Australian Media Bias of the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Abstract

Australian coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict is lopsided, and not by accident. You’ll often hear that the legacy outlets lean pro-Palestinian. The record says otherwise. On the measures that matter, how carefully claims get checked, who gets quoted, which frames stick, the coverage tracks the Israeli government’s line. This essay starts with how unverified atrocity claims and viral hoaxes travelled through the press, then takes apart the habit of reading Palestinian national liberation as Islamic extremism. That second claim is easy to disprove: Palestinian Christians were central to the movement from the start. Set against what reporters later documented at places like the Sde Teiman detention camp, unverified Israeli claims got a very different reception, more prominent and less doubted. The numbers on story frequency, the language used for victims, the junkets that put Australian editors in Israel, and the way the antisemitism inquiries were covered all run the same way. Australian outlets aren’t just passing along foreign coverage. They’re reproducing a domestic consensus that keeps Israeli state narratives on top.

Report first, check later

Late on September 30, in the middle of rolling live coverage of a reported attack on a Dubai-Tel Aviv flight, Israel’s Channel 12 put a passenger on air. He described a plane pitching up and down, a cabin under “insane pressure”, and someone shouting “Allahu Akbar”. Nobody asked who he was. When asked who he was sitting with, he named his brother, “Nevo… it’s short for Nebuchadnezzar”. At that point, as the Jerusalem Post noted, “it became obvious that the caller was not an actual passenger on the plane.” By his friend’s account he was a hoaxer who phoned Channel 12’s researchers, cleared screening, and went to air “within minutes” as part of a pre-planned attempt to “troll media systems in Israel”. The friend said he’d warned Channel 14 first and called Channel 12’s performance “journalistic clownery”. The interview ended once the prank got too embarrassing to continue.¹

The hoaxer didn’t invent the claim. He caught it in the air. Within hours, Israel National News was quoting the same account as testimony: “There was a crew member who shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ran toward the pilot.” That sentence went straight to the headline, and the crew member was never identified.² By October 2, Nine’s Sydney Morning Herald and The Age had carried the frame into Australian feeds, hedging with scare quotes but keeping the claim up front: “‘Islamist radical’: Israel claims horror flight co-pilot shared hate online”.³ The copy was more careful than the headline. Six paragraphs in, it admitted that witness accounts varied, that other witnesses hadn’t made the claim, and that there were “no detailed accounts of anything the attacker said during the ordeal.” By October 5 the claim had hardened anyway: the co-pilot “told interrogators he planned last week’s attack before being hired”, sourced to “two Israeli officials”, anonymous, like the third source beneath them.⁴

Then the feeds filled with a face. A man in an aircraft aisle shouting “Allahu Akbar” and “death to America”, captioned as the flydubai co-pilot, got shared and re-shared as the face of the attack. It wasn’t him and it wasn’t the flight. The clip was fourteen months old, from an EasyJet service between Luton and Glasgow, and its subject was an Indian man named Abhay Nayak, who told a Scottish court he was protesting Donald Trump’s visit and whose family said he lived with schizophrenia. He faced no terrorism charge. The correction ran nowhere near the front of anyone’s feed. It took a week, and it came from Indian fact-checkers writing for Indian audiences, who graded it false.⁵ Worse, India Today reprinted the debunking next to its own refutation and set the needle to “Half True”, the second-highest mark on a four-point dial reading True, Half True, Mostly False, False. Wrong man, wrong flight, wrong year, and the machine still granted it half. The claim went out at full volume and the correction went out at half.⁶

I’m not opening with this because the attack was fiction. It wasn’t. The UAE’s prosecutor general called it a terrorist act, Oman had already grounded the co-pilot over extremism concerns, a captain was stabbed, and a plane did dive.⁷ I’m opening with it because of the joinery. Three unrelated things, a hoaxer’s improvisation, one witness’s recollection, and a year-old video of a different man on a different flight, got welded into a single usable image of an enemy, and the weld travelled faster than any of the three facts could undo it. Nine’s papers found room that week for at least half a dozen flydubai stories: the crash axe, the Omani ban, the Melbourne degree, the RMIT probe, the analysis of “rogue pilots”. A year’s reporting on Sde Teiman, and on documented torture in an Israeli military prison, found room for one wire brief.

