French performers Sophia Aram, Arthur and Gerard Darmon speak at a Paris rally on 5 October 2025 in memory of the 7 October victims and in support of Israeli hostages held in Gaza

Alain Gabon – Middle East Eye Nov 24, 2025

Despite an apparently greater interest shown in the horrific fate of the Palestinians between May and October, in alignment with the slightly more critical declarations of western governments, France‘s mainstream media never stopped uncritically echoing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rhetoric, even as Palestinians were being decimated before our eyes.

This small, temporary shift in tone did not signal any change in their overwhelmingly pro-Israeli positions, but rather a moment of damage control during the worst phase of the genocide.

French media – and, to varying extents, those of many other countries – were thus forced to at least pretend to be more critical of Israel and grant more space to the plight of the Palestinians.

Yet at the same time, they deployed a range of strategies that effectively cancelled out that already mild and momentary inflexion in their reporting, allowing them to continue toeing Israel’s official line as closely as possible.

These methods were, and remain, systematic across the dominant French television and radio channels, both public and private, as well as in the major newspapers and magazines, from the centre-left to the far right.

The only exception is the small Communist daily L’Humanite, which lacks the reach and influence of the larger outlets. The result is a media landscape in which pro-Israeli propaganda continues to shape coverage at every level.

Disinformation by omission

At a time when the reality of the genocide had become impossible to deny – after top Holocaust Studies academics and the UN Independent Commission recognised it, and a number of Israeli Jewish public figures echoed the international call for sanctions – the French media saturated their coverage with known Israeli propagandists and government officials.

They platformed genocide denialists such as Caroline Fourest and Georges Bensoussan, giving them lengthy, unchallenged airtime.

Fourest, a ubiquitous media presence despite her record of disinformation, often targeting Muslims and defending Israel, denied Israel’s humanitarian blockade and claimed that Hamas was hijacking food and aid. She also insisted that Palestinian deaths were overestimated and should be “divided by at least five and even 10”, ignoring that these figures are widely considered a dramatic undercount.

Yet she and others were still given free rein to repeat Israel’s proven lies, including fabricated stories of decapitated babies.

ecent studies show that France’s reporting largely consisted of quoting Netanyahu or the Israeli military without critical distance, parroting the official talking points of the Israeli government and its armed forces. These statements were often the sole sources for news segments, justified by appeals to “journalistic objectivity”.

In media reporting, one must consider not only what is shown but also what is omitted.

In that respect, all major French outlets dramatically under-reported Palestinian suffering or ignored key aspects of Israel’s eradication of the Palestinian people, especially outside of Gaza.

The influential daily Le Parisien, which often sets the news agenda, did not cover the West Bank at all for the 11 months between October 2023 and September 2024, concealing the ethnic cleansing campaign underway there.

During the worst of Israel’s genocidal assault, the 1pm and 8pm newscasts of the public channel France2 and the private channel TF1 largely stopped covering Gaza, dedicating only five and eight minutes, respectively, over 10 straight days between 5 and 14 September 2025 – most of it spent repeating Israel’s official line.

They nevertheless found ample time for trivial items, including celebrity news and social media rumours about Brigitte Macron.

Such editorial choices, similar across public and private media and clearly deliberate, amounted to censoring Israel’s killing and injuring of thousands of Palestinian civilians in both Gaza and the West Bank, rendering them invisible.

This occurred at a time when reporters had already been banned from Gaza so Israel could kill behind closed doors and cover up its atrocities – including, when needed, by targeting the journalists who risked their lives to report them.

Systematic sanitisation

Western media routinely suppress information that exposes Israel’s actions, including the illegality of its bombing campaigns in Iran, Syria and Lebanon; its long record of violating international law; its repeated UN condemnations for war crimes; and the extraordinary fact that a state treated as an ally and a democracy has for years been ruled by a man wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, murder and other inhumane acts.

This silencing amounts to disinformation by omission.

One also observes a systematic sanitisation, normalisation and euphemisation of the language used to describe Israel’s atrocities since 1948.

Over the last two years, a genocide was simply a “war against Hamas” or another episode in the so-called “Israeli-Palestinian conflict“.

Words such as “colonisation”, “colonialism”, “apartheid“, “Jewish supremacism”, “massacres” or even “Occupied Territories” are almost entirely absent, revealing deliberate editorial choices to conceal central, irrefutable facts.

Ethnic cleansing becomes “population displacement”. Colonisation becomes “strategic and methodical evacuation” or “offensive expansion”. Civilian targets, including schools and hospitals, become “enemy positions”. A racist, colonial, segregationist and religiously supremacist ethnostate is described as a “democracy” and part of “the West”.

This rhetoric mirrors Israel’s own, ignoring that Israeli Jewish historians have long debunked these myths of self-legitimation. Likewise, Israel never “kills” anyone: Palestinians simply “die” or “are killed”, the passive voice erasing Israeli responsibility.

From 7 October 2023 onward, French and western media embraced Israel’s alibi, describing these two horrendous years as “self-defence” in perfect Orwellian doublespeak.

