In November 2023, more than 270 Australian journalists signed an open letter calling for fairer Gaza coverage. Consequently, senior editors at Nine’s mastheads, all of whom had taken lobby-funded trips to Israel, banned signatories from covering the conflict. Two months later, an Israeli tank fired on an ambulance the army had cleared to reach six-year-old Hind Rajab, killing her and the paramedics. It made headlines worldwide — but across 2024, News Corp and Nine published no original reporting on it. This editorial blackout of verified atrocity crimes is a distinct mechanism of impunity, erasing the victims and enabling the perpetrators.
Submission FPM-HR written by Mark Bradbeer, with Free Palestine Melbourne, in response to the UN Special Rapporteur OPT’s call for input on the role of media in the context of Israel’s policies and practices toward the Palestinian people, especially after 7 October 2023.
Introduction
Seven weeks after 7 October 2023, over 270 Australian journalists wrote a letter of complaint to their media outlets, requesting better reportage of the Israel/Palestine conflict without the prevalent pro-Israel bias. They identified eight failures around truthfulness, victim-centring, IDF source scepticism, the framing of crimes, historical context, protest coverage, lobby-trip transparency, and newsroom trust.
This submission examines how the editors of Australia’s largest newspapers (including Nine’s Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and News Corp’s The Australian, Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph) responded to the letter, and tests the mastheads’ performance against the eight demands using the 29 January 2024 killing of six-year-old Hind Rajab and her family as the central case study.
The editors’ response
Senior editors of Nine mastheads The Age and Sydney Morning Herald signed a letter saying: “The SMH and The Age hold a very significant place in Australian society because of the mastheads’ reputation for independent journalism and reporting bound by the highest standards of impartiality. It is a strong-held tenet that our journalists’ personal agenda do not influence our reporting on news events. This applies across the board, including to our coverage of the current war in Israel and Gaza.” The letter, published by News Corp’s news.com.au, The Australian, and the Herald Sun, confirmed that “Any newsroom staff who signed this latest industry letter will be unable to participate in any reporting or production relating to the war.”
The journalists at The Age newspaper in Melbourne who signed the letter were told they were henceforth banned from reporting on any story connected to Israel and its war on Gaza — including Melbourne’s local rallies opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide.
Testing the demands
“1. Adhere to truth over ‘both-sidesism’.”
The drive for balance can easily lead to a story being undermined with the response from one side taking over the narrative of an incident. Thus a balanced true version of the event can be lost. That is why the first request of the journalists was to give primacy to the truth, rather than following the traditional journalistic ethic of presenting both sides of the story.
ABC’s Media Watch, its media scrutiny program, found that the Australian papers failed to achieve any aspiration of balance in its coverage of Gaza: the Media Watch episode of 19 February 2024 noted that “the big Australian newspapers we looked at have failed to cover the Gaza conflict fairly, in terms of giving equal weight to the victims on each side, with the Nine papers [Sydney Morning Herald and The Age] not too bad, but The Australian failing in spectacular fashion.” The SMH editors rejected the ABC’s criticism on 18 February 2024, claiming the papers’ coverage was “thorough, fair and balanced. We have documented the ongoing tragedy and destruction experienced by innocent civilians on both sides of the war. Counting stories published in print only is a simplistic and flawed approach that doesn’t reflect the full extent of the Herald’s in-depth coverage”. ABC queries to News Corp about the apparent bias went unanswered.
“2. Centre the human tragedy in the coverage of the conflict.”
The human tragedy of Hind Rajab and her family was completely ignored by News Corp and Nine Network newspapers (documented below). It is impossible to imagine a similar response if Hind and her family were Israeli. About this apparent blind spot, Media Watch asked: ‘Is it because western journalists can’t get into Gaza to find the families? Well, that may be part of the reason. But on social media there is no shortage of powerful human stories of Palestinian suffering with photos, names and faces, from sources like UNICEF, Medecins Sans Frontieres and Al Jazeera’.
