THREE years ago, Israel had most of the world’s sympathy. On Oct 7, 2023, Hamas-led fighters killed around 1,200 people in Israel and took more than 250 hostages. Israel experienced a kind of grief that Palestinians live with every day. But grief is not a blank cheque. Three years on, the story Israel told the world about itself that day no longer commands automatic authority. Oct 7 happened. But the world has spent three years watching what came after. Gaza’s health ministry now counts at least 74,000 Palestinians killed. More than 1,100 have died since a ceasefire took effect last October. Israeli forces still control over half the territory.

In 2024, I wrote here about the Western media’s role in protecting Israel’s narrative — the different standards applied to Israeli and Palestinian victims, the lavish attention paid to Israeli suffering, the reduction of Palestinian deaths to statistics. Much of that criticism was dismissed as partisan. But what happens when audiences stop waiting for the media to tell them what they are seeing?

Palestinians in Gaza have spent three years documenting their own destruction on their phones. Palestinian journalists have kept reporting through the same bombardment, hunger and displacement........

© Dawn