What does RNZ 'abiding by its own editorial standards' really amount to in practice? In March of this year one of New Zealand’s major public broadcasters - Radio New Zealand (RNZ) - released the findings of an independent review of its digital and broadcast output over the 9 months following the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023.

This article was first published at When Life Comes Crashing In and is syndicated here with permission of the author

After reviewing all the on-air complaints, and RNZ’s replies, Colin Feslier, a former RNZ editorial policy manager and government spin doctor commissioned to write the report, claimed that he was “unable to find anything that indicated a systemic problem in meeting the standards or any general variation from accepted news gathering and reporting.”

Given the fact RNZ had been found to be “abiding by its own editorial policy as well as the standards and principles of the Media Council and the Broadcasting Standards Authority watchdogs” - I thought it would be interesting to track how the broadcaster dealt with one of the biggest stories to have come out of Gaza over the last several months - the IDF attack on a convoy of Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) ambulances, a UN car and a fire truck from Gaza's Civil Defence. This story broke in Western mainstream media on April 1 and attracted widespread attention, condemnation and, of course, the usual denials from Israeli spokespeople.

I checked Radio New Zealand’s website when the story first broke on April 1 and then again on April 2 but there was no mention of it despite having been covered by most of the major Western news media outlets including BBC, CNN, Sky News and - somewhat more belatedly - the New York Times. It had also been reported by the three major wire services AP, AFP and Reuters - all of which are relied on heavily by New Zealand media outlets, including RNZ. The story had also been featured on the websites of two other New Zealand outlets - One News and Stuff - both of whom ran a detailed report by Associated Press on April 1st. It had not, at that point in time, been covered by the New Zealand Herald.

First Appearance of the PRCS Story on RNZ - 5.11am, April 3

On the morning of April 3, in it’s early morning show First-up, RNZ finally gave some attention to the story during a regular slot with one of its Middle East correspondents - Alex Baird, who is based in Doha. The headline accompanying this interview acknowledged that the killings were - as Baird pointed out in the interview - executions.

Here is the transcript of the relevant section of this interview:

Yeah, so this is a pretty awful story. A very shallow grave was discovered and in it there were the bodies of 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers and one United Nations worker. The allegation is that they were killed by Israeli forces - there is no-one else who would kill Palestinian paramedics. And it’s not just that - once these bodies were found in this shallow grave 9 days ago they were found … many with their hands or legs tied & they had gunshot wounds to either their head or their chests. And so this is very much looking like a potentially very serious war crime because it looks like summary executions and not of fighters, of Hamas, but of people who were going to save those crushed and badly injured in Israeli strikes. But as we have seen here allegations of war crimes very much have come to very little when the Israelis are involved. We have several cases at the International Court of Justice & Criminal Court but again we are seeing yet another serious war crime potentially in the Gaza Strip.

Alex Baird did not pull his punches in this report, pointing out that the incident was “very much looking like a potentially very serious war crime” and also noting that allegations of war crimes have “come to very little when the Israelis are involved”. Unfortunately, however, host, Nathan Rarere, chose not to pursue the topic any further and moved on to asking Baird about US carrier groups being sent to Yemen.

And, just as an aside, when I went to re-listen to this section of First-up in Podcast form several days later the caption had changed from: “Israel continues operations in Gaza with accusations of execution-style killings and mass land grabs”, to the much less eye-catching, and also less accurate (given the actual contents of the interview) caption: “Our Middle East correspondent has the latest from Gaza where Israel is seizing ‘large areas; of land and ordering residents to leave”.

First Appearance of the PRCS Story on RNZ in Written Form - 8.11pm, April 4

The first article to be featured on RNZ’s website about what was, as Baird pointed out, obviously a war crime didn’t appear until 8.11pm the following evening, April 4 - a short piece from AFP headlined Deadly fire on Gaza ambulances possible Israeli ‘war crimes’, UN official says. This was four days after the story first broke in Western media. It was also the same day the New York Times broke the story about the video found on the phone of one of the slain aid workers - a video which contradicted Israel’s initial account of the incident.

The body of this AFP article focused mainly on accounts of the incident from the UN and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) though it did note - twice - that Israel “claimed it was an attack on terrorists” and reported that Israel would be launching an investigation into the incident.

Given the majority of people don’t read beyond the headlines, the choice of headline and the choice of photo is crucial. Given the horrifying nature of what Israel was accused of - an ambush and then a cold-blooded massacre of aid workers - the headline was fairly anodyne. It avoided highly emotive words like ‘executions’, ‘massacre’ or ‘mass grave’ and it made sure the reader knew that the war crime was only ‘possible’ and that the accuser was an anonymous ‘UN official’.

The first paragraph was also very careful not to paint Israel in a negative light.