An answer rather, may be that ‘in Australia, a preliminary analysis for the Islamophobia Register by Dr Susan Carland found Instagram posts from The Australian and 9News all humanised Israeli victims but not Palestinians, with the ABC the only one to give equal coverage to both sides’. The documented pattern suggests Palestinian lives were not considered newsworthy in comparison to Israeli lives.
“3. More scepticism of IDF press releases.”
On 25 February, the Israeli government’s response to the killing of Hind Rajab and her family followed a familiar pattern: denial of troop presence, denial that ambulance coordination was needed, a promise of internal investigation, and a pivot to October 7 and civilian-shielding by Hamas. Australia’s commercial mastheads hadn’t reported the killing, so felt no need to apply scepticism to Israel’s justifications.
When Israel accuses, Australia’s News Corp papers amplify the accusation as fact. The Australian’s exclusive 15 November 2023 profile of “the man from Melbourne running Israel’s PR war”, Mark Regev, treated three contested IDF al-Ahli claims as established fact in one paragraph — Hamas’s “misfired rockets”, “exaggerated” casualties, no direct hit — then quoted Regev’s tactic for discrediting Palestinian casualty figures without rebuttal: “the minute you say it’s the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health… people will raise a question mark about it”. The same day, the same masthead claimed that Hamas was using al-Shifa hospital as its “command and control centre” with the headline: “Israel Defence Force reaches Hamas’ Gaza hospital headquarters” (with “War on Hamas’s hospital HQ” in print the next day) — justifying the attack on the hospital. The Washington Post’s December 2023 investigation found no evidence supporting the claim, and no evidence the rooms identified by the Israeli military were even connected to the tunnel network.
When Israel is accused, the response can shift, with The Age running the 16 September 2025 UN Commission of Inquiry genocide determination on the front page — whereas The Australian ran no news report on the determination. Instead, it published an editorial two days later dismissing the finding as “dodgy UN claims” — a tactic it repeated weeks later when COI chair Navi Pillay came to Sydney for the Peace Prize. News Corp’s metropolitan tabloids carried nothing on the genocide determination.
The blackout of the killing of Hind Rajab and her family revealed the same logic, applied earlier: Israel’s case amplified or defended; evidence against, buried or attacked.
“4. Give coverage to credible allegations of war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid, and don’t avoid using the term ‘Palestine’ where appropriate.”
The killing of Hind Rajab and her family was clear evidence of a war crime. Its omission from News Corp and Nine mastheads was consistent with a pattern of avoiding stories that would require confronting such allegations, demonstrating the complicity of Australian media.
“5. Provide historical context of persistent persecution of Palestinians.”
Australian newspaper articles unfailingly take October 7, 2023, as the start of conflict between Israel and Gaza. Very rarely do they refer to conflict before then or to the occupation or to the Nakba. They constantly repeat Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s claim that Israel has a right to defend itself, but almost never mention the right of an occupied country to self-determination, let alone resistance, or the right of the State of Palestine to self-defence.
“6. Provide full and fair coverage of Australia’s growing anti-war movement.”
The Palestine-solidarity protests since October 2023 have been the largest sustained political movement in Australian history. The Sydney Harbour Bridge March for Humanity on 3 August 2025 drew an estimated 300,000 — comparable in scale to the country’s two largest single political demonstrations on record. Mainstream coverage has framed these gatherings consistently as a problem of public order rather than a political demand. Speeches by Indigenous leaders, parliamentarians, doctors returning from Gaza, rabbis opposing the war, and bereaved Palestinian Australians go almost entirely unreported.
Front-page coverage does not focus on the reasons for the protest or acknowledge the protesters’ demands. Instead it inflates isolated incidents to exaggerate controversy. The morning after Sydney’s March for Humanity, the front page of The West Australian (Seven West Media) splashed “BLOODY CHAOS” under the subhead “Baby dolls smeared in fake blood and Aussie flag burned as wild protests become our norm”. On 10 February 2026, the morning after a Sydney rally against Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s state visit, The Australian’s front page ran the masthead-spanning headline “DIGNITY v DISGRACE” under the banner “Herzog visit: activists forget Bondi lessons” — “dignity” being a head of state found by UN Commission, five months earlier, to have “incited the commission of genocide”, “disgrace” those protesting his visit. The lead paragraph called the chants “vile slogans”; a news photo caption called a placard “vile”. Four bylined reporters; news, not opinion. On the same front page, a companion piece attacked protesters for offering “nary a placard” against the war in Iran.
