17/05/2026
From The Australian, by Chris Kenny:
HOW ABC’S GAZA COVERAGE FUELLED ANTISEMITISM
Under its charter in the ABC Act our public broadcaster is charged with contributing to a “sense of national identity” and taking account of the “multicultural character of the Australian community”. Under this legal framework and the broader political context, our publicly funded broadcaster exists to support national cohesion.
In this crucial role it has failed the nation badly since October 7, 2023. On Gaza, Islamist extremism, Middle East conflicts and antisemitism the ABC has been jaundiced and deceptive, contributing to a climate that has seen the incitement of hatred against Jewish Australians.
This is an element of public debate I have drawn attention to across the past 2½ years. Thankfully, detailed evidence on these matters has been presented to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion and will have to be considered by Virginia Bell.
Four anonymous Victorians have made a 58-page submission (distilled from more than 150 pages) that provides a compelling case about the main distortions and three false narratives. The submission lays out how the ABC has pushed the “famine” hoax, the “baby killers” slur and the “genocide” claims, all buttressed by meticulously researched examples, as well as detailing how the ABC amplified Hamas propaganda.
The tone was set early. A “sentiment analysis” of reporting in the two weeks after the October 7 atrocities found “ABC headlines were 4-5 times less sympathetic to the impact on the Israeli population”.
Remember this was in the wake of 1200 obscene murders, including of women, children and the infirm, as well as rapes, defilement and hostage taking; hundreds of hostages were unaccounted for and the war against Hamas had hardly begun. This perversion of the victim versus perpetrator dynamic has only grown since.
An ABC story from March 2024 under the headline “Mothers in Gaza are watching their children slowly starve to death and are unable to stop it” demonstrates the “famine” deception. The report focuses on a harrowing personal trauma: “Two-year-old Watin al-Aswad’s body has been so badly ravaged by starvation during the Gaza war, that her bones are protruding on her skeletal frame.”
The ABC included photographs of this very sick little girl and said 27 children had starved to death according to the “Gaza Ministry of Health” – without mentioning this meant the claim had come from Hamas. Yet some of the photos showed that the girl’s mother appeared to be well nourished and healthy – would a mother feed herself while her child starved?
This is but one of hundreds of examples cited in the submission. “Even the fact that parents or other people in the photos appeared healthy did not stop the ABC from claiming that the children were starving as a result of Israel’s actions,” it said.
The submission also examines the famous (infamous) and poignant photo of one-year-old Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, cradled by his mother. The ABC used this as a giant backdrop when Anthony Albanese was interviewed on Insiders.
“A one-year-old boy is not a Hamas fighter,” said Albanese. “That boy isn’t challenging Israel’s right to existence, and nor are the many who continue to suffer from the unavailability of food and water.” All feeding into the demonisation of Israel.
It was later revealed that the little boy suffered cerebral palsy and an uncropped version of the photograph showed his healthy and well-nourished toddler brother off to the side. How could one boy be starving and the other not?
Clearly, one was suffering from terrible illness and food supply was not the problem. The submission notes “Israeli officials have consistently refuted false claims of starvation” and argues that “repeated misrepresentation of facts has fuelled the tsunami of antisemitism in Australia”.
Similar media narratives have created ugly dynamics in other Western liberal democracies, but that does not make it any less woeful here, nor provide any excuses for the ABC.
In May 2025 the ABC ran the patently absurd claim that 14,000 babies could die of starvation in Gaza within 48 hours. While this hysterical claim was made by UN official Tom Fletcher, the ABC clearly failed to pause, think or give the claims the slightest rational consideration before amplifying them as “shocking” and a “devastating warning”.
The UN eventually disowned the claim, blaming an erroneous interpretation of risks for young children across a 12-month period (which was still alarmist and wrong). Despite official corrections by the ABC, the damage, the demonisation of Israel, was done again.
As an example of framing the Israel Defence Forces as “baby killers” the submission cites an ABC radio report where a disgruntled former humanitarian contractor claimed a young boy, “Amir”, was shot dead by soldiers. He was later found to be alive and the ABC issued a correction – but an email chain reveals that before the story ran the ABC was informed that the boy’s adoptive mother believed he was alive and had been taken into care.
