Reversing The Truth – The Gaza ‘Ceasefire’ And British Complicity In Genocide

We live in a time when truth is reversed in plain sight. Black is declared white, and white is declared purple with pink polka dots. Immunity appears to be assumed on the basis that a sufficient proportion of the screen-addled population is too gullible or distracted to notice.

Thus, continuing the Nobel Committee’s ignoble tradition of awarding its Peace Prize to celebrity warmongers – think Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama – this year’s award has been handed to Maria Corina Machado, leader of oil-rich Venezuela’s opposition. Max Blumenthal supplied some context:

‘Machado is a US govt-funded regime change activist who’s helped lead failed military coups, violent street riots, and has likely promised her country’s oil and mineral wealth to a consortium of MAGA aligned billionaires in exchange for financing her political arsonism. This icon of peace has even appealed to Benjamin Netanyahu to help her lead a military invasion of Venezuela’.

US fossil fuel executives, unfairly restricted to stealing oil from Iraq, Libya and Syria, are doubtless hoping the award will have a political effect in Venezuela comparable to that achieved by Alfred Nobel when he mixed nitroglycerine with diatomaceous earth to invent dynamite.

Competition for this year’s Peace Prize was fierce. Time magazine’s cover greeted the latest pause in Israel’s US-armed genocide in Gaza with a portrait of self-proclaimed Nobel front-runner Donald Trump:

‘HIS TRIUMPH’

The reference was to Trump’s Gaza Peace Plan that called for a ceasefire, commencing October 10, and the release of all 48 living and dead Israeli ‘hostages’, and 250 Palestinian ‘prisoners’ in Israeli jails, as well as 1,718 detainees from Gaza.

For those of us fresh from seeing Palestinian fathers carrying their headless babies and starving children blown apart by Israeli bombs, Time’s cover left our intelligence not just insulted but ground into the dirt. As the Roman historian Tacitus said:

‘They make a desolation, and they call it peace.’

Even Tacitus might have blanched at someone calling the desolation a ‘TRIUMPH’.

After all, according to Emeritus Professor Paul Rogers at the University of Bradford, Israel’s blitz of Gaza using Trump’s bombs is ‘equivalent to six Hiroshimas’.

Washington’s naked emperor, the American Caesar, celebrated in the Israeli Knesset on 13 October in the presence of his friend ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu. Amid much laughter and mutual backslapping, Trump declaimed:

‘We make the best weapons in the world, and we’ve got a lot of them. And we’ve given a lot to Israel, frankly.

‘I mean, Bibi would call me so many times, “Can you get me this weapon, that weapon, that weapon?” Some of them I never heard of, Bibi, and I made them. But we’d get them here, wouldn’t we, huh? And they are the best. They are the best.

‘But you used them well. It also takes people that know how to use them, and you obviously used them very well. But so many, that Israel became strong and powerful, which, ultimately, led to peace. That’s what led to peace.’

As with Trump’s assertion that climate change is ‘the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world’, responding to such a comment risks giving the impression that rational engagement might be possible. As an aphorism commonly misattributed to Mark Twain observes:

‘The truth has no defence against a fool determined to believe a lie.’

If we think the vision of a triumphant Trump and a heroic Israel that ‘obviously’ used US weapons ‘very well’ are confined to the crazed margins, take a look at Big Brother’s close relative, Auntie Beeb - the BBC.

Of Israeli ‘Hostages’ And Palestinian ‘Prisoners’

We know, of course, that corporate journalists reserve a special use of language for Israel. ITV reported that an Israeli soldier had been ‘kidnapped from a tank during a battle with Hamas fighters’. By the same logic, 91,000 German soldiers were ‘kidnapped’ by Soviet forces after the Battle of Stalingrad.

It is deemed similarly uncontroversial to describe Israeli captives as ‘hostages’ and Palestinian captives as ‘prisoners’, even in the same news report, as in this example from the BBC:

‘It’s been a busy few days, with the release of dozens of Israeli hostages and thousands of Palestinian prisoners and detainees…’

We, of course, understand that the two-year ordeal of the 20 Israeli prisoners released as part of Trump’s ‘deal’ was horrendous – worsened by the high probability of being killed by their own army. Any feeling person must welcome and celebrate their release from suffering. But if that empathy is prioritised above compassion for the thousands of Palestinian prisoners, including many children, and the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed in Israel’s genocide, and the traumatised survivors trying to live amid the rubble, then our moral compass has been distorted, corrupted by the malign influence of prejudice and power.