The death of 15 medics and humanitarian workers in Gaza, after shots were fired at their ambulances, raises further concerns of "war crimes by the Israeli army", claims the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“The death of 15 medics … after shots were fired” is a particularly mild way of describing what already, at that stage, was very obviously a calculated and deliberate massacre of Palestinian first responders and healthcare workers in the line of duty by the IDF. It would be very interesting to see how such an incident would have been reported if the Russian army had opened fire on paramedics in Ukraine but I guess we shall never know …

The photograph under the headline was of a hand holding an Israeli flag and was taken in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, on 8 October, 2023 - the day after the October 7 Hamas attacks. The use of this particular photograph1 - carrying as it does the symbolic weight of the grief and trauma felt by Israel and its supporters in response to Hamas’s attack on October 7 - to illustrate an article about ‘possible’ Israeli war crimes was, to put it mildly, an interesting choice by RNZ.

The NZ Herald used the same article from AFP when it too finally broke its silence on the matter earlier the same day - April 4. To its credit The Herald chose a more appropriate image to accompany the story - a photo from AFP (the same source the story published by both outlets came from). Why RNZ chose to go with the hand-holding-the-Israel-flag image rather than this one is, I guess, something that us biased and somewhat emotional media critics will never know.

Reportage of the PRCS Story by Western Media Prior to the Release of the Video

Up until April 4 - when a video recorded by one of the slain medics was released - via an anonymous UN official who gave it to the New York Times - this story was trending in the same direction as so many other stories about Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Many Western media outlets were ignoring it - including Radio New Zealand - and those that were reporting it were either fore-fronting, or at the very least, giving far too much credence to Israel’s account of the event.

Here is Jonathan Cooke pulling apart Israel’s attempts to hide what was quite obviously a war crime prior to the release of the video evidence which blew its cover story to smithereens.

as news of the atrocity started to appear on social media last week, and the mass grave was unearthed on Sunday, Israel was forced to concoct a cover story.
It claimed the convoy of five ambulances, a fire engine and a UN vehicle were “advancing suspiciously” towards Israeli soldiers. It also insinuated, without a shred of evidence, that the vehicles had been harbouring Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters.
Once again, we were supposed to accept not only an improbable Israeli claim, but an entirely nonsensical one. Why would Hamas fighters choose to become sitting ducks by hiding in the diminishing number of emergency vehicles still operating in Gaza?
Why would they approach an Israeli military position out in the open, where they were easy prey, rather than fighting their enemy from the shadows, like other guerrilla armies – using Gaza’s extensive concrete ruins and their underground tunnels as cover?
If the ambulance crews were killed in the middle of a firefight, why were some victims exhumed with their hands tied? How is it possible that they were all killed in a gun battle when the soldiers could be heard calling for the survivors to be zip-tied?
And if Israel was really the wronged party, why did it seek to hide the bodies and the crushed vehicles under sand?

Despite Israel’s lack of credibility due to a record of consistent lying throughout this genocide and the paper-thinness of their story regarding this particular incident, the Israeli version of events was nevertheless reported, with little comment or criticism, by all of the mainstream media that bothered to cover the story when it first broke in Western media on April 1.

The BBC - in its story titled US says law applies to 'all parties' in Gaza after Israel kills medics - made the interesting choice to lead with the United States’ take on the matter but I guess that’s not surprising given the lead reporter on this story was Tom Bateman, the BBC’s ‘State Department Correspondent’.

The US has said it expects "all parties on the ground" in Gaza to comply with international humanitarian law but declined to confirm whether it was carrying out its own assessment into the killing by the Israeli military of 15 people - paramedics, civil defence workers and a UN official.
Asked about the killings, state department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said: "Every single thing that happens in Gaza is happening because of Hamas."

After a few cursory lines about actual atrocity itself, as reported by the UN’s humanitarian agency, the article quickly moved on to providing readers with Israel’s version of events:

The Israeli military said its troops had fired on vehicles "advancing suspiciously" without headlights or emergency signals and that a Hamas operative and other militants were among those killed, but it did not offer any comment on the accounts of bodies being gathered up and buried in the sand.

Reuters, in their April 1 report also obediently regurgitated Israel’s version of events:

The Israeli military said on Monday that an inquiry had found that on March 23, troops opened fire on a group of vehicles that included ambulances and fire trucks when the vehicles approached a position without prior coordination and without headlights or emergency signals.
It said several militants belonging to Hamas and Islamic Jihad were killed.
"The IDF condemns the repeated use of civilian infrastructure by the terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip, including the use of medical facilities and ambulances for terrorist purposes," it said in a statement.

As did AP in their April 1 report

The Palestinian Red Crescent says the slain workers and their vehicles were clearly marked as medical and humanitarian personnel and accused Israeli troops of killing them “in cold blood.” The Israeli military says its troops opened fire on vehicles that approached them “suspiciously” without identification.

AP, however, to their credit, did provide a lot more information about the killings than the BBC did, and did express considerably more doubt about aspects of Israel’s account of the incident.