The submission draws a direct link between this reporting and the rise of antisemitism. It describes reports such as this as “blood libels”.
Another focus is Gaza casualty numbers and their reporting. While upwards of 50,000 people were killed in the Gaza war, the ABC (and other media) has routinely parroted figures provided by Hamas, usually without making that source clear, and has disproportionately mentioned women and children as casualties while often ignoring terrorists or combatants.
Absent from the ABC’s coverage has been vital context from people such as international law expert, Iraq war veteran and former federal Labor frontbencher Mike Kelly about the relatively low number of civilian casualties. “If the Hamas figure of 70,000 killed is taken at face value this would mean that around half of that number would be civilian collateral casualties,” Kelly says. “That would be the best ratio of civilian deaths to combatant deaths ever achieved in the history of urban warfare.”
Then there is the ubiquitous “genocide” narrative, pushed relentlessly by the ABC even though a moment’s thought or critical analysis reveals the claim to be not only ridiculous but grotesquely so. Not only has population growth in Gaza outstripped Israel’s for decades, but Israel has ensured power, water, food and medical supplies have been available, even during the war.
In many cases, even during the war, Israel evacuated Palestinian children and others from Gaza for medical treatment. And throughout the war Israel used text messages, phone calls and leaflet drops to ensure civilians could leave areas where it was attacking Hamas.
Yet in September last year the ABC’s Middle East correspondent, Matthew Doran, reported that “the world’s leading association of genocide scholars has backed a resolution saying (Israel’s) conduct in the strip has met the legal criteria to be considered a genocide”. Missing from this report were details about the “leading association of genocide scholars”, which was the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
It turns out you can join the IAGS for $US30 with no vetting applied or academic qualifications required. Before October 7, 2023, the association had 144 members but its membership quickly ballooned to more than 500, with 15 per cent subscribing from Iraq, and some using pseudonyms such as “Adolf Hitler” and “Mo Cookie” (whose avatar was the Cookie Monster sporting a green, Hamas-style bandana).
This is the level of expertise, authority and journalistic testing that has been applied to the barbs of “genocide” repeatedly thrown at Israel. Journalists also have routinely mischaracterised what the International Court of Justice has found on this question – which is not that there are plausible claims of genocide against Israel, but that Palestinians have a plausible right to be protected from genocide.
Too often on the ABC we hear from discredited activists such as the UN’s controversial rapporteur Francesca Albanese, given free rein without critical questioning despite widespread condemnation of her work. Albanese has compared the Israeli leadership to the N***s and overestimated the Gaza death toll by a factor of 10.
“The cumulative effect of daily exposure to such framing is not public information but a form of indoctrination, normalising the perception of Israel as a pariah state and rendering suspicion or hostility toward its supporters socially acceptable,” the submission summarises.
“When extreme characterisations are normalised through daily repetition, they influence public discourse and narrow the boundaries of acceptable opinion. The result has been an environment in which Jewish Australians who openly support Israel are increasingly portrayed as perpetrators of alleged crimes against humanity. In such a climate, hostility becomes easier to justify and antisemitic sentiment more readily rationalised.
“Even if it was not the intention of the ABC, their missteps had a damaging impact on Australian social dynamics. To argue otherwise would be to negate completely the relevance of the ABC. The sheer scale of the journalistic failures and demonstrated bias – as the journalistic failures on the Gaza war always went one way, namely against Israel – contributed directly to radicalisation in society and intensified militant antisemitism across Australia.”
The logic of this argument, buttressed by the facts and the examples, is difficult to contradict. We can only hope Commissioner Bell calls the authors of this submission for evidence and gives due consideration to the media as a major driver of the climate of antisemitism.
Under its charter in the ABC Act our public broadcaster is charged with contributing to a “sense of national identity” and taking account of the “multicultural character of the Australian community”. Under this legal framework and the broader political context, our publicly funded broadcaste...
