Who will stand up for France’s aristocrats?

When it was recently announced that 40,000 people, the great majority civilians, have been killed in the Gaza conflict, I checked the media coverage. Almost all – Sky, CNN, the Guardian etc – correctly reported that the figure came from the Hamas health ministry. All, however, implied acceptance of the figure’s accuracy by the prominence they gave it (except for the Guardian, preposterously plus royaliste que le roi, which said the Hamas figure ‘does not tell the full story of Palestinian losses’). The classic example was the BBC. The story led the six o’clock news on Radio 4, the serious programme with the bongs of Big Ben, always considered the gold standard. Because of its statutory duty of impartiality, it then proceeded in effect to knock down its own story, pointing out that the figure could not be independently verified. Splashing with the Hamas claim is fake news because the truth is simply not knowable at this stage. Even if it were, Hamas would not reveal it unless it favoured their cause. Israel gives no figure for deaths because it says it has no accurate means of counting, a statement which has the merit of being true. In propaganda terms, though, big headlines are the main thing, and the big headlines trumpet the deaths and omit the caveat. Perhaps no comparison works, but it seems worth noting that the OHCHR estimate of civilians killed in the Ukraine war is 11,520. That figure covers 30 months rather than the ten months of Gaza, and it refers to a conflict in which the Russian aggressor often deliberately targets civilians. In Gaza, the entity which deliberately puts civilians in harm’s way is Hamas.