There were no articles featuring the original version of Israel’s story on RNZ’s website because the outlet didn’t bother to cover the story in written form at all when it first broke. My theory - and it’s just a theory which I cannot, of course, prove - is that RNZ, like many of its Western counterparts, was hoping this story would just go away so they wouldn’t have to bother reporting too much about it at all.

Two Examples of RNZ’s Prior Failures to Cover Important Stories from Gaza

I am suggesting this because RNZ does have quite some form when it comes to leaving important stories about Gaza by the roadside and hoping they get taken out with the morning trash. As far as I am aware Radio New Zealand has thus far failed to report on Israel’s use of the notorious Hannibal Directive2 despite this story having been broken on several separate occasions by Israeli media3 and being reported by many major Western media outlets - including ABC Australia, which was the first major mainstream outlet to report on the revelations. It is possible it may have been mentioned on air at some point but that no trace of it can be found in any of the captions accompanying the on air material on RNZ’s website .

Of course Radio New Zealand is by no means alone in failing to cover this story - after all neither the BBC nor the New York Times have covered it and neither have several other New Zealand media outlets including One News and Stuff (as far as I can ascertain). But the journalistic malfeasance of other outlets does not let Radio New Zealand off the hook.

*Image Source: Screenshot from Breakthrough News Post on Twitter / X following Yoav Gallant admitting in an interview on Israel’s Channel 12 that the Hannibal Directive was used on October 7*

RNZ’s failure to report on the Hannibal Directive revelations leaves it wide open to accusations of ‘propaganda by omission’ - particularly given the importance of the October 7 narrative - one repeated constantly by Western media, including RNZ - that what they call the ‘Israel-Hamas war’ was triggered by the October 7 Hamas attacks in which ‘Hamas seized 251 hostages and killed 1,200 people’. Israel’s admission that it invoked the Hannibal Directive on October 7 means, of course, that a considerable number of those people were killed not by Hamas but by Israel. To claim that these revelations are not important or newsworthy is - frankly - ludicrous so I would very much like RNZ to explain why it has failed to report on them.

Interestingly the Hannibal Directive revelations were referred to by one of the complaints dealt with by Feslier in his review of RNZ’s Gaza coverage but as journalist Mick Hall points out in his critique of this review

Feslier makes no mention of a failure to reference the Hannibal Directive, a significant omission that would have challenged long-running atrocity propaganda featured in RNZ content and in the wider media, which helped condition the public to be more receptive to Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ narrative pushed by Western governments.

Another major story that does not feature on RNZ’s website is the finding that Israel systemically uses sexual violence, including rape and sexual torture against the Palestinian people - as reported in a March 12 United Nations investigation - More than a Human Can Bear: Israel's systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since October 2023. Interestingly RNZ did run an article from AFP on March 14 which mentioned this UN investigation but that article focused solely on Israel’s targeting of reproductive healthcare facilities and failed to mention anything at all about Israel’s weaponisation of sexual abuse and gender-based violence despite this being a major focus of the report.

This would not be such an egregious oversight if RNZ had run another article which did focus on the systemic sexual abuse findings but, to the best of my knowledge, it has failed to do so. The AFP article seems to be the only article featured on RNZ’s website to mention this very important United Nations investigation. Again, RNZ may have covered the sexual abuse aspects of the investigation on air - on First-up, Morning Report or Checkpoint - but I could find no trace on their website of them having done so.

*Image Source: Screenshot of post by Special Rapporteur to the Occupied Territories - Francesca Albanese on Twitter / X*

It really is difficult to even begin to imagine why a news organisation - particularly one that has recently been found by an ‘independent report’ to be abiding so well by the standards of good journalism - would not view such a story as important. Systemic, weaponised sexual abuse against an entire population is definitely newsworthy and would, I am quite sure, have been duly reported by RNZ if such findings had been about almost any other country on the face of the earth apart from Israel. Imagine such a report being released by the UN about, say, Russia or China or Iran. Do you honestly think RNZ would have ignored the sexual violence aspects in that report - some of which were extremely graphic - and just concentrated on Russia / China / Iran’s targeting of reproductive health facilities? Of course not.

And just to put the icing on this very unpleasant cake, on the same day RNZ ran the AFP article which neglected to mention Israel’s systemic use of sexual violence it featured two articles on its website congratulating itself on how unbiased and balanced its journalism on Gaza was - RNZ’s Gaza Conflict Coverage Abided by its Editorial Policy Review and RNZ Review of Gaza Conflict Coverage Found no Policy Media Standards Breaches.

Given the fact that RNZ seemed so profoundly disinterested in these two crucially important stories - that Israel definitely killed a significant number of its own people on October 7 and that Israel systemically uses sexual violence against Palestinians - I suspect it is very likely that, despite their high levels of self-proclaimed journalistic integrity and their impeccable ‘balance’ in reporting on the Gaza genocide (which they still refuse to call a genocide), RNZ were hoping to give the Palestinian Red Crescent massacre story the same treatment - i.e., no treatment at all.

