“In foreign newspapers, particularly American ones, Israelis enjoy a competitive advantage reinforced by films and images. The word Palestine means nothing to that audience. For them, there is only the West Bank and Gaza,” says Joseph El-Khoury, a psychiatrist and executive director of Valens Clinics, describing today’s media landscape in covering the genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza, ongoing for more than two years. This linguistic siege has profound implications for how Palestinian identity is presented and framed.
This article draws on data collected and organised by the Anmat initiative through the “Framing Gaza” project, which aimed to uncover media narratives in the coverage of the war in Gaza during its first year (October 2023 – October 2024). The project analysed coverage data from five major American outlets, The New York Times, Associated Press, Fox News, The Washington Post, and CNN, to examine how much these outlets contributed to “stripping Palestine from Palestinians” by replacing their identity with geographical terms like “Gaza” or by otherwise erasing the words Palestine and Palestinians from their reporting.
Palestine: The Beginning of Linguistic Erasure
The British Mandate over Palestine ended in May 1948, when the Jewish Council declared the establishment of the State of Israel on Palestinian land. What followed was the Nakba, during which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced to neighboring countries like Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Those who remained were divided between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, while others became known as “the Arabs of ’48.” Debate continues about the label itself, but what is not disputed is that they are treated as less than second-class citizens under deliberate Israeli policies of marginalization and erasure.
From the very beginning of this systematic dispossession, linguistic strategies, intentional or not, were used to shape the political environment we see today. Language is rarely neutral, and if normalized, can be easily exploited alongside bombardment and blockade. Among the many examples, using the term “Gazans” to refer to Palestinians in Gaza can be weaponized to erase the fact that many of them are not originally from Gaza. It frames Gaza as a marginal, timeless, isolated space rather than an integral part of historic Palestine. Meanwhile, Israel, with continuous support from the United States, has consistently sought to strip Gaza of its viability and normalize the suffering of its people.
Another commonly used phrase is “the indigenous population” of Gaza, which implies a post-genocide phase where Gazans are reduced to an isolated, fenced-in group that has lost everything. Yet many Gazans alive today lived through the Nakba in 1948 and still remember their displacement. Israeli media also pushes the term “Arabs” when referring to Gazans, insisting they are just like others in the Arab region. This referral is used to strip them of their Palestinian identity, lumping the entire region into one monolithic, indistinguishable block. In both cases, Palestine disappears.
The New York Times: Avoiding the Word “Palestine”
On March 14, 2024, The Intercept published a leaked internal memo written by New York Times editors Susan Wessling and Philip Pan and their deputies. The memo instructed journalists to avoid using the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” to steer clear of the phrase “occupied territories,” and to use the word “Palestine” only in the rarest of cases.
If words shape awareness, removing them erases the symbolic spaces they carry. Dr. Dima Issa, Chair of the Media Department at the University of Balamand, explains that objectification through language is not new; language has long been used to create distance between the reader and the victim by avoiding the link between certain words and specific groups.
“The very idea of Palestine is systematically erased,” Issa says. “It is replaced with terms like Gaza. In this way, the narrative is reshaped as if Palestine doesn’t exist at all; this is a form of racist discourse. We’ve seen this in postcolonial literature, where colonisers erase history in order to rewrite a new beginning and control the narrative.”
Political propaganda gained prominence after the 17th and 18th centuries with the rise of slavery in the American colonies and its accompanying racist literature, which dehumanised Africans as childlike beings needing the guidance or punishment of their white masters. Yet the most focused study of propaganda as a tool of dehumanisation came after the Holocaust, which was preceded by decades of antisemitic stereotypes in the United States and Tsarist Russia. Such linguistic conditioning helped pave the way for genocide.
Today, the same approach peaks in propaganda that normalizes Israel’s existence while dehumanizing Palestinians, who are labelled as “animals.” Palestinians are erased through language, their identity reduced to a mere geographic reference,“Gaza.”
In the New York Times database, the word Palestine never appeared, showing strict adherence to the guidelines. The word Palestinian appeared only sparingly, mostly in cultural contexts,like “museum,” “art,” or “flag”, and rarely in political or humanitarian coverage. In response to The Intercept’s report, NYT spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said: “Issuing guidance like this to ensure accuracy, consistency, and nuance in how we cover the news is standard practice across all our reporting, including complex events like this. We take care to ensure our language choices are sensitive, current, and clear to our audiences.”
