in covering the events in Israel & Gaza 2023-24

For journalists covering the anniversary of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the one-year mark of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the IMEU offers the following nine things to keep in mind. 

For more information or to speak with an expert for this story, contact Christopher at chris@imeu.org or (202) 903-3271.

9 Things to Remember When Covering 1 Year of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

1. For the past 12 months, Israel has been waging a genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza. This genocide is ongoing, with Israel continuing to bomb and starve more than 2 million defenseless people – half of them children – who have nowhere to run or hide. 

• Since last October, the Israeli military has killed more than 41,500 Palestinians in Gaza, with many thousands more missing and presumed dead, and injured more than 96,000 others, in one of the most destructive bombing campaigns in history.
   
• Hunger and disease are rampant due to Israel weaponizing starvation, restricting the entry of food, water, medicine, and other humanitarian aid, and destroying the health, water, and sanitation systems. 
   
• Nearly 2 million people – 90% of the population – have been driven from their homes by the Israeli military, forced to flee in terror again and again into smaller and smaller areas, slaughtered over and over by massive 2,000 pound bombs Israel dropped on areas it designated “safe zones” and ordered them to go to.
   
• Israel has laid waste to most of Gaza, destroying entire towns and neighborhoods, virtually depopulating northern Gaza, including Gaza City, systematically destroying the healthcare system, civilian infrastructure, schools, universities, libraries, museums, and other cultural and heritage sites, and desecrating cemeteries. 
   
• The International Court of Justice and a U.S. federal court ruled Israel might be guilty of genocide in Gaza, with the former investigating further. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requested arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” and “extermination and/or murder.”

2. Israel has been holding thousands of Palestinians captive and torturing them, including with sexual assault, since October of last year and prior to that.

• The U.N., rights groups, and journalists, have documented how Israel has been holding thousands of Palestinians from Gaza captive and torturing them since October 2023, including doctors and other healthcare workers and children. Israeli soldiers have been caught on camera sexually assaulting Palestinian captives and there have been numerous testimonies from Palestinians saying they’ve been raped by Israeli soldiers. At least 53 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since last October, including at least three doctors.
   
• Prior to last October, Israel’s occupying army held thousands of Palestinians captive as political prisoners, including women and children, many of them without any charges or trial, abusing and torturing them. Since Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began in 1967, Israel has imprisoned about a million Palestinians using a military court system that rights groups have condemned as unjust, including tens of thousands of children.

3. Israel’s genocide in Gaza is being armed, funded, and shielded diplomatically by the U.S. government in violation of U.S. law and international law, and contrary to the wishes of most Americans.

• President Biden and Congress are fully complicit in Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. actively aiding and abetting it with tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons and diplomatic shielding at the U.N. and other international forums.
   
• The Biden administration’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza violates both U.S. and international law and goes against the wishes of a majority of Americans, who want a ceasefire and an end to weapons transfers to Israel until the violence ends.

4. President Biden has the power to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza but has refused to use the massive leverage the U.S. has with Israel to do so. Instead, he continues to flood Israel with weapons, including massive 2,000-pound bombs and guided missiles to kill Palestinians.

• If Biden were to cut off weapons transfers to Israel – as called for by U.S. law – Israel would quickly run out of munitions and be forced to end its destruction of Gaza. As one retired Israeli general explained in November 2023: 

“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability. … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

• Despite this, Biden continues to approve massive weapons transfers to Israel, giving Netanyahu and his far-right government a green light to continue the killing.

5. President Biden’s unconditional backing of Israel’s far-right government and its genocide in Gaza has emboldened Netanyahu to carry out massive attacks and assassinations in Lebanon, threatening to spark a major conflagration in the region and beyond.

• President Biden’s refusal to draw any red lines for Netanyahu’s genocidal government has encouraged it to carry out major attacks on Lebanon using weapons supplied by the U.S., risking a larger regional war with potentially catastrophic consequences for the Middle East as a whole and the U.S..
   
