#genocide

When another Gaza "ceasefire" came into effect in October 2025, it provided Israeli authorities with cover to continue their policies of ethnic cleansing, occupation, and annexation of more Palestinian land—like the ceasefire negotiations in 2024 and the decades-long "peace process"—with less scrutiny. Legacy media supported these efforts by reducing their already poor coverage of the Gaza Genocide, underreporting Israel's expanded operations in the occupied West Bank, and filtering the existing reporting through the narrative of a ceasefire. Israel just continued killing Palestinians and blocking aid on a smaller scale, while the media continued to repeat Israeli and U.S. statements as fact. One of the more accurate headlines immediately following the ceasefire announcement came from the parody-news site The Onion, which stated, "Israel Agrees to Go Back to Killing Palestinians on Less Frequent Basis." Though satirical, The Onion's spoof headline managed to aptly capture not only the travesty of the ceasefire but also the historical model of Israel's violence against Palestinians.

— Don't Say Palestine by Assal Rad

Despite Israel's practice of targeting, arresting, and even killing Palestinian journalists, its massacre of journalists during the Gaza Genocide reached an unimaginable scale. As early as December 2023, CPJ documented a staggering spike in journalist deaths, reporting that nearly 75 percent of all journalists killed globally that year had been in Gaza since October. In just a few months, Israel had made 2023 the deadliest year for journalists in more than a decade. Even when it was evident that Palestinian journalists were being killed at a rate unprecedented in modern warfare, many headlines from major Western outlets avoided the most basic journalistic duty: naming the killer.

— Don't Say Palestine by Assal Rad

PROLOGUE

Why I Correct Headlines

In May 2021, I was reading the news on my phone when a headline stopped me, not because it shocked me, but because it carried the familiar tone that Western media outlets have perfected in constructing their narrative of Palestine. The article was about Palestinians being forced out of their homes in East Jerusalem. I remember pausing, then rereading the headline and subhead to take in the careful linguistic choices and the essential information that was missing. As a historian of the region, I was not surprised to see the way the media reflected the official account of their country's foreign policy positions.

The headline used the word "evictions," which suggested paperwork, municipal procedure, and real estate disputes. It did not say that East Jerusalem is recognized under international law as occupied Palestinian territory and that these expulsions were just another episode in a long history of forced displacement and land theft. This history was not denied outright, but it was laundered to erase Israeli violence and Palestinian victimhood. The language was softened enough to dull its meaning, referring to "contested neighborhoods" instead of "occupation," saying "to remove" rather than "to ethnically cleanse." These word choices were no accident.

I found myself mentally rewriting it, inserting the missing context, restoring the agency and violation that had been carefully edited out. What would happen, I wondered, if the headline actually said what was happening? If it distinguished the occupier and the occupied? So, I decided to make those changes. I took a screenshot, crossed out the problematic language, made my edits in red, and posted it. I did not expect a strong reaction. But as the post gained traction and the image spread, I realized it could do more than correct headlines. It offered a way to expose how reality itself had been slanted to fit our political ecosystem.

— Don't Say Palestine by Assal Rad