Afrasianet - Author: Alain Gabon - At the height of Israel's blockade of starvation and genocide on Gaza, French media systematically amplified Israeli propaganda, concealed the scale of its atrocities, and ignored Palestinian suffering.
Middle East Eye publishes a report on how the French media has covered the Israeli war on the Palestinians since October 7, 2023 until today, highlighting that most of them have adopted the Israeli narrative almost entirely, despite the high level of international criticism of Israel during periods of mass genocide.
The report concluded that the biased rhetoric of the French media aims to prevent the French public from understanding the reality of what is going on, and covers up the genocide and ethnic cleansing to which the Palestinians are exposed.
The text of the report is as follows:
Despite the growing interest in the horrific fate of the Palestinians between May and October, in line with the most critical statements of Western governments, France's mainstream media never stopped repeating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech without any thought or criticism, even as the Palestinians were being exterminated before our eyes.
This slight and temporary shift in tone signaled no change in its staunchly pro-Israel positions, but rather a moment of containment of the toll during the worst phase of the genocide. At least the French media — and to varying degrees, the media in a number of other countries — were forced to pretend to be critical of Israel and devote more space to the suffering of the Palestinians. At the same time, however, they published a set of strategies that effectively canceled out this slight and temporary shift in their reporting, which It was allowed to continue to follow the official Israeli narrative as much as possible.
These methods have been and continue to be systematized in all dominant French television and radio channels, both public and private, as well as in major newspapers and magazines, from the center-left to the far right. The small communist daily L'Humanite, which lacked the scope and influence of larger newspapers, was the only exception. The result is a media landscape in which pro-Israel propaganda continues to shape media coverage at all levels.
Misleading by deletion
At a time when it has become impossible to deny the fact that the genocide has been acknowledged by leading academics specializing in Holocaust studies and the Independent International Commission of Inquiry, and after a number of international Jewish-Israeli public figures have called for sanctions, the French media has saturated its coverage with well-known Israeli provocateurs and government officials. It has exploited genocide deniers such as Caroline Forrest and Georges Bensoussant and given them unchallenged time on the air.
Forrest, who has a large media presence despite a long record of disinformation and often attacks Muslims and defends Israel, has denied Israel's humanitarian blockade and claimed that Hamas is stealing food and aid. It also insisted that the Palestinian casualty numbers were exaggerated and that they should be "at least divided by 5 or even 10," ignoring that these figures are widely considered to be far below the true number. However, she and others were given complete freedom to repeat Israel's proven lies, including fabricated stories of infants who had been beheaded.
Recent studies show that French media coverage has mostly been limited to quoting statements by Netanyahu or the Israeli "army" without any critical distance, repeating the official statements of the Israeli government and its armed forces. These statements were often the only source of news, justified under the pretext of "journalistic objectivity."
During media coverage, not only what is shown, but also what is omitted should be considered. But in this case, all the major French media have largely downplayed the suffering of the Palestinians and ignored the essential aspects of Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people, particularly outside the Gaza Strip. For example, Le Parisien did notThe influential daily, which often sets the news agenda, covered events in the West Bank at all for 11 months between October 2023 and September 2024, obscuring the ethnic cleansing campaign taking place there.
During Israel's worst genocidal attacks, the 1 p.m. and 8 p.m. news broadcasts on the public channel France 2 and the private channel TF1 stopped covering the Gaza events, devoting only 5 and 8 minutes respectively, over 10 consecutive days between September 5 and 14, 2025, most of which was spent repeating the official Israeli narrative. However, I found enough time to present trivial matters, including celebrity news and rumors, on the Social media about Brigitte Macron.
These editorial choices, similar in public and private media and clearly deliberate, amount to Israel monitoring and hiding the killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank from the public. This occurred at a time when journalists were barred from entering Gaza so that Israel could perpetrate its crimes and hide its features— including, targeting journalists who risked their lives to cover these crimes, when necessary.
Systematic Tempering
Western media regularly work to withhold information that reveals Israel's actions, including the illegality of its bombing campaigns in Iran, Syria, and Lebanon; its track record of violating international law; its repeated convictions of war crimes by the United Nations; and the extraordinary fact that a "state" has been treated as an ally and ruled for years by a man wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, murder, and other inhumane acts.
This silence is misleading by way of deletion. We note the media's use of euphemism to describe the atrocities committed by Israel since 1948. For the past two years, the genocide has been just a "war against Hamas" or another episode of the so-called "Israeli-Palestinian conflict." Words such as "colonialism," "colonialism," "apartheid," "Jewish supremacy," "massacres," or even "occupied territories" are completely absent, revealing deliberate editorial choices to hide central and indisputable facts.
Ethnic cleansing becomes "population displacement," and colonization becomes "strategic and systematic evacuation" or "offensive expansion." Civilian targets, including schools and hospitals, become "hostile sites." The racist, colonial, discriminatory, and religiously intolerant ethnic "state" is described as "democratic" and part of the "West." This rhetoric reflects Israel's own rhetoric, ignoring Israeli Jewish historians who have long debunked myths of self-legitimacy. Thus, Israel does not "kill" anyone; the Palestinians simply "die" or "kill." Thus, the unknown formula falls on Israel.