None of this is a claim about what the co-pilot believed. It’s a claim about what the machine is built to do. What travelled in those two weeks wasn’t a fact but a shape: an unverified suspect, a religious signature pulled to the front, and an audience left to finish a thought nobody had to say out loud, that he shouted “Allahu Akbar”, and so hates Jews, and so supports the Palestinian cause, and so Palestine is radical Islam. Every step is insinuation rather than assertion, which is what makes it deniable and hard to stop. And it’s a stated objective. Netanyahu has pressed for the Palestinian struggle to be read as “radical Islam” rather than a national movement, and Likud’s rhetoric casts Israel as the wall holding back “Islamist barbarians” from Western civilisation.^{8 9} Australian outlets invented none of it. They reproduced it in their own ledes, faster than the facts could keep up. The flattening comes first. Everything downstream follows from it, so let’s pull the premise apart.

A Palestinian cause, not a Muslim one

Before the Australian record, one thing to clear up. Someone once suggested that Palestinian bake sales on a university campus were an insidious Islamic plot. Gaza is not a Muslim cause. It’s a Palestinian one, and “Palestinian” has never meant Muslim. Gaza’s Christian community is ancient and has been bombed and buried alongside its Muslim neighbours: the strike on the 1,000-year-old Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius in October 2023, which was sheltering hundreds of displaced families, killed civilians, among them relatives of the Christian Palestinian-American congressman Justin Amash.¹⁰ You can’t say “they hate us because of our God” about people who share our God, our liturgy, and the ground the church is built on. This isn’t a war on Islam. It’s a war on the living, Muslim, Christian, and everyone uncounted.

Palestinian Christians weren’t an afterthought to be “included”. They were woven through the resistance from its first breath. Christian-run papers, Najib Nassar’s al-Karmil (1908), Isa and Yusuf al-Isa’s Filastin (1911), Khalil Sakakini’s al-Dustur (1910), ran the earliest sustained anti-Zionist campaigns in Arabic, and Christian notables carried some of the first organised protests against Zionist immigration to the Ottoman authorities in 1891.^{11 12} So the claim that this is an Islamic struggle has to survive a harder fact: the people who built its armed and political wings were often Christian. George Habash (Greek Orthodox) founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Wadie Haddad ran its operations;¹³ Nayef Hawatmeh founded the Democratic Front; Ghassan Kanafani was the movement’s most celebrated writer and a PFLP spokesman until his death by a car bombing in 1972; Kamal Nasser was a leading PLO voice until he was assassinated in 1973; and Archbishop Hilarion Capucci went to an Israeli prison for smuggling arms to the PLO.¹⁴ Hanan Ashrawi, Edward Said, and George Antonius were all Christian Palestinians who shaped how the cause was argued to the world.

This is about structure, not sentiment. The PLO was founded in 1964 and remade in 1968 as a secular national-liberation movement; its covenant speaks of a Palestinian Arab nation, not an umma. Its dominant factions, Fatah, the PFLP, the DFLP, the Communist Party, were nationalist or Marxist, not confessional. Where Palestinian Christians have spoken as Christians, they haven’t preached quietism: the 2009 Kairos Palestine document, written by Palestinian church leaders, names the occupation a sin and calls for its end. Sumud, steadfastness, is a discipline Muslims and Christians share; Bethlehem’s Arab Educational Institute taught it for a decade as common civic education.^{15 16} The occupation has grasped this. It has bombed churches as well as mosques and depopulated Christian villages (Iqrit, Kafr Bir’im) alongside Muslim ones.¹⁷

