The media’s dangerous lies about Israel

1 June 2025. Make a note of that date. For there is a good chance it will be recorded as a day of infamy. As a day when the Jews were once again libelled as the slayers of innocents. As a day when the intellectual classes mimicked their benighted forebears of the medieval era and falsely accused the Jewish nation of spilling blood for sport. For many it was just an ordinary Sunday – but for those who will come to write the history of our times, it will stand out as a day of frenzied hearsay in which Jews were once again branded demons and bloodlusters.

Reports of a massacre in Gaza came early that day. It took place in Rafah, we were told, at one of the distribution centres overseen by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the US-Israel group that’s providing aid to Gaza’s needy. With depthless cruelty, IDF troops opened fire on the half-starved Palestinians queuing for meals. Thirty-one souls were slaughtered in the ‘aid-centre attack’, as the BBC swiftly called it. A venomous fury spread through the internet. No one can deny it now, people cried: Israel is ‘replicating’ Nazi tactics. Just as the Nazis told Jews they were being put on trains for a better life, so the New Nazis promise Palestinians food as ‘a pretext for slaughter’.

There was one problem with these breathless accounts of a wicked massacre: it seems no such thing took place. Last night, the BBC backtracked. It said it has now studied the ‘graphic video’ of the ‘aid-centre massacre’ and has ruled that it is ‘incorrect’. We were told the ‘massacre’ took place early in the morning, yet the ‘direction of the shadows’ in the clip point to an event that took place ‘after 7pm local time’. More devastatingly, the Beeb geolocated the clip and found that it was filmed in a part of Khan Younis that is 4.5km from the nearest aid-distribution centre. A journalist in Gaza confirmed it: the events in the viral clip are ‘unrelated to any aid-distribution site’.

If what the BBC is now saying is correct, then we have just witnessed something truly horrifying. We have watched as an untruth spread with uncommon speed to every corner of the Earth. We have seen a serious calumny be taken as good coin by newsmakers and influencers. Worse, we’ve witnessed an eruption of bigotry. Reports of an ‘aid-centre massacre’ unleashed untold Jew hatred. Across social media, the cry went up: they’re demons, they’re Nazis, they claim to be the ‘Chosen People’ and yet they use food to tempt innocents into the path of murder. All were in agreement: the Jewish nation is the most evil nation.

For the BBC to now say it was ‘incorrect’ is the worst case of ‘too little, too late’ I’ve ever seen. The reports of a food-trap massacre were not just ‘incorrect’ – they were absurd, hysterical and dangerous. The BBC itself played a key role in fomenting them. All day on Sunday its website led with ‘live’ coverage of the reported hellish event. The Guardian, too, made it its top story. Innocents were ‘gunned down while trying to reach food-aid site’, its headline cried. Journalists spread the story across social media. ‘The Israeli army massacred Palestinians queuing for food’, Owen Jones told his million followers on X. Proof, he said, that Israel’s aid initiative is really just ‘another stage in [its] genocide against the Palestinian people’.

NGOs joined the chorus. Amnesty International’s Middle East wing declared that Israeli forces had ‘shot at starved Palestinians’. The words of an Australian doctor in Gaza went viral: poor Palestinians were ‘instructed to collect food’ and were then shot, he said. Dystopic tales of evil Israel dangling grub to lure innocents to their death went viral. They were further stirred up by Philippe Lazzarini, head of UNRWA, who said Israeli aid distribution ‘has become a death trap’.

Will these people, like the BBC, admit that their feverish claims were ‘incorrect’? In a sense, it doesn’t matter. The damage is done. And no number of corrections will undo it. The untruth is in the wild now, titillating the world’s anti-Semites. Yet the rest of us, those of us who still believe truth matters, have a responsibility to reckon with the events of the past three days. To my mind, this is the most reckless reportage we have seen of this war. It speaks to the almost complete untethering of the West’s coverage from the principles of objectivity and truth, and its drift into a neo-imperial crusade whose aim is nothing less than to single Israel out as the savage in the family of nations.

The magnitude of 1 June and its fallout cannot be overstated. Our media classes lapped up the lies of Hamas. They made themselves its Lord Haw-Haws, uncritically repeating a horror story that worked to the benefit of that army of anti-Semites while further isolating the Jewish nation it dreams of destroying. The untruths have piled up this past fortnight. We were told 14,000 Gazan babies would die in 48 hours – not true. We were told Hamas does not hide in hospitals – not true. And we were told the IDF picked off the starving – not true. We are being lied to about Israel on an industrial scale – day in, day out. I have never seen anything like it.

It’s long been clear that those of an Israelophobic bent care little for the impact their misinformation might have on Jewish people and their security. Yet now we know they don’t care about Palestinians, either. Their demented fearmongering over Israel’s aid centres being ‘death traps’ could very well scare some Palestinians into staying away. These people told us Gaza was suffering the world’s worst famine – now they tell Palestinians they’ll die if they go for Israeli aid. Their Israelophobia has become so all-consuming and delirious that they would prefer to see Palestinians starve than be fed by the Jewish State. Like all of history’s eruptions of this particular bigotry, there’s madness here.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy