Mick Hartley

An interesting insight from a war correspondent into the gullibility of western journalists reporting from Middle East war zones.

Jonathan Foreman – The media need to stop treating medics in war zones as fonts of truth.

In the spring of 2005, when I was covering the Iraq War for the New York Post, I accompanied a squad of US Army soldiers visiting a sizeable hospital on the edge of the Sadr City area of Baghdad. An Iraqi doctor spotted my ‘press’ vest and took me aside. A handsome man in his late thirties, he spoke good English. He put his hand into the pocket of his white coat and took out a shiny .50-calibre machine-gun round. ‘These Americans’, he half-whispered, ‘two days ago they attacked our hospital! It is a war crime. You must report it.’

I might have photographed the heavy bullet and phoned home with my war-crime scoop, had I not been in the area two days earlier when the firefight he was referring to broke out. It had started when a joint US-Iraqi army patrol was fired upon from this very hospital. The ‘resistance’ had built firing positions in the hospital grounds, effectively using patients and staff as human shields and causing the hospital to lose much of its protected status under the laws of war. This genuine war crime was par for the course for all the Iraqi insurgent groups, both Sunni and Shia, as was the use of ‘Trojan ambulances’ to ferry fighters and explosives – a tactic also used by militants in Afghanistan and in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

However, the doctor in Sadr City made no mention of this misuse of his hospital. He was blithely confident that I would believe his claims about the US troops and their alleged atrocities. After all, he had dealt with my kind before. As a general rule, British journalists abroad never doubt the word of a doctor.

Indeed, from Yemen to Gaza, doctors are a preferred media source, believed without question. After all, they are university-educated professionals, wear Western-style clothes and usually speak English. I have seen British hacks, instinctively sceptical of anyone in a state-issued military uniform, become as credulous and undiscriminating as children when listening to a man or woman in a white coat wearing a concerned expression. They are seen as more credible, more worthy of trust than other people – a leftover, perhaps, from the class-ridden era in which a Brit who wanted a passport needed a signature from a doctor, lawyer or accountant.

The relevance to Gaza is clear enough.

The BBC and other mainstream news organisations seem only too happy to parrot the more outlandish casualty figures issued by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health and various accusations of Israeli war crimes made by unnamed ‘hospital staff’. The media also seem to rely on one medic in particular, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a surgeon whose social-media page is filled with posts sympathetic to Hamas’s 7 October attack. He has been quoted by every British outlet, from the Guardian to the Telegraph, as an impartial observer.

Deference to doctors is perhaps the more charitable explanation for the false report by Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, in November 2023. He claimed that Gaza’s Al-Ahli hospital had been ‘flattened’ by a deadly Israeli airstrike. But, as soon became clear, the hospital was very much still standing, no one had been killed and the explosion in its parking area was the result of a misfired Hamas missile. When the same hospital was later captured by the Israel Defence Forces, soldiers found scores of Kalashnikov assault rifles and RPG rocket launchers inside. Bowen then bizarrely suggested that such weapons are a normal sight in Middle Eastern hospitals.

It's not just doctors and health care workers. Even given the well-known Hamas monopoly of news information in Gaza, western reporters seem primed to accept the word of whoever wants to tell them about the latest Israeli atrocity.

Take the BBC's Lucy Williamson, for example. In December she breathlessly reported on the abuse of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Eighteen-year-old Mohammed Nazzal, hands bandaged and surrounded by his family, described to her how Israeli guards beat him and broke bones in both hands. The fact that the Israel Prison Service had a video of the lad being released with no sign of injury did nothing to prompt our intrepid reporter to reconsider. Here they were, a family of brave Palestinians, testifying about their suffering at the hands of the Jews. Why would such simple, noble folk lie to her? Of course she believed them.