Hamas harvests civilian casualties. The media should never be complicit - opinion

There is a noble assumption at the heart of conflict journalism: that unflinching reporting of the horrors of war protects civilians and holds military power to account.

But conflict has changed, the information battlefield has changed, and now the way civilian casualties are being reported is actually creating a strategic incentive to produce them.

This is a phenomenon called civilian casualty harvesting: the deliberate exploitation of civilian deaths and suffering as a military and political resource. It is related to human shielding, but it is not the same thing. It is a cynical and grotesque abuse of conflict reporting.

Human shielding describes the use of civilians to protect military infrastructure. International humanitarian law prohibits it. The International Committee of the Red Cross defines human shielding as using the presence or movement of civilians to render military objectives immune from attack or to shield or impede military operations.

Civilian casualty harvesting begins where human shielding ends.

Its purpose is not merely to make an enemy reluctant to shoot. It is to create a situation in which either decision benefits the exploiting belligerent.

Do not attack the military target, and the combatants survive.

Attack it, and civilians die, and their deaths become ammunition in another theater of war: phone screens, newspaper front pages, cinema, TV, international institutions, and Western public opinion.

The civilian has become strategically valuable precisely because he can die.

The NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence has described the strategic logic of human shielding in Gaza in strikingly similar terms:

“On the other hand, if the IDF limits its use of military power in Gaza to avoid collateral damage, Hamas will be less vulnerable to Israeli attacks, and thereby able to protect its assets while continuing to fight.”

The horrific innovation Hamas has perfected is the cynical use of civilian casualties to manipulate the global information environment.

A civilian death can now travel around the world before anyone knows what was targeted, whether combatants were present, what precautions were taken, who the dead were, or sometimes even what caused the explosion.

The image arrives first, context limps along after, and journalism, with its noble instincts drawing it toward human suffering, is allowing itself to be recruited into this twisted harvesting of death.

At CAMERA, much of our work consists of restoring context missing from reporting on conflict in the Middle East. Where were the combatants? What was the objective? Why is only violence from one side active, while the other is painted in passive and reactionary terms? This phenomenon is not restricted to any one outlet.

Hamas has learned that its strategy will not be questioned, and that the catastrophic suffering it causes to its own people will be uncritically amplified by Western journalists, driving public and institutional antipathy against Israel. It has identified an incentive structure.

If hiding among civilians makes you safer, you hide among civilians.

If preventing civilians from leaving makes enemy attacks politically more costly, preventing them from leaving becomes useful.

And if civilian deaths reliably generate international condemnation of your opponent, while scrutiny of your own role in placing civilians at risk disappears from the story, then civilian death has acquired strategic value.

This is where journalists and media outlets need to examine their own conduct. The failure is tiny and yet catastrophic. The simple fact is that by refusing to clearly label the original human shielding strategy, they have created an unending appetite for civilian death. Hamas has no reason to protect civilians in Gaza when putting them deliberately in harm’s way is so successful in achieving their war objective to isolate Israel on the world stage.

The journalist didn’t kill the civilian. The image didn’t kill the civilian. But an incentive doesn’t require direct responsibility; it requires participation and, darker still, complicity.

Pressuring major outlets to acknowledge civilian casualty harvesting is not a hasbara (public diplomacy) issue. It is a reaction to the changed nature of conflict reporting in the era of the digital war. It is a campaign to prevent any civilian population from finding itself in the clutches of an authoritarian organization or government that realizes that civilians’ brutal deaths are more valuable to the war effort than their lives.

Crucially, acknowledgement would not ask journalists not to report on civilian deaths. The noble purpose remains the same. Report the deaths, but report clearly who caused them. If the BBC, for example, employed a simple formulation every time civilians died in Gaza because of Hamas strategy, “Hamas routinely embeds in civilian areas for strategic reasons,” it could, in nine words, strike a hammer blow to the incentive structure. If Hamas were being held to account for this horrific tactic, how long would the tactic remain useful?

The idea that being careful about context somehow diminishes compassion is backward and must be abandoned. The truth is more protective than ever. The media must fully commit to it, not just for the sake of Palestinians in Gaza, but for all of us.