Earlier this month, the UN announced it would add Israel to a blacklist of countries and organisations harming children in conflict zones.
To many, this is about seven months overdue.
One of the challenges of telling the truth about the effects of Israel’s war on Gaza has been the refusal by Israeli authorities to allow access to foreign journalists in.
This has meant the conflict has been heavily skewed in favour of an Israeli official narrative, designed to protect the framing of the violence as defensive, despite its continuity with a history of ethnic cleansing, and the huge level of harm to all forms of life and infrastructure.
Much has been said about the generational shift happening around attitudes to Palestine - a recent poll suggested a majority of Britain’s young people did not believe Israel should exist and that a majority of young people in the US sympathise more with Palestinians than they did with Israelis, with 34% saying that Hamas’s reasons for fighting were valid.
Today, the reality of an occupied Palestinian people’s need for self-determination and their national liberation struggle in the face of a brutal occupation has never been clearer to young people.
An AI-generated “All Eyes on Rafah” graphic was shared more than 44m times on Instagram, and pro-Palestine content is proliferating on TikTok, where activists claim there is less censorship than through US-owned Meta.
In newsrooms across the western world, journalists have cried through editorial meetings, hidden in toilets to scream and even been sacked for trying to confront the bias.
This is no longer about pitying wounded children - it is about holding Israel truly accountable for its crimes and giving voice to an occupied people’s call for freedom.
It’s about time the mainstream media caught up, or else they risk losing their remaining credibility to the TikTok brigade”
Opinion by Myriam François
