Why does anyone believe the IDF anymore?
the lie and they lie and they lie
Israel, laughably, refer to their military as the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Despite their name, they habitually invade countries, commit war crimes, and then try to cover them up. Here are three recent examples.
While reading these, please hold the acronym DARVO in your mind. It stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. It describes a pattern of behavior often used by perpetrators in abusive relationships to deflect blame and responsibility for their actions.
The Assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh
An IDF sniper shot and killed journalist Shireen Abu Akleh on 11ᵗʰ May 2022. The sniper could fully read her PRESS vest when he shot her. Witnesses reported, without delay and accurately, that Israeli forces had carried out the shooting. Media outlets, human rights organisations, and the United Nations supported this claim.
Israel sought to evade responsibility. “The Palestinians did it” they claimed, tweeting a video of Palestinian gunmen. Israeli human rights group B’tselem quickly debunked the video. They showed it was filmed in a completely different location.
Then Israel decried “hasty” accusations as “misleading and irresponsible”. Their supporters in the media wrongly painted Israel as the true victim. They called the accusations “blood libel” and “antisemitic”.
Israel’s DARVO tactics worked. The New York Times and the Guardian played it safe by wrongly attributing Abu Akleh’s death to “clashes” between “Israeli military forces and Palestinian gunmen.” The Associated Press even changed a quote from the Palestinian Ministry of Health so that it no longer named Israeli forces as the culprit.
Western media framed Israel’s actions as a justified response to Palestinian “terrorism”. They portrayed Abu Akleh’s death as a tragic accident instead of what it was: a deliberate assassination. This narrative allowed the Biden administration to support Israel’s lie, despite internally concluding that the IDF was the culprit.
The IDF demanded that only a small number of mourners - and only Christians at that - attend Abu Akleh’s funeral. They then attacked, smashing the back window of the hearse and stealing the Palestinian flag that covered Abu Akleh’s coffin. Kicking and hitting people with batons, the IDF forced mourners carrying her coffin to lose their balance and drop it to the ground.
While this occurred, the BBC, CBS, and others reported mere “clashes” and “tussling.” This was despite overwhelming visual evidence of Israeli occupation forces attacking mourners in broad daylight. The Daily Mail even credulously reported that:
Israeli cops say they intervened in funeral of Al Jazeera journalist because mob STOLE coffin from her family
Abu Akleh wasn’t the first Palestinian to be persecuted in death, nor was she the last.
Months later, when the world had looked away, Israel admitted that “there was a high possibility that Ms. Abu Akleh was accidentally hit by IDF gunfire.” They still refuse to open a criminal investigation.
Even if they did open an investigation, the odds of a prosecution would be slim-to-none. A meagre 0.17% of all incidents of IDF wrongdoing reviewed by their “fact-finding mechanism” result in prosecution. By comparison, the system that Israel uses to prosecute Palestinians has a 99.7% prosecution rate. The purpose of a system is what it does.
The Flour Massacres
Israeli forces often shoot Palestinians trying to get food from aid trucks. These events happen so often that we have a name for them: flour massacres. Last month, about 600 desperately hungry Palestinians were killed this way.
None of this is accidental. Israeli soldiers have been explicitly ordered to shoot civilians at aid sites. That hasn’t stopped them trying to evade accountability though.
They kill and lie faster than I can debunk. So we’re only going to examine one crime here: the flour massacre of June 1ˢᵗ 2025 in which Israel killed at least 31 people.
First they denied their crime, saying: “it simply didn’t happen!” Then they changed their story. “The Palestinians did it”, they claimed, tweeting a video of unidentified gunmen. Drop Site News quickly debunked the video: it was filmed at an entirely different location. The video could be of any armed group in Gaza. Perhaps the ISIS-affiliated militia that Israel has bragged about training and arming?
The IDF then attacked their accusers:
This report is entirely false and echoes the propaganda of the terrorist organization Hamas.
They also tried to blame their victims for their own deaths: designating the scene of the crime a no-go-zone after they started shooting. They then used the fact that their victims were in said zone to blame them for their own deaths. This is a common IDF practice.
Israel’s DARVO tactics had a visible chilling effect on the BBC, who softened their language from:
31 dead after Israeli tank opens fire near Gaza aid centre
to:
Israel denies firing at civilians after Hamas-run ministry says 31 killed in Gaza aid centre attack … There are conflicting reports on what happened near an aid distribution centre in Rafah on Sunday.
Israel scolded the BBC, and the corporation responded by softening its coverage. There’s a lesson here for anybody who runs a media organisation. Do not give an inch to these genocidal maniacs. Israel recently announced a huge twentyfold increase to their “consciousness warfare” budget, so editors must learn this lesson quickly or they’ll be swamped with smears.