Fox News: Israel Dominates
While The New York Times’ avoidance of certain words reflected bias toward the Israeli narrative, Fox News accused the Times of bias in favor of Palestinians after it published a photo of a malnourished child in Gaza as evidence of famine. Fox claimed the photo was misleading because the child had a prior medical condition, accusing the Times of malpractice and insisting an apology wasn’t enough; the correction should have been placed in the headlines.
But when analyzing Fox’s coverage, the absence of bias that she accused her colleagues of could not be found. On the contrary, the database reveals a clear bias toward the Israeli narrative in Fox News’ reporting: the word “Palestine” appeared only three times (and only in connection with student protests), while “Israel” dominated the coverage, surfacing thousands of times more frequently.
As for the word “Palestinian,” it appeared at a relatively high frequency in the database—even slightly more often than the word “Israeli.” However, upon reviewing the context, it became clear that the references carried negative connotations. The most common pattern in which “Palestinian” appeared was in association with protests and vandalism. By contrast, the word “Israeli” was tied to the army, hospitals, and hostages.
Most notably, Fox emphasized “Hamas,” which appeared three times more often than “Gaza” in its headlines, usually in military contexts (command centers, airstrikes). Gaza was associated mainly with destruction and division.
Dr. Issa comments: “Western media use terms like Hamas, a term heavily loaded with meaning, often tied to terrorism in the West. The very concept of ‘terrorism’ is itself a Western construct, loaded with stereotypes. So, constant pairing of ‘Israel’ with ‘Hamas’ reinforces, at least linguistically, the idea of Hamas as a terrorist group.”
Fox’s style emphasizes audience engagement rather than deep reporting, a strategy not unique to coverage of Palestinians. A study published by the University of Texas Press described Fox as profit- and popularity-driven, relying on selective and often limited information that shapes viewers’ perceptions with misleading data.
Noam Chomsky has described this as the “manufacturing consent” process which points to when media shapes public opinion in ways that serve political and economic elites. Fox embodies this through its “manufactured reality,” designed to stir emotions and distract viewers with repetition and stereotypes, undermining critical thinking.
For Fox, preserving the strength of its brand takes precedence above all else. The network deliberately avoids any coverage that could threaten its image, even if that requires presenting a one-sided narrative and excluding other perspectives. As a channel closely tied to the Republican Party, it markets itself as a platform “for the people,” unafraid to deliver what it calls “harsh, unfiltered truths.” In reality, however, these so-called truths are framed within a discourse that claims to challenge the establishment while in fact reinforcing a clear political agenda.
This approach was especially evident in its coverage of the Covid-19 vaccine mandates, where the reporting was marked by exaggeration, sensationalism, and a selective presentation of facts—an editorial choice that served its ideological leanings and deepened its audience’s loyalty at the expense of balanced journalism.
CNN: “Truth” Is Only Israeli
Fox wasn’t alone in adopting the Israeli narrative. The Guardian reported that CNN staff complained about “institutional bias in favor of Israel,” which included restricting Palestinian quotes while treating Israeli government statements as unquestionable facts.
Data showed “Israeli” appeared 30 times more often than “Palestinian,” “Gaza” five times more, and “Hamas” three times more. Palestinians were frequently referred to as “Gazans,” while the word “Palestine” was entirely absent.
Lebanese-French philosophy professor Frank Darwish cautions against blind reliance on statistics, noting they highlight some things while obscuring others. He argues that part of today’s discourse stems from the absence of a recognized Palestinian state. “Journalists aren’t even sure how to use the term ‘Palestinians’, they’re everywhere: in the US, Lebanon, elsewhere. If they want to localize events, they default to ‘Gaza,’ because it defines a place more clearly for the reader,” he says.
CNN once helped shape global awareness; its real-time reporting birthed the “CNN effect,” where televised news influenced government decisions. But philosopher Jean Baudrillard, in his essays on the Gulf War, argued that CNN’s broadcasts turned war into spectacle: filtered images crafted a cinematic narrative that obscured the full horror on the ground.