• The Israeli military has killed more than 1,000 Lebanese over the past two weeks, including at least 87 children, inflicting mass death and destruction and forcing as many as a million people out of their homes, much as it has done in Gaza.

6. Prior to October 7, 2023, Palestinians in Gaza lived under violent, oppressive Israeli military rule for 56 years and a suffocating, illegal Israeli siege and naval blockade for 17 years.

• Most Palestinians in Gaza are refugees whose families were ethnically cleansed from their homes in what became southern Israel during the state’s establishment in 1948. Since 1967, they’ve lived under brutal Israel military rule that continued after Israel’s withdrawal of settlers in 2005, as affirmed repeatedly by the U.N., rights group, and the I.C.J.. 
   
• Since 2007, they’ve suffered under a crippling Israeli siege and naval blockade that has been repeatedly condemned as collective punishment of the entire civilian population and illegal by the U.N. and rights groups. 

7. While the world’s attention has been focused on Gaza, Israel launched a massive wave of violence and repression against Palestinians in the West Bank and Israeli settlers ramped up their attacks on Palestinians to drive them out of their homes.

• Between October 2023 and September 2024, Israeli soldiers and settlers killed at least 693 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, including at least 158 children. Israel’s occupying army has repeatedly invaded, laid siege to, and launched airstrikes on Palestinian towns, refugee camps, and hospitals, causing widespread destruction.  
   
• At the same time, heavily-armed, fanatical Israeli settlers have been rampaging in the West Bank, attacking Palestinians and their property, often accompanied by Israeli soldiers. Between October 2023 and August 2024, the U.N. recorded approximately 1,250 attacks by Israeli settlers in the West Bank, with the actual number likely higher. Since October 2023, Israeli settler violence has driven more than 1,600 Palestinians out of their homes.
   
• Before October of last year, 2023 was already on track to be the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank due to Israeli violence in decades. Israeli soldiers and settlers killed 243 Palestinians in the West Bank from January to early October, including at least 38 children, which prior to 2024 was the highest number of Palestinian children killed in the West Bank since records began.  

8. Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been accompanied by a wave of censorship and repression in the U.S. and elsewhere targeting Palestinian-Americans and others who have spoken out against it, and violent hate crimes against Palestinians. 

• Students and others – including many Jews – who have peacefully protested or criticized Israel’s genocide in Gaza have been viciously smeared by politicians, including President Biden and members of Congress, and the media, threatened and violently assaulted, arrested by militarized police, doxed, fired from their jobs, had job offers rescinded, and threatened with deportation. Artists and authors have had exhibitions, musical performances, plays, and book launches canceled.   
   
• The demonization and dehumanization of Palestinians by politicians and many in the media has fueled anti-Palestinian racism and a series of violent hate crimes against Palestinians in the U.S., including: the murder of 6-year-old Wadea Al Fayoume, who was stabbed 26 times and his mother seriously wounded by their landlord in Illinois in October 2023; the shooting of three Palestinian-American college students, one of whom was left paralyzed, in Vermont in November; the attempted drowning of a three-year-old girl in Texas in June 2024; and the hours-long violent assault by a mob of pro-Israel counter-protesters on students protesting Israel’s genocide at UCLA in May 2024, while police watched and did nothing. 

9. The root cause of all the violence in Palestine/Israel is Israel’s 76-year-old apartheid regime and oppression of the Palestinian people.

• Since Israel was established in 1948 based on the ethnic cleansing of the majority of the indigenous Palestinian population, it has imposed a racist system of oppression on millions of Palestinians that the International Court of Justice, human rights organizations, and other experts have concluded amounts to apartheid. This brutal apartheid regime is the root cause of all the violence in Palestine/Israel. As noted by Amnesty International: “Israel must dismantle the apartheid system and start treating Palestinians as human beings with equal rights and dignity. Until it does, peace and security will remain a distant prospect for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

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