On the Ethics of Embedding With Génocidaires

On Sunday, August 10, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a dramatic announcement: After 674 days of barring foreign media from Gaza, Israel was planning to begin staging guided tours, under Israeli military control, for embedded members of the foreign press.

“We have decided, and have ordered, directed the military, to bring in foreign journalists—more foreign journalists, a lot,” said Israel’s premier, in a rambling, paranoid half-hour press conference—staged, he said, to dispel “the global campaign of lies” against Israel. “There’s a problem with assuring security, but I think it can be done in a way that is responsible and careful to preserve your own safety.

Just seven hours later, Israel assassinated the beloved, world-renowned Palestinian Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif, along with five other journalists, in a targeted airstrike as they sheltered in a tent for members of the press just outside al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

The timing of this announcement was no coincidence. Nor was Netanyahu’s pointed reference to guaranteeing the “safety” of journalists. Since the beginning of the so-called Global War on Terror, military regimes have used access to occupied territories as a tool to control and manipulate the media: first by denying that access, often through violence; and then by offering “safe” access in the form of highly coveted embeds. And from the beginning—in Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other places—mass media have all too eagerly played along.

In a grotesque tweet posted after assassinating Anas and his colleagues, Israel’s military exulted over the killings and repeated the smears it had been airing for months as trial balloons for his murder: that he was “head of a Hamas terrorist cell” who “advanced rocket attacks” on Israelis.

To their eternal shame, many Western news outlets repeated these fabrications in their coverage of his killing—a cowardly act of ventriloquism that they refuse to perform when other foreign governments make false accusations against reporters from the West.

Today, as the Israeli regime grows exponentially more violent, the implied promise of safety for embedded journalists increasingly means the explicit threat of killing for the unembedded.

Make no mistake: When journalists accept Israel’s terms of embedment, they accept the murder of their colleagues as an acceptable price to pay for a coveted moment of access to a killing field—granted to them by the killers, on their terms and conditions.

We know what the resulting stories will look like, because Israel’s military has already done this: In October 2024, during its illegal invasion and occupation of parts of southern Lebanon, it took roughly a dozen of the world’s most prestigious media outlets on tours of the Lebanese villages it was occupying.

The Public Source conducted an in-depth analysis of the resulting articles and broadcasts. We found them to be riddled with distortions, disinformation, dehumanizing language, and factual errors: in effect, state propaganda masquerading as actual news—but without any of the questioning, fact checks, or balance that distinguish legitimate newsgathering from public relations.

The Gaza tours promise to be an even more shameful attempt to manipulate the media into repeating meaningless lies, covered by the barest fig leaf of attribution. “One of the things you’re going to see is precisely our efforts to bring in Gazans, or rather to bring in food to Gaza,” Netanyahu said, in a preview of the kind of lines that Israel will be feeding its willing stenographers—the usual litany of falsehoods, the purpose of which is not belief, but instead what Hannah Arendt called the “trembling, wobbling motion” we experience when reality is drowned out by a constant chorus of lies.

Israel is offering these tours because it is, as Netanyahu admitted, losing “the propaganda war.” Israel is losing its war on the truth—and on reality itself—because of courageous professionals like Anas and his colleagues, who gave everything they treasured, including their lives, to show the world the reality of Israel’s genocide.

To go on one of Israel’s propaganda tours is to accept the bargain that Israel is offering: accept the murder of real reporters on the ground in exchange for a brief, stage-managed glimpse at genocide, shown to you by its perpetrators, with the goal of legitimizing it.

This calculus should be unacceptable to any journalist with professional ethics, integrity, or a conscience. Even those who don’t care about their colleagues should care about the truth.

Western governments have long chosen to normalize the state-sanctioned murder of journalists. But journalists don’t have to. They can and should say no. We are calling on news organizations and individual journalists to stand up and say no to Israel’s propaganda tours. Here’s what a principled news outlet or individual would do:

1. FOR NEWS OUTLETS: Refuse to send your reporters on Israel’s propaganda tours of Gaza. Issue a statement to your readers explaining why.

2. Instead of sending reporters on embeds, hire Palestinian journalists in Gaza and offer them the same protections as non-Palestinian correspondents.

3. FOR INDIVIDUAL REPORTERS: Refuse to go on military embeds to Gaza.

4. Sign letters and statements to newsroom leadership asking them not to send your colleagues on military embeds to Gaza.

This open letter originally appeared as an editorial in the independent Beirut-based outlet Public Source (8/27/25).