And yet, for the BBC, Trump’s ‘ceasefire’ was all about the 48 Israeli prisoners. Just imagine if Palestine had razed the whole of Israel to the ground, killing hundreds of thousands, injuring and traumatising literally millions and the BBC made the return of 20 Palestinian captives their continuous, highest profile focus.

In image after image, the BBC made the release of Israeli prisoners the big, emotive news story at the top of their homepage. See here, here, here, here and here.

Continuously, on the day the captives were released, as well as on preceding and subsequent days, pictures of Israeli suffering and celebration were headlined exactly as if the British Broadcasting Corporation was the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation. By contrast, a single, small box was consistently reserved for news on the release of the much larger number of Palestinian prisoners. See here, here and here.

Even after the living Israeli prisoners had been released, the BBC headlined three dead Israeli prisoners with names, pictures and family background as their top news story, something it had not done for living Palestinian prisoners that had been released.

Are we a bit odd? Is it, in fact, obvious that the Israeli prisoners were the real news for reasons we don’t understand? If so, we are not alone, because the Guardian homepage managed to headline a picture of celebrating Palestinians as its top story.

The BBC published a long article detailing the names, pictures (repeated) and backgrounds of all 48 Israeli prisoners, thus deeply humanising them as individuals: ‘Who are the released hostages?’ Compare that with this 55-second video: ‘Watch: Palestinian prisoners released in West Bank to rapturous crowds’. As usual, Palestinians are presented as an anonymous crowd – no humanising names, faces or personal stories.

The point is that the BBC was working as hard to humanise the Israeli captives as if they had been British. But why is it so crucial for the British public to focus so intensively on the fate of just these foreign captives, and why do the Palestinian captives matter so much less? The reality, of course, is that the BBC is trying hard to rehabilitate the devastated reputation of Israel, a key US-UK ally.

A day later, the Financial Times reported:

‘Israeli soldiers killed several Palestinians in northern Gaza on Tuesday, a day after US President Donald Trump touted the end of the war in the coastal enclave.’

This breaking of the ceasefire was reported in a rolling BBC live report, but it was not headlined on the BBC homepage. Middle East coverage on the BBC News website is overseen by online Middle East editor Raffi Berg. We wrote to Berg on X:

‘Good morning, @raffiberg. Why didn’t we see a headline of this kind on the BBC website yesterday?’

We, of course, received no reply. In December 2024, the Guardian’s Owen Jones wrote on Drop Site News of the same Raffi Berg:

‘On August 23, 2020, Berg posted an image of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu taking a phone call at his desk. In his post, Berg has zoomed in on and circled a copy of [Berg’s book] Red Sea Spies visible on a bookshelf behind the prime minister. “First time I’ve been on a prime minister’s bookshelf!” he wrote. “I know I’ve got one of #Israel PM @netanyahu’s books on mine—but wow!” He tweeted a similar image in January 2021.’

A former BBC journalist told Jones of Berg:

‘This guy’s entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel.’

On October 16, Reuters reported Hamas’s claims that Israel had killed at least 24 Palestinians since the ceasefire started. The following day, this Associated Press headline certainly belongs in our Hall of Propaganda Infamy:

‘Israel strikes southern Gaza in test of ceasefire.’

Israel breaking the ceasefire was merely a ‘test’ of the ceasefire, even though the report itself confirmed that ‘at least 36 Palestinians were killed across Gaza, including children’.

The Real Palestinian Death Toll

With Time magazine celebrating, Trump and ‘Bibi’ chuckling over a job well-done, with the media trying to convince us that Israeli ‘hostages’ matter infinitely more than Palestinian ‘prisoners’, it is a challenge to hang on to our sanity and sense of what is right. It may help to remind ourselves of the true extent of the genocide that these people are celebrating and whitewashing.

In an article titled, ‘Skewering History – The Odious Politics of Counting Gaza’s Dead’, Dr Richard Hil, Adjunct Professor in the School of Human Services and Social Work at Griffith University and Dr Gideon Polya, formerly a biochemist at La Trobe University, reviewed the evidence.

They noted that, according to figures issued by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in early May 2025, the official death toll in Gaza since 7 October 2023 had been over 55,000, with more than half of the dead being women and children.

