How Gaza's media playbook reached Lebanon

What we're seeing in the Western media coverage of Lebanon very much mirrors what we saw and what we continue to see in terms of the coverage of the Gaza genocide.

But what we saw in Gaza was not new. It reflected a longer pattern of dehumanisation directed at Palestinians and, more broadly, the Arab world. That framework has translated easily into coverage of Lebanon.

The same patterns reappear: omissions that obscure Israeli responsibility, the misuse of language such as "ceasefire", chronic underreporting, and the assumption that almost any Israeli action can be justified in the name of destroying Hezbollah, just as similar arguments were used to justify actions against Hamas in Gaza.

In Lebanon, this often takes the form of headlines that describe destruction without clearly identifying who is carrying it out. The deliberate nature of the destruction is frequently absent from reporting, even when Israeli officials have been open about plans that involve the displacement of Shia communities and the clearing of Shia villages. Instead, media coverage often relies on sanitised language such as "evacuation", masking the coercive reality on the ground.

The result is systematic underreporting.

When organisations such as Amnesty International conclude that Israel is committing the war crime of unlawful transfer, those findings often receive little attention in mainstream Western media. More broadly, statements and reports from NGOs documenting abuses frequently struggle to gain significant coverage.

Yet the underlying logic remains the same. The idea that an entire village can be destroyed in the pursuit of Hezbollah echoes the rationale used in Gaza, where vast destruction was justified through the stated objective of eliminating Hamas.

If those tactics were normalised in Gaza, it is hardly surprising to see them reproduced in Lebanon.

What much of the media adopted was essentially the language of the Gaza playbook, and that same framework was then applied to Lebanon.

But that is precisely the problem. Gaza is not a playbook. It is a genocide, involving some of the gravest crimes of our time.

And yet, through that framing, what emerges is a whitewashing of the genocide itself, alongside the normalisation of similar tactics in Lebanon and, increasingly, in territories occupied by Israel in Syria.

At the heart of all this is a failure to contextualise Israel as an expansionist state. Without that broader context, these actions are presented as isolated security measures rather than as part of a larger political and territorial project.