Four days later, CNN put the BBC to shame. They clearly showed what anyone paying attention already knew: Israel did commit the massacre and tried to hide it. The IDF were caught in a lie, again, but their damage control strategy had worked. The eyes of the world had already moved on.
The Rafah paramedic massacre
Israel has killed hundreds of health and aid workers since their genocide began. They massacre and misrepresent faster than I can clarify. So we’re only going to examine one crime here: the paramedic massacre of March 23rd 2025, in which Israel killed at least 15 aid workers.
Israel went to great lengths to literally bury the truth of what happened. They hid the bodies and the bullet riddled ambulances in one mass grave of contorted flesh and metal. Then they blocked access to it.
They also kidnapped one eyewitness and killed another, a 12-year-old boy. With the witnesses taken care of, they claimed that the paramedics they had killed were actually “terrorists” in “suspicious vehicles” who were “advancing toward troops without use of headlights or emergency signals”.
UN officials from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) tried to get to the crime scene. On their way, OCHA officials bore witness to the cheapness of Palestinian life. The IDF shot two more civilians right in front of them. OCHA were then denied access to the site.
Two weeks after the massacre new footage emerged. It contradicted Israel’s version of events. Headlights and emergency signals were visible. Terrorists were not. Investigators, who had finally gained access to the gravesite, found the footage on the phone of one of the victims. The IDF had buried it with his body. Also buried with the bodies were cable ties. These indicate that the paramedics were killed “execution-style” and posed no threat. No wonder the IDF had so fiercely guarded the gravesite.
The IDF finally acknowledged that its first account was “mistaken.” It still insists that the ambulances were used “for terrorist purposes.” No one has ever presented evidence to support that claim. On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence that the IDF perfidiously disguise themselves as aid workers to launch attacks. Every accusation is a confession.
Addressing the fact they hid the bodies in a mass grave, they said this was to prevent wild dogs eating the corpses. The IDF chose not to answer the obvious follow-up question: Did you think dogs would eat the ambulances you buried too?
Even now, if you say Israel killed those aid workers, they call it blood libel. And this tactic works. Sky News reported, long after the facts emerged, that “we don’t know why” Israel “detained” eyewitness paramedic Asaad al Nsasrah. Why would the perpetrator of a crime kidnap a witness? We haven’t the foggiest.
So, why does anyone believe the IDF anymore?
There are too many horrors to count, but I hope the examples above sufficiently plot the trend. Israel lies, Palestinians die, and western media let them. Indeed, it doesn't matter how many times we catch Israel in a lie. Western media continues to treat their claims as credible. It’s like a perverse Groundhog Day.
When reporting on Israel’s mass murder campaign, passive voice is king. Omitting facts is standard, and fabrication is permissible in newspapers that read like caricatures of themselves. They muddle, mislead, and misconstrue: manufacturing consent for genocide and creating confusion around murders that are clear as day. When it comes to Palestine, the industry that claims to speak “truth to power” is really just a loudspeaker for the powerful.
Why is this? Well, you could write a book on that and many have. But I’m British and short on time, so we’re only going to examine one institution here: the BBC.
We saw earlier how belligerent foreign states and their friends in the media pressure the BBC. The corporation is also disciplined by British politicians. Former chancellor George Osborne recently admitted as much:
You think of the BBC as being this big, independent organisation with lots of protection against the government of the day … but the chancellor can basically boss the BBC around.
An open letter from 112 BBC journalists and 306 media figures revealed that BBC staff are forced by the organisation’s pro-Israel leadership to “perform PR for the Israeli government”. The letter calls on the BBC to sack Sir Robbie Gibb, Theresa May’s former spin doctor. He was a Tory-appointed BBC director. He currently sits on the BBC’s Board and it’s Editorial Standards Committee.
Gibb bought the Jewish Chronicle, a racist pro-Israel paper that regularly prints falsehoods. He made the purchase on behalf of an anonymous consortium. To this day, he refuses to say who gave him the money. BBC Journalists note that:
This conflict of interest highlights a double standard for BBC content makers who have themselves experienced censorship in the name of ‘impartiality’. In some instances staff have been accused of having an agenda because they have posted news articles critical of the Israeli government on their social media. By comparison, Gibb remains in an influential post with little transparency regarding his decisions despite his ideological leanings being well known. We can no longer ask license fee payers to overlook Gibbs’ ideological allegiances.
I’ve used the BBC as a case study, but journalists everywhere face similar interference when they report facts about Israel.
To answer the question I posed at the top of this article: nobody actually believes the IDF anymore. Western journalists just pretend to because they’re rewarded for doing so, and punished when they don’t.