Hil and Polya noted that while widely regarded as credible, the Ministry’s data had been challenged in The Lancet by an international team of epidemiological researchers who in February 2025 put the death toll in Gaza at 64,260. Using this approach, the Lancet authors argued that ‘the Palestinian Ministry of Health under-reported mortality by 41%. Women, children and older people accounted for just under 60 per cent of the 28,257 deaths’. (Our emphasis)

Hil and Polya commented:

‘Importantly, the researchers argued that the actual death toll was likely much higher given the exclusion of non-trauma deaths resulting from the destruction of health care facilities, food insecurity, and lack water and sanitation.’

A subsequent letter published in The Lancet reported a ‘conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death’ in Gaza. (Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee, Salim Yusuf, ‘Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential,’ The Lancet, July 2024)

Hil and Polya commented on this assertion:

‘Assuming that deaths from deprivation were four times the violent deaths, then the 136,000 violent deaths after 15.5 months of killing (25 April 2025) would imply 544,000 Gaza deaths from imposed deprivation, and that the total Gazan death toll would accordingly be 136,000 violent deaths plus 544,000 from imposed deprivation, leading to a staggering total of 680,000 deaths by 25 April 2025. Most of these victims, as indicated in earlier counts by the Ministry of Health are women and children.’

They added:

‘Assuming that 33 per cent of the violent Gaza deaths were children, 21 per cent women and 46 per cent, men (according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor), and that the same proportions obtain for the deprivation-based deaths of non-infant children, women and men, then the 680,000 Gazans killed by violence and imposed deprivation by 25 April 2025 included about 380,000 under-five-year-old infants, 479,000 children in total, 63,000 women and 138,000 men.’

Readers may recall that at the time of the Iraq war, it was widely reported that around 100,000 Iraqis had been violently killed. But Lancet researchers, and others, again found that the actual death toll from non-trauma deaths was far higher, likely more than one million.

Conclusion – Britain’s Complicity

If that is the true, unbearable scale of what has been wrought by Israel on the captive population of Gaza, what is the truth of British responsibility?

Peter Oborne has worked as political editor of the Spectator, as chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph, as a journalist at the Evening Standard and as a commentator at the Express. He has made nearly 30 documentaries for Channel 4, BBC World and BBC Radio 4, appeared endlessly on high-profile radio and TV programmes, and has been made Society of Editors Press Awards Columnist of the Year (See our media alert, ‘The Impossible Peter Oborne’).

But in his new book, ‘Complicit – Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza’ (OR Books, 2025) – Oborne has arguably transcended all of these achievements. In the conclusion to his book, this vanishingly rare example of a media insider turned truth-teller comments of Britain:

‘We bear a heavy responsibility for the deaths in Gaza, third in line only behind Israel and its primary patron and collaborator the United States. We helped enable the daily slaughter, destruction, disease, starvation, and human misery. We could have stopped arms sales. We could have sanctioned Israel. We could have ended military support.’ (e-book version, p.195)

In an extraordinary concluding section to a book that strips away any last remaining illusions that Britain has an honest and honourable free press, Oborne writes:

‘Damn the politicians and journalists who never reported on or cared about the deaths of Palestinian journalists targeted and killed by Israel. Damn the blood-soaked British newspaper industry. Damn you Murdoch. Damn you Rebekah Brooks. Damn you Victoria Newton, editor of The Sun. Damn you Tony Gallagher. You are The Times editor who awarded space to Yoav Gallant, wanted by the ICC for alleged war crimes including the use of starvation as a weapon of war and crimes against humanity. Damn you Professor Niall Ferguson for co-writing that article.

‘Damn you Chris Evans, editor of the Daily Telegraph, for turning your newspaper into one of Israel’s propaganda tools. Damn you Zanny Minton Beddoes of The Economist. You allowed your renowned journal to denounce the International Court of Justice genocide judgment as a “show trial”. You knew that Israel was turning Gaza into a “hellscape” yet still demanded: “fight on”.

‘Damn you Daily Mail editor Ted Verity and your offshore proprietor Lord Rothermere. Damn you Michael Gove. Damn The Spectator.

‘Damn the ignorant, lavishly paid, cruel, canting newspaper columnists and studio hosts. Damn the know-nothing reporters who peddled lies and twisted the facts. Damn the reporters who were too afraid to search out the truth…

‘Damn the moral cowards at the top of the BBC: Samir Shah, Robbie Gibb, Tim Davie, Richard Burgess. Damn you for failing to understand the meaning of the great institution you have disgraced, or why it mattered so much.’ (p.196)

This is just a sample from ‘Complicit’. Oborne has much more to say in what is undoubtedly one of the most important exposés of the British press we have read.

DE

David Edwards is author of ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, June 2025. See here.

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