It is also remarkable that Israel is never labelled a “terrorist state”, despite being the most lethal in the world and an active supporter of terrorism, while terms such as “terrorist”, “terror”, “massacre” or “murder” are reserved exclusively for its enemies.

Double standards

Besides what is or is not reported, how stories are framed matters just as much.

French media watchdogs, including Acrimed, Arret sur Image, Les Mots Sont Importants (LMSI) and Blast, have documented the radically pro-Israel framing across major outlets, to the point even Google’s AI finds nothing positive to say when asked how they covered the Gaza “conflict”.

Pro-Netanyahu voices dominated both screen time and treatment, while the rare pro-Palestinian guests were marginalised, criticised as pro-Hamas, constantly interrupted and placed between several pro-Israeli guests and “moderators”.

Double standards were also clear in coverage of casualties and in reporting on the release of hostages and prisoners. France24 devoted three and a half minutes to its live report on the release of 20 Israelis but only one minute to 90 Palestinians. The tone was celebratory for Israelis but perfunctory for Palestinians.

Palestinians were described as “prisoners”, not “hostages”, with constant emphasis on alleged terrorism. Some commentators even labelled all Palestinian hostages “all terrorists“, ignoring that many were children abused in Israeli jails, echoing the official Israeli line.

A further aspect of this preferential treatment was the exclusive humanisation of the 20 Israeli hostages, presented through a plethora of photos, personal stories and biographical details.

None of this was extended to the far more numerous Palestinian hostages held by the Israeli military, including scores of children about whom there was virtually no reporting.

These double standards in valuing innocent lives are both quantitative and qualitative.

The same logic was evident in reactions to the Trump “peace plan”. Palestine is expected to be demilitarised and “de-radicalised”, but there is no similar proposal to demilitarise Israel, which has killed far more defenceless civilians than Hamas and all other Palestinian armed groups combined.

Nor is there any call to confront the radicalisation of Israeli society, which polls and on-the-ground reporting show to be deeply dehumanised and violently extremist – a society ruled by religious fanatics elected by its own population.

The Trump plan offers extensive security guarantees to Israel while ignoring the security needs of Palestinians, who remain the victims of a large-scale genocide in which Israel has killed tens of thousands more and injured hundreds of thousands, mainly unarmed civilians.

‘Fallacious presentism’

Other common methods of disinformation include the reductio ad Hamas, which justifies the killing of civilians by claiming that Hamas alone was targeted, and the parallel reductio ad 7 October, by which all Israeli crimes of the past two years are excused by invoking “7 October” as a pretext.

This allows media figures and pseudo “experts”, usually pro-Israeli propagandists presented as Middle East specialists, to divert from the issues at hand.

When asked about Israel’s illegal colonisation, which long predates 7 October, the ubiquitous Rina Bassist immediately invoked the “Hamas attack”, even though Hamas had nothing to do with Israel’s colonialism and did not exist when Israel began annexing land.

This fallacious presentism erases the deep causes and long history that led to that horrific attack, ignoring that Israel’s genocidal enterprise began long before October 2023.

It is part of a continuum going back to the ethnic cleansing campaigns of 1947, which western media conceal through disinformation by omission. Any attempt to explain this important history and context is perceived as justifying the operation.

Diversion is also frequent: instead of covering the genocide, French media refocus on antisemitism in France or manufacture controversies around minor incidents, such as a few town halls displaying Palestinian flags, whose mayors were presented as “pro-Hamas”.

False symmetry is another treacherous tactic: equating the Hamas attack and Israel’s two-year assault, speaking of “suffering on both sides” or “Palestinian victims and Israeli victims”.

This injects a false equality that exists nowhere in reality, covering up the radical dissymmetry in casualties, power, resources and status between a bombarded civilian population and the colonial state bombarding them.

Journalistic shipwreck

Finally, one observes how narrow and restrictive the media’s coverage remains, both geographically and historically.

Israel’s attacks in Lebanon or Syria were barely mentioned, and the countless debates and talk shows on 7 October and the two years that followed never addressed the fundamental questions: the roots of the attack, the decades-long brutal occupation, or the broader context that led to it.

Two essential questions were never raised. Was this latest genocidal episode part of a much longer extermination campaign against Palestinians that began in 1947 and has continued ever since, alternating between open massacres and a permanent “stealth” genocide that takes several forms?

And is this genocide, along with the visible dehumanisation by Israeli society, inscribed in the very nature – the DNA – of the Zionist project itself, if not its explicit intention, then its logical consequence, since that project demands the disappearance of the Palestinians?

In professional and ethical terms, France’s coverage of Israel-Palestine from 7 October to today has been a journalistic shipwreck, but one according to (Israeli) plan.

Consistent with French foreign policy since the Sarkozy era, the French media have outdone themselves in their Gaza coverage, often being even more pro-Israel, propagandistic and unconditionally Zionist than many Israeli Jewish journalists, Holocaust historians, human rights organisations such as B’Tselem, or even former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert.

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