While the October 2024 embed was one of the more preposterous embodiments of Western corporate media’s special relationship with Israel, outlets continue to do a fine job of sanitizing Israeli brutality even when their reporters are not physically viewing the region from inside an Israeli armored vehicle. Since March of this year, Israel has killed at least 3,613 people in Lebanon and displaced 1.2 million, obliterating entire villages and otherwise expanding the ecocidal policy honed in the Gaza Strip.

There has been no remotely comparable destruction on the Israeli side, and a recent Reuters article (5/31/26) that had attempted to suggest some symmetry now comes with the preface: “This May 31 story has been corrected to remove a reference to tens of thousands of Israelis being displaced by Hezbollah fire, in paragraph 3.”

Like in Gaza, where genocide proceeds apace in spite of a declared ceasefire (FAIR.org, 10/21/25), the media tend to report “ceasefires” in Lebanon without caring to highlight the fact that it’s not a ceasefire when Israel is still pummeling the country and massacring people, all the while setting the stage for a massive land grab with its creeping so-called “evacuation orders.”

…

As Battah remarked to me, the media’s acceptance and deployment of such arbitrary vocabulary creates “artificial structures” and a sense of orderliness, when in reality “there’s no yellow lines, there’s no yellow, there’s no colors—these are just illegal invasions.” And because media are committed to sanitizing Israel’s behavior rather than questioning it, “colonization becomes normalized.”

The eagerness of journalists to do Israel’s bidding is all the more confounding given that Israel is currently the No. 1 killer of journalists in the world. A recent Associated Press article (5/29/26), for example, reduced the pulverization of Lebanon to simply “ongoing fighting in southern Lebanon between Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters.”