Video Evidence Emerges Contradicting Israel’s Account

But back to the matter at hand, Let’s take a look at the New York Times article that first broke the story of the video.

*Source: The New York Times - Annotated screenshot taken from the video*

The Times opened with this paragraph:

The U.N. has said Israel killed the workers. The video appears to contradict Israel’s version of events, which said the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously” without headlights or emergency signals.

Note how right out of the gate the Times is keen to provide at least some cover for Israel by telling readers that “the video appears to contradict Israel’s version of events”. This phrase has been repeated, in various forms, by most other Western mainstream media outlets. Of course, as should be obvious to anyone looking at this with their eyes open and their cortex switched on, the video does not ‘appear to contradict’ Israel’s account at all, it very obviously contradicts it. The video shows, incontrovertibly, that Israel was lying about the incident.

The main body of the New York Times piece, however, doesn’t attempt to pull its punches, and provides a detailed description of the contents of the video. It is noted that the convoy of ambulances and a fire truck were “clearly marked, with headlights and flashing lights turned on” and that the paramedics were all in uniform and obviously attending an incident. It also noted that the paramedic filming the whole thing is heard reciting the ‘shahada’ - the Muslim declaration of faith which people recite when facing death and that he says “Forgive me, mother. This is the path I chose — to help people,” and “Allahu akbar,” God is great.

It’s very difficult to deny at this point that Israel has committed a war crime, and it is equally difficult to deny that they lied in order to cover up that war crime. These two facts were acknowledged by, of all people, Barak Ravid in two posts on Twitter/X early morning NZ time on April 6. Ravid is an Israeli journalist who has worked for Israel’s Channel 13 News and has served as an intelligence officer in the IDF’s Unit 8200 and who now writes for English-language outlet Axios about Israeli politics.

A little later, at 4.25am NZ time, Ravid posted this:

Western Media’s Handling of the Video Revelations: Some Examples

That Barak Ravid has come to such a conclusion is highly significant but sadly major outlets like the BBC, Sky News and the New York Times still don’t seem to have reached Ravid’s ‘breaking point’. Despite the video evidence showing that Israel definitely committed a war crime and that it definitely lied in order to cover up that war crime, these outlets are still taking Israel’s claims about this incident seriously and fore fronting Israeli perspectives on the event.

Here is a screenshot of a recent effort by the New York Times to whitewash Israeli crimes - the article is a behind a paywall but you can access it here if you are a subscriber.

The New York Times admits that Israel had ‘previously asserted’ that workers had been “advancing suspiciously’ towards Israeli troops and then notes that the video obtained by the New York Times “appeared to contradict that account”.

Of course, as I’ve already noted above, for those of us not sipping on the Zionist Koolaid or doing service as propagandists for empire the video did not just appear to contradict the Israeli account, it blew the Israeli account out of the water. It proved, in no uncertain terms, that the Israeli account was a shameless lie.

The BBC’s effort to launder Israeli crimes is not behind a paywall so we can have a look at that in more detail.

It opens with this banger:

Israel's army has admitted its soldiers made mistakes over the killing of 15 emergency workers in southern Gaza on 23 March – but says some of them were linked to Hamas.

The reporter - Dan Johnson (based, of course, in Jerusalem) then describes the harrowing video footage, including the last prayers of the phone’s owner as he faces certain death.

Moving quickly along, Johnson then repeats Israel’s original story - the vehicles were ‘advancing suspiciously’ and some of those killed were ‘Hamas fighters’ and then, entirely without comment or criticism, Johnson runs Israel’s attempts to absolve itself of any wrongdoing in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary. Here is this section in full - emphasis mine to highlight where Johnson fails to question Israel’s claims:

An Israel Defense Forces (IDF) official briefed journalists on Saturday evening, saying the soldiers had earlier fired on a car containing three Hamas members.
When the ambulances responded and approached the area, aerial surveillance monitors informed the soldiers on the ground of the convoy "advancing suspiciously".
When the ambulances stopped beside the Hamas car, the soldiers assumed they were under threat and opened fire, despite no evidence any of the emergency team was armed.
Israel has admitted its earlier account claiming the vehicles approached without lights was inaccurate, attributing the report to the troops involved.
The video footage shows the vehicles were clearly marked and the paramedics wore reflective hi-vis uniform.
The soldiers buried the bodies of the 15 dead workers in sand to protect them from wild animals, the official said, claiming the vehicles were moved and buried the following day to clear the road.

Note how accepting Dan Johnson is of Israel’s claim that there were “3 Hamas members” in the car. Note too, how Israel neatly passes the blame for the ‘mistake’ - that the vehicle was approaching without lights - onto the troops involved and how Dan Johnson accepts this without any comment. Finally, note that Dan Johnson reports, again with no comment or criticism, Israel’s story that the troops buried the bodies of the 15 dead workers in the sand to ‘protect them from wild animals’ and that the cars were buried to ‘clear the road’.

Taken within the context of Israel’s general ‘kill everything that moves and leave them to die’ approach in Gaza - an approach which has been openly admitted to by numerous sources within the IDF since October 7, 2023, the idea that Israeli soldiers would take the time to bury the bodies of the 15 paramedics they ‘mistakenly’ shot to save them from wild animals is, frankly, ludicrous. That Dan Johnston could report this obvious lie without any caveats takes this particular piece of journalism beyond malpractice and into the realm of journalistic malfeasance.

And just to underline how much care Israel takes with dead bodies in Gaza, in an investigation published in Haaretz in December of last year IDF soldiers and veterans described a “kill zone” in the Netzarim corridor in the heart of Gaza, where troops were ordered to shoot “anyone who enters.”

“The forces in the field call it ‘the line of dead bodies,'” one commander said. “After shootings, bodies are not collected, attracting packs of dogs who come to eat them. In Gaza, people know that wherever you see these dogs, that’s where you must not go.”

There was also a report from Sky News which tells a very similar story to the BBC’s - and repeats all the same claims from Israel with little comment or criticism.

As Ricky Hale notes in this post from Twitter/X - this kind of reporting is not journalism - it’s reputation management. It’s essentially nothing more than running PR cover for Israel.

RNZ’s Handling of the Video Revelations

The first article by RNZ following the release of the video - from CNN - Video casts doubt on Israeli account of emergency worker killings in Gaza - was posted on the RNZ website on April 6. In common with most Western media post-video reports it notes that the video ‘casts doubts’ on the original Israeli account and also that the footage “appears to contradict” Israel’s story about the vehicles “moving suspiciously”, not being marked and not having any lights on.

It earnestly informs us that the Israeli military is planning to “thoroughly and deeply” examine all the claims and documentation circulating about the incident. Remarkably this statement is allowed to pass with no comment or caveat, despite the fact that time and again these ‘deep and thorough’ investigations either do not happen at all or they result in Israel finding itself not guilty of any wrong-doing

This article also repeated Israel’s original claim - made prior to the video’s release - that it had “eliminated a Hamas military operative who took part in the 7 October massacre, along with eight other terrorists from Hamas and the Islamic Jihad." The report did note, however, that Israel offered no proof of the identity of the ‘alleged terrorists’.

Finally, the article also noted, without comment or caveat, the Israeli military’s claim that Israeli forces “buried the bodies of the workers, because they expected it would take time to coordinate their retrieval, with the PRCS and the United Nations”. The report neglected to explain why these forces also buried the ambulances.

As I have already noted above, to report this obvious lie without any comment is beyond journalistic malpractice. So much for RNZ “abiding by its own editorial policy as well as the standards and principles of the Media Council and the Broadcasting Standards Authority watchdogs” - or perhaps at this stage of the game we should realise that this sort of disgraceful reporting actually does represent ‘abiding by its own editorial policy’ when it comes to the Gaza genocide?

Surprisingly, given RNZ’s total lack of interest in this story when it first broke, the outlet then rushed to file another story about the incident the very next day - April 7. Perhaps this was an attempt to make up for their tardiness in covering the story when it first broke? Or perhaps it was because while the first story they posted endeavoured not to make Israel look bad, this second story decided to go the whole hog and try to make Israel - the state just caught out in yet another lie about yet another war crime - look good.

This story - syndicated from Reuters - was headlined Israeli military changes initial account of Gaza aid worker killings

The picture caption included the now ubiquitous line that the video “cast doubt” on Israeli claims.

The first paragraph set the Israel-friendly tenor for the entire article (my emphasis):

The Israeli military has provided new details that changed its initial account of the killing of 15 emergency workers near the southern Gaza city of Rafah last month, but said investigators were still examining the evidence.

This introduction gives the very strong impression that Israel decided - without any prompting - to ‘change its initial account’. The video which had prompted this ‘change’ is mentioned in the picture caption but it’s not mentioned in either the headline or the first paragraph. The first paragraph also notes that ‘investigators are still examining the evidence’. Again, given Israel’s appalling track record of either not investigating its own war crimes at all or of doing the kinds of ‘investigations’ that always result in its own exoneration, to report this without comment or caveat is, to put it mildly, not good journalism.

Because I don’t want to be here all day I won’t go paragraph by paragraph through the whole article. Suffice to say, there were 29 paragraphs in this Reuters article and 18 of them were devoted to Israel’s account of what had occurred - including their initial account prior to the video being released and their amended account following its release. Two paragraphs were also devoted to statements from Trump and the White House which essentially amounted to “The whole thing is all Hamas’ fault”.

Just to drive this home - around 70% of an article about an Israeli war crime that Israel has already been caught red-handed lying about is devoted to an Israel-friendly account of the matter. We’re left with only 9 paragraphs where either the UN or the Palestinian Red Crescent accounts of the matter were given any space. The contents of the video which necessitated this ‘change’ to Israel’s ‘initial account’ are only mentioned - very briefly - in the picture caption of this article.

The final section of this egregious piece of Israeli propaganda masquerading as journalism comprised 12 paragraphs and 11 of which were devoted to Israel’s account of the events as they unfolded.

I’ll cite this section in full, just to give you the general flavour of this article - featured by Radio New Zealand, that paragon of journalistic integrity - emphasising the points which were just reported verbatim with no comment or caveat:

The military official said initial findings from the investigation showed troops had opened fire on a vehicle at around 4am (local time), killing two members of the Hamas internal security forces, and taking another prisoner, who the official said had admitted under interrogation to being in Hamas.
As time passed, several vehicles passed along the road until, at around 6am, the official said troops received word from aerial surveillance that a suspicious group of vehicles was approaching.
"They feel this is another incident like what happened at 4am and they opened fire," the official said.
He said aerial surveillance footage showed the troops were at some distance when they opened fire, and he denied reports that the troops handcuffed at least some of the paramedics and shot them at close range.
"It's not from close. They opened fire from afar," he said. "There's no mistreatment of the people there."
He said the soldiers had approached the group they had shot, identifying at least some of them as militants. He did not explain what evidence had prompted the assessment.
"And in their eyes they had an encounter with terrorists, that is a successful encounter with terrorists."
He said the troops had informed the UN of the incident on the same day and initially covered the bodies with camouflage netting until they could be recovered.
"There was no incident where the IDF tried to cover up. On the contrary, they called the UN immediately." There was no immediate comment from UN officials.
Later, when the UN did not immediately come to take the bodies, the soldiers covered them with sand to stop animals from getting at them, the official said.
He said the vehicles were pushed out of the way by a heavy engineering vehicle to clear the road, but he could not explain why the vehicles were crushed by the engineering vehicle and then buried.
The United Nations confirmed last week that it had been informed of the location of the bodies but that access to the area was denied by Israel for several days. It said the bodies had been buried alongside their crushed vehicles - clearly marked ambulances, a fire truck and a UN car.

RNZ’s On-Air Treatment of the Video Revelations

Apart from these two reports - from CNN and Reuters - there have, thus far, been no more articles on Radio New Zealand’s website about the incident although, to be fair to the broadcaster, it has been discussed several times on air. On April 8 it was discussed twice - on RNZ’s flagship morning news show Morning Report and on the broadcaster’s drive-time news show Checkpoint. And on April 9 it was discussed on RNZ’s early morning news show First-up - a 5am show with Nathan Rarere.

On Morning Report co-host Alexa Cook spoke to Radio New Zealand’s Tel Aviv correspondent Trent Murray who explained that the IDF are now facing a big ‘please explain’. He mentioned that the IDF have released a statement saying that they are “now investigating the incident which took place in a combat zone” and that the investigation will be presented in a ”detailed and thorough manner”

Murray also noted that “a lot of scrutiny is now being focused on this incident” because not only were the medics killed but also the “justification from the IDF appears to be completely incorrect based on this video which was released”.

The correspondent makes no attempt to cover up the fact that Israel has been caught out in an obvious lie and that this lie makes it look even worse than it looked when the incident first came to light. The interviewer, to her credit, also takes the time to ask a follow-up question about the potential lack of independence of any reviews that the IDF might carry out, though she fails to mention what, at this stage in the game, should always be mentioned whenever the IDF talks about investigating itself - and that is that it very rarely finds itself guilty of any wrongdoing.

On Checkpoint that same day host Lisa Owens interviewed another of Radio New Zealand’s Middle East correspondents - Jacob Brown. Again, like Murray and Bair, Brown didn’t pull his punches, noting at one point that Israel had originally said:

they fired on these vehicles because they were advancing suspiciously - since then the mobile phone video footage has emerged and it shows the lead-up to this incident and it actually shows as a matter of fact that - the vehicles did have their emergency lights on and were responding to wounded people at the time. When these ambulances stopped the Israeli military said its soldiers nearby assumed this was some sort of threat so they opened fire without having any evidence at that stage the emergency teams were armed, and it has since admitted, the Israeli military that is, that these workers were unarmed & while it claimed some of them were linked to Hamas it has provided zero evidence to back that up.

He also mentioned that “the IDF is now admitting it did make mistakes and said that it will be conducting a thorough examination of this incident”. Unfortunately, however, our intrepid host asked no follow-up questions of Brown, despite the fact there were many questions that could have been asked. Instead - ears perking up with excitement at the mention of one Western journalism’s very favourite bogeymen ‘Hamas!!!’ - she, somewhat clumsily, moved the discussion on to far more comfortable territory.

You mention Hamas, Hamas has launched one of its biggest attacks on Israel in recent months. What are the details?

