On November 8, the Israeli media monitoring group Honest Reporting released a report suggesting that six Gaza-based freelance photographers who covered Israel’s war on Gaza for four leading international media organizations may have known about the Hamas attack in advance Southern Israel was informed on October 7th.

Israel’s reaction to the proposal was swift and brutal.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office accused the journalists named in the report of being “accomplices in crimes against humanity.” Danny Danon, a senior member of Netanyahu’s Likud party and a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, wrote on X that the photojournalists should be “eliminated.” “We will hunt them down together with the terrorists,” he wrote.

The debate over whether Palestinian photojournalists and those who published their work already knew about the Hamas attack occupied the media for several days. But the controversy soon came to an abrupt end when all four media outlets involved – CNN, Reuters, The Associated Press and The New York Times – alleged that they or the photographers they worked with had been informed of the attack in advance. decisively rejected. They called Honest Reporting’s story “irresponsible” and said: “It endangers the safety of any media outlet operating in Israel or the Palestinian territories.”

Gil Hoffman, executive director of Honest Reporting, said he was “so relieved” to have found the four companies’ statements on the issue “appropriate.” He added that his organization never “accused” the media outlets of knowing about the attack in advance, but merely “raised questions.”

Why is this debacle worth remembering today? Because the incident had all the hallmarks of standard Israeli propaganda: the real-life trauma and tragedy of a horrific attack was used to portray a conspiracy between Western media organizations and Israel’s enemies.

Propaganda campaigns or individual salvos already dominate the Palestinian-Israeli confrontations. Since its founding in 1948, Israel has developed effective propaganda and information manipulation techniques that give it an advantage in getting the Western media to reflect its side of the story.

Therefore, it is important to note when things start to change in this area. This story about whether Gaza photojournalists knew about the Hamas attack in advance was the latest addition to a rapidly growing list Recent Israeli propaganda efforts have failed – largely because Palestinians, Arabs and most international observers of the conflict and the region now routinely investigate every serious Israeli allegation and often expose it as a lie.

As a result, American media outlets, including organizations that traditionally presented Israeli views and accusations as facts without due care, are now more carefully evaluating Israel’s media statements and narratives, particularly when it comes to military actions that kill Palestinian civilians.

A national newspaper reporter told me privately that journalists in the United States are increasingly skeptical of narratives promoted by security forces in the United States, Israel or any other country because the Black Lives Matter movement has raised awareness of social justice issues the police have exposed hypocrisy and lies.

“There is a profound shift taking place,” the journalist said, “because we need to do better in reporting on race and ethnicity, particularly violent incidents involving police or military.” Since 2020, we have seen the parallels between Black Lives Matter and Gaza very clearly.”

In recent years, there have been many cases in which Israel has been caught distorting the truth or outright lying to hide its crimes against Palestinians and violations of international law from the world.

For example, after Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot dead in an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank in May 2022, Israel claimed that she was “hit by indiscriminate Palestinian gunfire” during a shootout by Palestinian gunmen. But within days, multiple independent investigations confirmed that she was killed in a targeted attack by an Israeli sniper.

Most recently, at the beginning of November, 15 Palestinians were killed in an Israeli airstrike on an ambulance convoy in the besieged Gaza Strip. Israel said it was targeting “Hamas positions” but failed to convince the international community.

On November 11, the official Arabic account of the Israeli Foreign Ministry was published Posted a video of an apparently agitated nurse talking about Hamas overrunning al-Shifa Hospital and confiscating supplies meant for patients. It was clearly a fake and was deleted by the Israeli authorities without explanation after significant public backlash.

Last week, the Israeli military released a video of a room at Gaza’s al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital that purportedly showed a roster in Arabic of Hamas fighters guarding Israeli prisoners there – what was in reality just a handwritten calendar with the days of the week was.

These are just a few recent examples of Israeli officials obscuring the truth or outright lying to hide their criminal activities from global media audiences (and likely from the International Criminal Court as well). These repeated and easily exposed lies have greatly increased American journalists’ skepticism toward official Israeli statements. Today, even the most pro-Israel media organizations are reluctant to report Israeli claims as fact without seeing concrete evidence.

Even journalists who identify more with Israeli views are now more cautious when dealing with Israeli military statements, particularly regarding deaths and injuries, another TV journalist told me. This change in approach can be easily seen in the US media’s relatively cautious approach to Israeli claims that Palestinian hospitals in Gaza host Hamas military bases or command centers.

Israeli views continue to dominate mainstream American media, but as a result of this trend, Israelis are increasingly being pressured to provide evidence for claims that the media once spread without question. Palestinian views are also appearing more frequently in the media, reflecting in part a crucial structural shift in society: Young Americans are much more balanced between Israel and Palestine and are more actively challenging U.S. and Israeli government actions they consider overly militaristic, unjustified, or consider unfair.

Another journalist with national and global reporting experience summed it up for me: “We are simultaneously experiencing unprecedented generational and societal changes in the context of racial and social justice. This is a reckoning for the journalism industry.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.