The Age and SMH signatories were the journalists most likely to cover these rallies with journalistic integrity — but they had been removed altogether from any reporting on the conflict by editors who had enjoyed lobby-funded Israel trips.
“7. Be transparent about journalists who have been on all-expenses paid trips to Israel.”
Executive editor of the ABC (former SMH editor and former Middle East correspondent for The Australian) John Lyons wrote in 2017 that:
in my opinion, no editors, journalists or others should take these [expenses-paid Israel lobby] trips: they grotesquely distort the reality and are dangerous in the sense that they allow people with a very small amount of knowledge to pollute Australian public opinion. Those on the trips return to Australia thinking they have some sort of grasp of the place, but they have spent more time in Tel Aviv’s most expensive restaurants and cafes and in settlements than looking at the real crisis behind trying to continue an occupation of another people.
(John Lyons, Balcony Over Jerusalem, Harper Collins, 2017, p.288)
By 2023, four senior editors of The Age and SMH had been on expenses-paid trips to Israel expenses courtesy of the Israel Lobby: Patrick Elligett, David King, Tory Maguire and Bevan Shields. These four were the four who signed a letter to Age/SMH staff that rejected their criticism and threatened to censor staff who had signed the letter of complaint. The editors who claimed Nine’s coverage was “thorough, fair and balanced” (see #1) were the same editors who had taken these trips, and whose papers produced no original reporting on Hind Rajab.
News Corp journalists are the main recipients of these trips to Israel.
“8. Trust Australian journalists of Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and Jewish backgrounds to do their jobs.”
The four senior editors at Age/SMH that gagged/sidelined/censured their journalist signatories had been on expenses-paid trips to Israel. The lobby funding those trips also employs intimidation against journalists who deviate from the prevailing editorial line.
By July 2024, four signatories of the open letter — Najma Sambul, Abbir Dib, Max Walden, and the long-standing Miki Perkins — had left Nine’s mastheads following the Network’s “heavy-handed response”. At least two were Australian journalists of Arab or Muslim heritage. Their departures reduced newsroom diversity at a time it was greatly needed — which may be one reason that stories like Hind Rajab’s were omitted.
Killed twice: the Hind Rajab newspaper blackout case study
January, 2024
Two months after the petition, an Israeli tank killed six members of Hind Rajab’s family in Gaza on 29 January 2024, leaving the six-year-old as the only survivor. Subsequently, an ambulance gained permission from the Israeli army to aid Hind. When the ambulance arrived on the scene three hours later, an Israeli Merkava tank fired upon it with 120mm rounds, killing the paramedics and Hind Rajab. The case became a global touchstone, including the award-winning 2025 film The Voice of Hind Rajab.
February, 2024
On 10 February, the audio recording of Hind’s pleas for help was released through Al-Jazeera. Even before Hind’s body was found, #WhereIsHind was trending on social media. Remaining family members soon found the bodies of Hind and others. The story was reported by the BBC and Channel 4 in the UK, and Washington Post, CNN, NBC and Fox News in the US.
On 19 February, ABC’s Media Watch episode ‘Humanising war victims’ reported on Hind Rajab and on the silence of the other major news networks in Australia, in particular News Corp and the Nine Network.
The silence of these print media was confirmed by review of the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT). This review of reportage for the year 2024, across the major Australian legacy press, demonstrated zero reports on the death of Hind Rajab in the two major Australian newspaper organisations (News Corp, Nine Network).
Up to 19 February, this deeply human-interest story was mentioned in six reports in The Guardian Australia (on 30/1, 1/2, 2/2, 10/2, 11/2, 13/2), and once (on 12/2) in many regional papers (Advocate, Bendigo Advertiser, Border Mail, Canberra Times, Daily Advertiser, Illawarra Mercury, Newcastle Herald, The Standard) using the same singular AAP wire report. There was no report in the major print newspapers (Melbourne’s Age, Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Herald-Sun, Daily Telegraph, Courier Mail, Hobart Mercury, nor Adelaide’s Advertiser).