Firstly, let’s be clear about the actual magnitude of this attack - of the 12 rockets launched by Hamas 11 were intercepted and only one actually landed, causing minimal damage and killing no-one. Lisa Owens, however, obviously thought her time with RNZ’s Middle East correspondent was better spent discussing this ineffectual attack rather than exploring the implications of what this correspondent had just told her - that Israel has been caught out, pants down to its ankles, in a blatant lie, a lie which was quite obviously told to prevent being accused, and very possibly found guilty of, a grave war crime.

On First-up the next morning (April 9) host Nathan Rarere announced in the introduction to the show that the Red Crescent aid group is calling for an inquiry into Israel's killing of paramedics in Gaza and that they will be talking about this with their Middle East correspondent Alex Baird.

The interview with Baird begins with a brief discussion of Netanyahu’s meeting with Trump. He also mentions Netanyahu’s visit to Hungary and the fact his plane had to take a long and winding route to get from Hungary to the United States in order to avoid the airspace of countries that threatened to implement the ICC criminal warrant. The interviewer then moved on to the Palestinian Red Crescent story. I will quote the interchange in full here:

Nathan R: Meanwhile, Israel has admitted to killing 15 Palestinian medics will this admission change anything?
Alex B: I hate to say Nathan, no … Basically just to remind people - we had a mass grave which was discovered just over a week ago which had the bodies of 15 paramedics, also one UN worker, and also there was an ambulance buried in this mass grave as well. Israelis had claimed they hadn’t executed anyone or anything like that. We’ve had this mobile phone footage released by the Red Crescent - they found on one of these bodies the cellphone footage which clearly shows an ambulance convoy with the ambulance lights going, and its very clear that they were ambushed, that all of the paramedics were shot with the intent to kill. Another ambulance which came to the scene - they were also shot they were also killed.
Unfortunately this is the way that Israel has operated since the beginning of the war on Gaza. We have had numerous, numerous allegations of war crimes. We’ve had cases go to these international courts and what comes of it? Absolutely nothing. And so sadly I think here once again you’re seeing something that has outraged the international community. Israel originally said, oh no, no, no, this isn’t how we operated but then once this phone footage came out Israel said ‘Oh, yep, actually we’re going to change our story now’. But once again, these things come out in the open and once again, nothing happens.
Nathan R: One of the stories I saw and it just boggled my mind, knowing the news cycle as I’ve grown up with it in my life … Iran and the U.S. are to hold direct talks over a possible nuclear deal - what’s Donald Trump said about that?

Once again, Alex Baird doesn’t pull any punches in his reporting of either the incident or of Israel’s response to it. He also doesn’t try to hide the fact that this was very likely a war crime.

Instead of questioning Baird further, however, host Nathan Rarere decides to abruptly change the topic despite not even having asked Baird about the issue he had promised to cover at the top of the bulletin - the Palestinian Red Crescent’s call for an enquiry into Israel’s killing of the aid workers.

I concede that RNZ’s on-air efforts on this story have been considerably better than their written efforts - perhaps due to the fact that they talk to correspondents in the Middle East who seem a lot less shy about calling a spade a spade where Israel is concerned than whoever makes decisions about what articles will be featured on RNZ’s website. The quality of the reportage from these correspondents is, however, not matched by those interviewing them. The lack of follow-up questions and the abrupt change of topic by both Lisa Owens and Nathan Rarere strongly suggested both these ‘journalists’ were, at the very least, not in the slightest bit interested in exploring the very important implications of what their correspondents were telling them about the behaviour of IDF and of the state of Israel.

This - as far as I can ascertain - was the last time the incident has been mentioned on RNZ to date, either in written or audio form. To be fair to the broadcaster most other mainstream Western media outlets seem to have washed their hands of the story now too. The only two outlets where I could find any mention of it over the last couple of days were the BBC - which featured an article published on April 11 focusing on the pain of the mother of Rifaat Radwan - the paramedic whose video of the event ‘appeared to contradict’ Israel’s story and an article on Australia’s ABC which featured an interview with an Australian educator, Sam Muamar, who was a relative of one of the slain paramedics.

Concluding Comments

It should be fairly obvious at this point that RNZ’s approach to the PRC story does not exactly cover the outlet in glory. When this important story - a story which strongly suggested that Israel had committed a grave war crime - first broke across Western media it took RNZ three days to even mention it - and then only in a brief report on their 5am show First-up. It then took the outlet another full day to provide any coverage of the incident in written form - a very short article from AFP. While the article did provide coverage of accounts of the attack from the perspectives of the UN and the PRCS the headline was anodyne and the accompanying photo - of a hand holding an Israeli flag, taken at the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC the day after the October 7 attacks - seemed calculated to evoke sympathy for Israel rather than for the slain Palestinians at the heart of this story.

Once the video blowing Israel’s account of the incident out of the water was released RNZ released two stories in quick succession. As I’ve already noted, the first story - from CNN - endeavoured not to make Israel look too bad while the second story - from Reuters - went balls to the wall to try and make Israel - a state caught out committing war crimes and lying about it - look good.

