Exposed in Translation: Between Hebrew and English media narratives, Israel hides its war crimes confessions

I’m going to assume that everyone reading this piece has already seen the news of Israel’s bombing of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. From just following the BBC or other Western media outlets, you’ll get a similar picture; that the hospital was bombed twice, the first strike killed Reuters journalist Hussan Al-Masri and others, the second appeared to be a ‘double tap’ strike targeting first responders.

Benjamin Netanyahu has stated that this incident was a “tragic mishap” that Israel “deeply regrets,” and the Israeli military has claimed that they were targeting a “Hamas surveillance camera.”

Is this a sufficient summary of what we know? No. For one thing, Israel’s explanation fails to account for the double strike. But what’s more alarming is that a simple way to find a fuller account is to simply read Israeli news. But before I go into that, I’d like to tell a story about a magical ambulance.

Appealing to different audiences

In 2002, Israel captured the popular Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti. Open Amos Harel’s Ha’aretz report in English and you’ll read  how “IDF tanks surrounded” the home Barghouti was hiding in before capturing him. Many eagle-eyed readers at the time noted that if you read Hebrew, you’d see the very same journalist in the same newspaper giving a slightly different version of events. He writes (translated): “The soldiers crammed into an armoured ambulance in order to reach the house where Barghouti was hiding as quickly as possible and seal it off.”

Another Hebrew article quotes a reporter asking if it undermined Israeli accusations of Palestinians exploiting the immunity of ambulances for them to do this exact thing.

How does an ‘ambulance’ in Hebrew become ‘tanks’ in English? Because Israelis have two different audiences that they play to. The first is the general public of supportive states, who mostly think hiding soldiers in ambulances or killing journalists is bad. The second is the general Israeli public, who mostly do not care one iota about the ‘laws of war’ or any morals at all.

This creates the awkward dynamic that if you want to read the most damning portrayal of Israel, you don’t need to look for anti-Israel propaganda, you can just read their own press and you’ll regularly find them casually admitting all kinds of depraved crimes. But their more worldly-wise advocates understand that bragging about how you cleverly hid soldiers in an ambulance to capture a Palestinian leader isn’t a good look in the rest of the world, so they self-censor in English.

Which leads us back to the Nasser Hospital bombing. How was that reported in the Israeli press?

Framing the attack on Nasser Hospital

On Israel Radio 94 an Israeli intelligence operative talked about having personally tracked the location of the aforementioned ‘Hamas camera’  before handing the information to the Israeli Army. From the interview (credit to Younis Tirawi for publicising and translating it), it is abundantly clear that this ‘Hamas camera’ and the Reuters livestream that had been operating from Nasser Hospital all week are one and the same.

The operative even admitted that he doesn’t literally think these journalists were members of Hamas, but because they are allowed to operate in Gaza, that means they are ‘obligated’ to Hamas and thus are legitimate targets.

Likewise, if you read Israel Channel 14’s summary of the attack, Nasser Hospital is described as “a terrorist headquarters in which terrorists are being born, and our forces are successfully destroying them.” The bombing of the hospital is described as “a successful and accurate attack” where “terrorists disguised as journalists were also killed.”

In another article, it is specified that the bombing “was approved and coordinated with senior command, who knew about it before it was carried out.”

That Netanyahu later issued an apology claiming the bombing was a mistake did get noticed in Israel (note that his apology only exists in an English statement, no Hebrew version), enough for Channel 14 to quote “senior IDF officials” expressing their support for “the soldiers who attacked Nasser Hospital” saying that they “did what was required.”

Another detail worth noting, was the IDF’s English statement claiming that one of the “terrorists” killed in the hospital attack “took part in the infiltration into Israeli territory on October 7,” which is a bit vague, but is clearly intended to paint him as a militant. Indeed the Jewish Chronicle didn’t bother with subtext and simply described him as “one of the October 7 gunmen”.

We can look to the Hebrew Israeli press to find the straight truth; in a Maariv article, the writer candidly states that according to the Israeli military “one of the journalists who documented October 7” was killed without any attempt to pretend he was anything but a journalist. For their audience, being a journalist is reason enough to kill them.

I don’t have any inside sources on any of these matters, nor the institutional support of a media outlet. Everything I’ve just written about just comes from me, a regular guy, following the news on Palestine a bit more closely than what you’ll get from just reading the BBC and other Western mainstream media. But it shouldn’t have to be this way. It really didn’t take much digging to realise there’s something obviously wrong with the Israeli government issuing apologies for killing journalists and bombing a hospital by mistake, whilst its media is full of “of course we got explicit authorisation from our commander before bombing that hospital!” statements.

Either this contradiction is not being made clear in most Western media coverage because reporters are too lazy to do anything but just reprint Israeli government statements, or they do know how Israelis talk amongst themselves, but are choosing not to share this with the wider public.

Daniel Lindley is a writer and trade union activist in the UK.

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.