After February, 2024
After 19 February, the situation hardly changed during 2024, with The Guardian mentioning Hind’s name several times (on 30/4, 1/5, 9/5 & 10/10), while there was one regional News Corp newspaper report (Gold Coast Bulletin on the 1/5). Reports occurred in the electronic media, such as The Conversation (on 9/5, 5/12) and the ABC Australia (on 8/5, 16/5, 18/10).
In May 2024, the student occupation of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University was reported by some in Australia, with The Guardian Australia explaining why students renamed the hall “Hind’s Hall”. In contrast, News Corp and Nine newspapers did not mention it once while it was happening.
Hind’s name was amplified by Macklemore’s very powerful rap song and video-clip, ‘Hind’s Hall’, released on 6 May. ABC News noted it “got social media buzzing”.
On 8 May, The Australian mentioned Hind Rajab’s name once in a one-sentence passing mention, in the context of Macklemore’s protest song. Five days later, the masthead followed up with a hit-piece framing the song as antisemitic — without referencing Hind at all.
The editorial decisions from outlets such as News Corp and Nine News to consistently omit the story of Hind Rajab effectively helped to cover up murders committed by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). This story was omitted despite — or perhaps because — it was tragic and compelling, and because it may have drawn into question the Australian Government’s unwavering support for Israel.
On 7 March 2026, The Australian finally engaged with Hind Rajab’s story — through reviewing Kaouther Ben Hania’s film. Reviewer Nikki Gemmell’s four-star “Call of despair” called The Voice of Hind Rajab “propaganda, but also truth”, before complaining that “we only see one side here” and appealing for “similarly thoughtful, courageous docudrama one day from the Israeli side”. A film built around the verified emergency-call audio of a six-year-old killed by Israeli forces was framed by Australia’s only national broadsheet as a perspective requiring Israeli “balance”. Two years on, the petition’s first demand was still ignored — now in framing rather than blackout.
Conclusion
In November 2023, over 270 Australian journalists identified their industry’s failures in covering Palestine and called for change. This submission tests their demands against one story: the killing of six-year-old Hind Rajab, covered by mainstream media worldwide. News Corp and Nine newspapers produced no original reporting. The Australian managed one passing mention — in an entertainment piece, months after the killing — then, five days later, ran a hit-piece smearing the rapper whose song bore her name.
The title of ABC Media Watch’s investigation — Humanising War Victims — acknowledges that commercial coverage was not, in fact, humanising Palestinians. The blackout of the killing of Hind Rajab is an extreme expression of that failure: when a country’s largest newspapers systematically erase verified civilian killings from the public record, they are not merely failing to humanise; they are obscuring the crimes themselves, and manufacturing consent for genocide and apartheid in their audience.
This pattern was reproduced across two competing media groups, by editors who accepted lobby-funded trips to Israel, threatened staff who signed the petition, and dismissed documentation of bias as “simplistic and flawed”.
The silence about lobby-funded trips to Israel compromises journalistic integrity; the resulting silence about Hind Rajab betrayed our right to know that a six-year-old had been murdered.
Australia’s largest commercial newspapers failed on every one of the petition’s demands for truthfulness, scepticism, context, transparency, and trust. In doing so, they primed Australian audiences to consent to Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, and the Australian government’s support thereof.
Recommendations
The Special Rapporteur is urged to:
- Recognise that Australia’s largest newspapers obscure atrocity crimes against the Palestinian people — including the killing of children — through systematic editorial erasure, and that this erasure is a distinct mechanism of impunity;
- Call on Australia, as a State Party to the Genocide Convention, to investigate the editorial conduct documented above for complicity in genocide under Article III(e);
- Call on Australia to legislate statutory disclosure of foreign-government-funded and lobby-funded travel by journalists and editors, and to prohibit retaliation against media personnel who advocate compliance with international law.