RNZ also featured the story four times on air - once on First-up prior to the video revelations and three times - On Morning Report, Checkpoint and First-up again - after the video was released. The three Middle East correspondents who were interviewed by the hosts of these programmes were all quite frank about the horror of what had happened and the fact that it was pretty clearly a war crime. They were also upfront about the fact that Israel would most likely not be held accountable. The hosts of First-up and Checkpoint, however, seemed to have little interest in pursuing the story - both of them made no effort to ask important follow-up questions and both of them very abruptly changed the subject to issues that - particularly in the case of Checkpoint - were not even in the same ballpark in terms of either newsworthiness or significance.

If RNZ treats too many of its other stories about Gaza in the same way it treated this one - ignoring it until it became too big to ignore and then running articles that endeavour to paint Israel in as flattering light as possible and making little effort to ask follow up questions of on-air correspondents - this is, to say the very least, concerning. While such an approach might be seen to be meeting RNZ’s ‘editorial standards’ - whatever they might be - it is definitely not meeting what I suggest should be our most basic expectation of a functioning media - providing the public with enough clear, accurate and unbiased information about an issue to enable them to come to an informed understanding of it and - perhaps most importantly - to enable them to hold those in power to account for any wrong-doing.

The approach taken by RNZ to its Gaza journalism would be worrying no matter what the issue was but when the issue is genocide - and there is now a pretty firm consensus amongst human rights organisations and genocide scholars that what Israel is doing in Gaza is, indeed, a genocide, it moves well beyond worrying and starts to look very much like complicity.

As journalist Karishma Patel, who resigned from the BBC due to concerns with the broadcaster’s biased coverage of Gaza, pointed out in a recent interview with Ashfaaq Carim, the way in which Western media took Israel’s claims about Al Shifa Hospital on faith

means that Israel goes into that hospital and kills people. That's the cost of all of these news organizations refusing to fully and properly interrogate all of those Israeli claims.

And not only, of course, did Israel go into that particular hospital and kill people, it then proceeded to go into almost every other hospital in the Gaza Strip and do exactly the same thing. Because Western media - including Radio New Zealand for all its protestations of wide-eyed innocence - always takes Israeli claims as gospel and consistently ignores or attempts to obfuscate Israeli crimes, this means that Israel will then go on to commit more crimes because they know they will get away with them.

If the media do not do the job of holding Israel to account for the killing of these aid workers - and the silence that has fallen about the subject across Western media suggests they will not - this is not just a serious journalistic failure, it is a profound moral failure and one that will directly result in more war crimes and more deaths. If the media do not loudly and consistently hold Israel to account then Israel will know that it can massacre aid workers in broad daylight, bury them in a shallow grave, and lie about it and nothing will happen. It will know that, within a few days, the media - and the public - will just move on.

*Image Source: Twitter/X - Palestinian Red Crescent paramedic Rifaat Radwan*

If we are brutally honest with ourselves we all know that if Palestinian medic Rifaat Radwan had not pressed ‘record’ on his phone as his convoy approached the scene they had been called to attend Western media would not have given even the cursory - and fleeting - attention it has thus far given to this latest in a long line of Israel war crimes.

In an article published in Middle East Eye on April 7 journalist Soumaya Ghannoushi wrote:

Even as his life drained away, Radwan bore witness. Bleeding to death amid a convoy of ambulances, he recorded the massacre. There were no journalists or international observers present. He understood that if he didn’t speak, the truth would die with him. So he spoke.
He knew what came next. Israel would kill, then lie. It would release another media statement to repackage murder as self-defence. He knew the pattern, but he refused to be erased. With his final breaths, he told the truth.
Radwan was gunned down and tossed in a pit, but his voice rose from the grave. His testimony survived the bullets, his story shattering the lie. He told the world what his killers tried to bury: that even mercy is now a crime. That to save a life in Gaza is to sign your own death warrant.
In doing so, he won. Israel did not get its silence. The mask slipped. The world cannot say “we didn’t know”.
Radwan rose - not only in spirit, but in defiance. He rose above fear, above propaganda, above death itself. In a world numbed by numbers, he restored humanity to the story.

If Rifaat Radwan, in the last terrible moments of his life, could break through the silence and tell the world the truth then surely those of us here in the West who know this truth can be brave enough to tell it too - in whatever way we able. Western media outlets may continue to obfuscate, whitewash and ignore Israel’s war crimes (and then absolve themselves of any wrongdoing in long-winded pompous reports wagging the finger at their critics for being ‘too emotional’) but we must continue to fight back, to bear witness, to hold them to account. If the lies, obfuscations and silence of Western media is one of the pillars holding up this genocide then we must force them to tell the truth, we must force them to break their silence.

If we can pull that pillar down then who knows, maybe the rest of the rotten edifice will come tumbling down after it.

Karyn Taylor-Moore is a recovering academic psychologist & a long-time leftist anti-imperialist from Ōtautahi

RNZ's Gaza Investigation vs Coverage of the Palestinian Red Crescent Massacre