The same pattern repeats in Gaza today: endless images flooding screens, creating the illusion of shared experience. But the visceral realities, burnt flesh, famine-ravaged bodies, suffocation under siege, remain beyond what cameras can capture, leaving Palestinians alone in their daily, bloody reality.
The Washington Post: Passive Voice Paradoxes
Foreign media usually name and describe perpetrators. Every article recalls “the terrorist attack carried out by Hamas on October 7, which killed 763 Israelis, including 38 children.” By contrast, the Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, faced criticism for its frequent use of the passive voice in covering Gaza. One article headlined: 60,000 Gaza residents killed, including 18,500 children.
Database analysis shows the Post, like the Times, avoided naming Palestinians directly. Unlike other outlets, Palestine appeared in its headlines 151 times, but this was minimal compared to the 315,630 word combinations in the dataset. By contrast, Gaza appeared 68,668 times, Israel 60,217, Israeli 23,224, while Palestinian appeared just 13,513 times.
The most common associations with the word “Gaza” are: “airstrike,” “administration,” “explosion,” “caused”… meaning the focus falls on direct conflict events such as bombings and explosions, with some references to administrative or investigative aspects. The same goes for the word “Israel,” which appears in contexts tied to international and regional politics. Meanwhile, “Palestine” shows up in coverage of student sit-ins, in constructions such as “sit-in,” “Free Palestine.”
Dima Issa explains: “When you create this binary division of ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ and use phrasing that suggests Palestinians are dying—almost as if randomly—without attributing responsibility to Israel, you are in effect erasing Israel’s image as a malicious force carrying out the killing. By simply omitting the killer’s name, you allow the idea of an unknown shadowy figure to emerge as the perpetrator, even though the reader implicitly knows who did it. But the act of not naming directly neutralizes the crime and reduces accountability for the killing.”
She further notes that “the constant return to October 7 means placing blame on the victim. This is a notion Teun A. van Dijk spoke about in his work on racism in journalism and news discourse, where he argues that the narrative frames the victim as having brought the killing upon themselves. This is common in Western media and in the broader Western narrative, which seeks to portray Israel as acting in ‘self-defense’ because of what happened on October 7, cementing it as the point of origin of violence, while erasing everything that came before.”
But what about the reader who has grown accustomed to consuming content that never holds the perpetrator accountable? When readers consume these kinds of narratives without questioning or challenging them, they implicitly—though unconsciously—help perpetuate the dominant narrative. In this way, they are not merely passive recipients; they become part of the feedback loop that grants media or political powers the legitimacy to keep producing the same kind of content.
Associated Press: Disowning Its Journalists!
On July 24, the AP News agency, in partnership with the BBC and Reuters, issued a press statement expressing concern over the starvation of journalists in Gaza—an unprecedented move at the time. But only a few months later, the agency disappointed its readers with this headline: “AP freelance journalist Mariam Daqqa killed in Israeli airstrike in Gaza.”
In that headline, the emphasis on Mariam’s status as a “freelance journalist” redraws the distance between the agency and the reporter. While the relationship between a journalist and their employer carries mutual duties and responsibilities, reducing her to the label “freelance” provides an opening for the agency to disown those responsibilities.
Joseph El-Khoury notes that this drawing of distance is not only linguistic but also reflected in Israeli military tactics. He explains: “The first military step is dehumanization. This appears in the way wars are fought today, where everything has become mechanical. Israeli soldiers don’t see the people they are killing. You see bombs falling and buildings collapsing. In the West, these images don’t resonate in the same way they would for someone in Lebanon. Empathy through memory must be sparked and activated.”
Even so, according to the database, Associated Press appeared closer than others to naming Palestinians directly. Although the word “Palestine” never appeared—not unlike The New York Times or CNN—the word “Palestinian” did: eight times more than “Israeli,” seven times more than “Gaza,” and twenty times more than “Hamas.”
We sent an email with the data attached to the outlets mentioned in the text. The only response came from Patrick Mack, AP’s head of media relations, who did not comment on the substance of the data. He simply said: “We are very proud of the essential work Mariam Daqqa did for the agency. We published a gallery of her photos, and you can view the death announcement here.”
