TEHRAN – Palestinians are “dead” while Israelis are “getting killed”. That’s how the London-based BBC likes to refer to the casualties of the current military conflict between Israel and the Gaza Strip. 

The Hamas resistance movement’s unprecedented attack on Israel has been keeping Western media abuzz with a slew of accusations and allegations pointed towards the group.
Hamas launched a full-scale attack on the occupied territories Saturday as it fired thousands of rockets and sent its fighters into Israeli settlements through land, sea, and air. 

For people outside West Asia who have been grasping information on the region through the lens of Western media, this might be the first time they have come across the harrowing images of war between Gaza and the Israeli regime.

That’s because despite the wars fought on 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021, this time Israel does not seem to be holding the upper hand in its conflict with Gazans. In the other four wars, Palestinians seemed to have been invisible to Western media. The massacre of men, women and children and the decimation of residential buildings, schools, hospitals, mosques and other civilian sites went largely unnoticed by Western media outlets as Israel was envisaged to emerge as the victorious party.

Apart from the occasional brutal poundings of Gaza, Israel has also been holding large numbers of Palestinians in detention. Thousands of them are kept in jail cells in the occupied territories and more than 2.3 million others are held captive in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison. 

But a typical audience of Western media outlets is not likely to know about any of these prisoners. Rather, they will have already heard about the 130 Israelis who were reportedly taken captive by Hamas forces in an “inhumane” and “illegal” act. They know about the Saturday incursion of Hamas into the occupied territories, yet they have no clue about the Arab soil forcefully captured by Israel in 1967 and 1973.

“First and foremost, do you condemn what Hamas did inside Israel to Israeli civilians” is the first question CNN host Christiane Amanpour asked of the head of the Palestinian Mission to Britain, inside her studio. 

“The loss of civilian lives is tragic on both sides,” Husam Zomlot told Amanpour. “It’s the Palestinians that are always expected to condemn themselves. Did you bring me here when Israel was killing hundreds of Palestinians in the past years?” he said when asked the exact same question by a BBC anchor. 

The interviews received immense attention on social media. “When it comes to resistance, the West has a clear double standard. It applauds Ukrainians, but condemns Palestinians,” a user said on X. 

Some have also pointed out Israeli War Minister Yoav Gallant’s latest remarks about Palestinians in which he called them “human animals”. Social media users believe such remarks would have never got sidestepped by Western media if they’d been uttered by Russia’s Putin in regards to Ukrainians. 

During the ongoing war between Gaza and Israel, over 700 Palestinians, including 140 children, have been slaughtered. Journalists, doctors and aid workers are also among the casualties. Once again Western media is disproportionately focusing on Israeli fatalities while all but ignoring the lost Palestinian lives. Someone not familiar with the woefully painful history of Palestine is almost sure to see Israel as the victim, and think of Palestinians as monstrous terrorists that only seek to spill blood. The Western media acts as another tentacle of the Israeli war machine, which despite claiming to be a proponent of human rights, seems to have zero regard for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are getting massacred by the regime.