New York Times, NYT ‘investigates’ genocide, uncovers nothing but ‘loosened standards’

On Thursday, The New York Times ran a bazillion-word would-be expose on the ongoing United States-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip titled Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians. It can also be listened to on the newspaper’s website – if you happen to have 28 minutes and 27 seconds to kill.

The word “genocide” appears exactly once in the article – and only as an allegation that Israel denies: “Israel, which has been accused of genocide in a case before the International Court of Justice, says it complies with international law by taking all feasible precautions to minimize civilian casualties.”

And yet as the article itself demonstrates, any such pretence of precaution was essentially thrown to the wind on October 7, 2023, when the Israeli military issued an order that gave mid-ranking officers unprecedented leeway in authorising attacks on Gaza. In previous conflicts with Hamas, according to the Times, “many Israeli strikes were approved only after officers concluded that no civilians would be hurt” – which would certainly be news to the thousands of Palestinians in Gaza slaughtered by Israel in the past 20 years alone.

The new order gave officers the “authority to risk killing up to 20 civilians” with each strike and meant that the military could “target rank-and-file militants as they were at home surrounded by relatives and neighbors, instead of only when they were alone outside”. One wonders how the Israeli military nonetheless managed to pulverise entire apartment buildings in Gaza in every war leading up to this by only targeting militants “when they were alone outside”.ALL NIGERIANS HOME AND ABROAD NEED TO SEE THIS| SEE WHAT PRESIDENT BOLA AHMED TINUBU IS PLANNING TO DO IN 2025 THAT WILL AFFECT ALL NIGERIANS WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT.

Patting themselves on the back for their scoop, the article’s authors stress that the October 7 order had not been previously reported – as though the fact that Israeli officers were authorised to risk killing civilians is somehow surprising in a genocide. But rather than report genocide as fact, the Western corporate media instead obscure the big picture by concerning themselves with things like extensive investigations into Israel’s bureaucratic manoeuvres to “loosen” the rules of war.

More than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 2023 although the true death toll is undoubtedly significantly higher. As per Article II of the Genocide Convention, genocide means “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, including by “killing members of the group” or “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”.

But the corporate media refuse to take even the Israeli leadership’s own word for it and the flaunting of genocidal intent day in and day out for nearly 15 months. Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi, for example, took to the platform X at the outset of the war to proclaim: “Now we all have one common goal – erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth.” Shortly thereafter, Israeli President Isaac Herzog chimed in with the suggestion that civilians in Gaza were absolutely legitimate targets: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”

While the Times report includes damning details regarding Israel’s behaviour, at the end of the day it’s always the fault of Hamas – and Israel is always permitted to remain in the self-appointed club of ethical and “civilised” nations. This enables the United States newspaper of record to project a veneer of fair-minded criticism without fundamentally condemning Israel’s current mass extermination campaign.

So it is that the Times informs us that “unlike Hamas, which fires rockets indiscriminately at civilian areas, Israel and all Western armies operate under a multilayered oversight system that assesses the legality of planned strikes.” Never mind that much of the Israeli military activity described in the article itself would appear to qualify as indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas.

After the October 7 order, another order issued on October 8, 2023, permitted the military to “cumulatively endanger up to 500 civilians a day” in strikes. The article continues: “In any case, the limit was removed two days later – allowing officers to sign off on as many strikes as they believed were legal.”

Other findings from the Times investigation also imply blatant indiscrimination, such as that the Israelis “often relied on a crude statistical model to assess the risk of civilian harm, and sometimes launched strikes on targets several hours after last locating them, increasing the risk of error”. Plus, the military “struck at a pace that made it harder to confirm it was hitting legitimate targets” while also adopting an “unproven system for finding new targets that used artificial intelligence at a vast scale”.

But this, after all, is what happens in genocide. If Times journalists weren’t so committed to parroting the US establishment line on Israel and disappearing the G-word, perhaps they would have been less shocked to find that “on a few occasions, senior [Israeli] commanders approved strikes on Hamas leaders that they knew would each endanger more than 100 noncombatants – crossing an extraordinary threshold for a contemporary Western military.”ALL NIGERIANS HOME AND ABROAD NEED TO SEE THIS| SEE WHAT PRESIDENT BOLA AHMED TINUBU IS PLANNING TO DO IN 2025 THAT WILL AFFECT ALL NIGERIANS WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT.

Meanwhile, as the Times gets bogged down with the particulars of Israeli military orders, Israel carries on with its goal of “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth” with the help of extraordinary quantities of US money and weaponry. And unfortunately, media complicity in letting Israel get away with genocide is hardly extraordinary at all...Tap To Read The Full Story Here.