support Israel. When 55 Hollywood celebrities signed a letter in support of a ceasefire, it merited a stand-alone article on October 20 with the headline, “Jon Stewart, Cate Blanchett, Joaquin Phoenix, and More Call on Biden for Ceasefire in Gaza and Israel.” But when 2000 celebrities signed a letter in support of Israel organized by Creative Community for Peace, all it got was a single paragraph inside of a 2000-word, November 26 article that otherwise defended celebrities like Mark Ruffalo who promoted the libelous claim that Israel is committing genocide. Even that small mention of the CCFP letter was only after CAMERA called out the magazine and its then-editor on X for ignoring the letter. (Although RS did report on a letter organized by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum calling for release of the hostages.) This was consistent with the magazine’s history, prior to 2023, of ignoring work by Creative Community for Peace.
This pattern of happily covering entertainment industry activities agitating against Israel, but ignoring members of the entertainment industry who support Israel, extends beyond open letters. Rolling Stone covered Macklemore’s Hind’s Hall in May of 2024, Hind’s Hall 2 in September, and even his comments on Instagram explaining that he said “F*ck America” during an event because of “the United State’s involvement in the Israel-Hamas war and [he] said ‘watching a genocide unfold in front of us has been excruciating on a spiritual, emotional and human level.’” Yet the magazine ignored John Ondrasik’s (also known as Five for Fighting) beautiful and heartbreaking song and video “OK.” All three articles about Macklemore repeated the lie that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and none mentioned anything about accusations of antisemitism in the artist’s past.
One particular low came about a month after the departure from the magazine of Editor-in-Chief Noah Shachtman on March 1, 2024. In April José Andrés, the head of World Central Kitchen, told ABC reporter Martha Raddatz in an interview, “this doesn’t seem [to be] a war against terror, this doesn’t seem anymore a war about defending Israel, this really at this point seems it’s a war against humanity itself.” This is Nazi-level rhetoric: what do you do with a people who are “at war with humanity itself”? Rolling Stone, back again under the leadership of Sean Woods* and even more rudderless that it had been in the earlier months of the war, chose to elevate this comment into a headline.
On the one-year anniversary of the attack, October 7, 2024, Rolling Stone published 4000 words by Jesse Rosenfeld: “A Year After Oct. 7, Israel’s War in Gaza Has Become a Regional Inferno.” As with earlier coverage, the article does describe some of the horrors of the attack, but puts the blame for it on Israel. Israel is to blame for the bad things that happen to Israelis, and Israel is to blame for the bad things that happen to Palestinians:
For years, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu steered the country with the promise that Israel’s military, intelligence, and technological advantage ensured quiet as a replacement for peace. As he finished the walls that sealed in occupied Palestinians, allowing Israelis to freely expand in East Jerusalem and the West Bank while sieging and fighting low-cost wars in Gaza, Tel Aviv became one of the world’s most expensive cities, while Palestinians were put out of sight and mind.
That ended as thousands of fighters from Gaza burst through fences, walls, and firewalls that cut off the coastal enclave from the world for 16 years. The gruesome killings of ravers at the Nova music festival, residents of southern Israel trapped in their homes, and soldiers surprised and overwhelmed in their bases, transformed the country in a day. Unable to ignore Palestinians any longer, Israel began bombing them into silence.
For Palestinians under Hamas, there was no quiet before Oct. 7, 2023. Life in Gaza had already felt impossible; its residents were trapped, suffering under Israel’s limited allowance of goods, and relying on infrastructure so damaged by years of Israeli bombings that seawater came through the taps while rivers of open sewage flowed into the Mediterranean Sea.
The article describes, from the point of view of a journalist that was in Sederot on October 7, the horrific attack, but then turns that suffering back to the Israeli government:
“Civilians were targeted in their homes while sleeping, in the shelters and safe rooms,” says the long-haired photographer and writer. Sitting in a Tel Aviv café, he is clearly still disturbed by what he saw, the people killed and body parts strewn about, during his investigation of the attacks in five southern Israeli communities. “Families, children, women, elderly people,” he says, describing the dead. …
Regardless of politics, he says that these atrocities touched every Jewish Israeli. “Of course it was going to explode one day,” says Ziv, 38, about the system of segregation, military rule, and blockade he’s covered most of his life. “Did I think it would explode in that kind of brutality? No.” Since those attacks, Ziv has watched Israel’s leaders use the collective trauma and calls for vengeance to further a spiraling war.
So not only do Israeli actions cause Palestinian violence, in this telling (“‘Of course it was going to explode one day,’”) but Palestinian violence is merely a convenient excuse for Israeli retaliation (“Israel’s leaders use the collective trauma and calls for vengeance to further a spiraling war”).
In contrast, in writing about a Palestinian in Gaza who was “trying desperately to get his family out of Gaza through the Rafah crossing with Egypt,” Rolling Stone tells readers, “any hope of escape was dashed as Israel seized the border crossing as part of its invasion of Rafah in May.” There is no mention of the fact that Egypt had sealed its border with Gaza long before that point.
This same individual tells Rolling Stone, “it’s like a never-ending nightmare.” But it doesn’t seem to occur to either the reporter or any of his interview subjects that the group that started the war, Hamas, actually could end the “nightmare” at any time by surrendering and releasing the hostages unconditionally. Only Israel is at fault.
So how did Rolling Stone do in 2025? See part three of our series here.
(*The author was a high school classmate of Rolling Stone editor Sean Woods.)