Since October 7, 2023, French and Western media have embraced the pretext of "Israel," describing these two horrific years as "self-defense" in elaborate misleading language. It is also striking that Israel has never been classified as a "terrorist state," despite being the world's deadliest "state" and an active supporter of terrorism, while terms such as "terrorist," "terrorism," "massacre," or "murder" are reserved exclusively for its enemies.
Double standards
Besides what is reported or withheld, how stories are crafted is equally important.
French media watchdogs, including Acrimed, Arret sur Image, Les Mots Sont Importants (LMSI), and Blast, have documented the pro-Israel formula so substantially in various mainstream media outlets that even Google's AI was unable to find anything positive to say when asked how it covered the Gaza "conflict." Pro-Netanyahu voices dominated screen time and processing, while Rare pro-Palestinian guests have been sidelined, criticized as pro-Hamas, constantly boycotted and placed among a number of pro-Israel guests and "observers."
The double standards were clearly evident in the coverage of casualties and the release of hostages and prisoners. France 24 devoted 3 1/2 minutes to its live report on the release of 20 Israelis, while only one minute was devoted to 90 Palestinian prisoners. The tone was celebratory for the Israelis, and lukewarm for the Palestinians. The Palestinians were described as "prisoners" rather than "hostages", with a constant focus on alleged terrorism. Some commentators even called all the Palestinian hostages "terrorists", ignoring that many of them were children who had been subjected of abuse in Israeli prisons, echoing the official Israeli narrative. Another aspect of this preferential treatment has been the exclusive humanization of the 20 Israeli hostages, through the display of a wide range of photographs, personal stories and biographical details. None of this has been applied to Palestinian prisoners held by the Israeli military, including dozens of children to whom no reports have been allocated. These double standards in assessing innocent lives are both quantitative and qualitative.
The same logic was evident in the reactions to the Trump Peace Plan. Palestine is expected to be disarmed and "deradicalized," but there is no similar proposal for disarming Israel, which has killed far more unarmed civilians than Hamas and all the other Palestinian armed groups combined. There is no call to counter extremism in Israeli society, which opinion polls and field reports show to be highly inhumane and violently extremist A society ruled by religious fanatics elected by its inhabitants.
Trump's plan provides sweeping security guarantees for Israel, while ignoring the security needs of the Palestinians, who remain victims of a large-scale genocide in which Israel has killed tens of thousands and injured hundreds of thousands, mostly unarmed civilians.
"The Present Direction Is Misleading"
Other common methods of disinformation include reduction to Hamas, which justifies the killing of civilians by claiming that Hamas alone was the target, and the parallel reduction to October 7, in which all Israeli crimes in the past two years are justified by using the October 7 attack as a pretext. This allows media figures and pseudo-"experts," usually pro-Israel agitators presented as specialists in Middle Eastern affairs, to deviate from the issues at hand. When asked about Israel's illegal colonialism dating back to long before October 7, the famed Israeli journalist Rina Bassett immediately referred to the "Hamas attack," even though Hamas had nothing to do with Israeli colonialism and did not exist When Israel began to annex the territories.
This misguided present trend erases the deep causes and long history that led to that attack, and ignores the fact that Israel's genocidal project began long before October 2023. It is part of an ongoing series of ethnic cleansing campaigns that began in 1947 and which are being concealed by the Western media through disinformation through omissions. Any attempt to explain this important history and context is a justification for the process.
Instead of covering the genocide, French media have refocused on anti-Semitism in France or fabricated controversy over minor incidents, such as the raising of Palestinian flags in some municipal buildings, whose mayors have been described as "pro-Hamas." Disinformation is another malicious tactic, equating the Hamas attack with the two-year-old Israeli aggression and talking about "the suffering of both sides" or "Palestinian victims and Israeli victims."
This would spread a false equality that does not exist in reality, and cover up the radical disparity in losses, power, resources, and status between the civilian population being bombed and the colonial "state" that bombs them.
Undermining the press
In conclusion, we note the narrowness and restriction of media coverage, both geographically and historically. Israel's attacks on Lebanon or Syria have made no mention of it, and the countless debates and talk shows on October 7 and the two years that followed have not addressed fundamental questions about the origin of this attack, the brutal decades-long occupation, and the broader context that led to it. Nor were the two most important questions raised: Was this latest genocide part of a much longer campaign of extermination against Palestinians that began in 1947 and has continued ever since, alternating between overt massacres and ongoing "secret" genocide in multiple forms? Is this genocide, along with the dehumanization of the Palestinians by Israeli society, included in the nature of the Zionist project — that is, in its essence — even if it is not its explicit intention, it is its logical outcome, since this project demands the demise of the Palestinians?
Professionally and ethically, France's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since October 7 until today has been a subversion of the press, but in accordance with the Israeli plan. In line with French foreign policy since the Sarkozy era, the French media have outdone themselves in their coverage of events in Gaza, and have often become more pro-Israel, more unconditionally propagandistic and Zionist than a number of Israeli Jewish journalists, Holocaust historians, and human rights organizations such as B'Tselem, or Even former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Source: Middle East Eye