None of this requires pretending Hamas isn’t Islamist. It is, and it says so in writing. The 2017 document dropped the old covenant’s antisemitism. But the same text calls the movement “a Palestinian Islamic national liberation and resistance movement” whose “frame of reference is Islam”, and describes Palestine as “the spirit of the Ummah”.¹⁸ Concede every word, because the frame needs the concession to work. It takes one Islamist party and lets it stand in for an entire society. Hamas is one faction of a national movement, no more the Palestinians than the ultranationalist settler movement anchoring Netanyahu’s coalition is ‘the Jewish people’. Once the party and the people are treated as the same thing, “radical Islam” describes a population rather than an adversary, and everything done to that population is done under a license the description created. This is a national cause, in which the cross and the crescent have marched together and been buried together. That “Palestinian” means “Muslim” was never evidence in the record. It was the assumption some people brought to it.

Media Bias in Australia: the “40 Beheaded Babies” story

On 10–11 October 2023, Israeli officials claimed “40 babies beheaded”, and the Australian press ran it with no laundering required. The Australian reported it as flat fact: “Forty babies and children murdered and beheaded by Hamas terrorists in Israeli kibbutz Kfar Aza”,¹⁹ alongside a video asserting Israeli forces had “discovered the bodies of 40 babies murdered by Hamas”.²⁰ The West Australian turned its live blog into a single breathless sentence: “Hamas shot boys and girls in head, raped women, burnt elderly alive, beheaded soldiers”.²¹ Nine’s Sydney Morning Herald and The Age ran images of “slain children” under the title “Simply depravity”.²²

The chain of custody went like this. Israeli officials claimed it. Soldiers told i24. No outlet could confirm the specifics. The IDF declined to confirm the beheaded babies on October 11.²³ Snopes reported that evening that no photographs supported “40 babies beheaded”.²⁴ The White House walked back Biden’s “I saw photographs” on October 12, which Nine’s papers covered by wire, deep inside the paper.²⁵ Wikipedia’s consolidated account, citing Haaretz’s December 2023 investigation, lists the saga alongside the archetypal atrocity hoaxes: the Nayirah testimony of 1991, the “41 children” of Vukovar. Real wars, laundered numbers, useful pretexts.²⁶ Outlets from Spain to the US debunked the claim within days.^{27 28}

Asymmetric Reporting

On 23 November 2023, 270 Australian journalists signed the MEAA’s open letter asking their editors for one thing: “The same standard of skepticism applied to Hamas’s claims must be applied to Israeli authorities.” They noted that claims about Hamas, like the “mass beheading of babies”, repeatedly turned out to be fabricated or exaggerated, while a very different standard applied to the other side.²⁹ The letter went unanswered. The record answered for it.

Ask Australia’s outlets today what they published about Sde Teiman, the Israeli military detention camp where, by 2024, the UN human rights office said thousands of Palestinians were detained and mistreated;³⁰ where CNN published photos of a prisoner strapped to a bed in a diaper;³¹ where the UN’s own torture rapporteur found “reasonable grounds to believe” torture.³² In July 2024, a Palestinian detainee was allegedly gang-raped there, reservists stormed two military bases to protect the suspects, and Israeli media aired the abuse on camera.^{33 34 35} Five reservists were later indicted. By October 2024, not one Australian mainstream outlet had put it on a front page, and searches of Nine’s Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, both for this research and conducted by others, returned effectively nothing.³⁶ The one mention I can find in Nine’s papers in that period is a 31 July 2024 wire brief on the rape allegation.³⁷ The ABC published nothing about the camp. In the same months, it ran its radio presenters live from Jerusalem.³⁸

Compare the other ledger. In May 2026 the ABC ran the assertion flat and unqualified: “Hamas systematically used rape on October 7, report says”.³⁹ Two and a half years after “systematic” first leaked from the Israeli state’s narrative into the western press, and on the authority of a “report” the headline doesn’t name. On October 7, the attribution is a paragraph below. On genocide, the attribution never comes.

Nine’s papers covered the UN’s “reasonable grounds” finding on Hamas sexual violence within days, and the Sydney Morning Herald amplified Joe Biden’s “unimaginable cruelty” while the underlying intel was still being gathered largely from witness testimony without forensic access.⁴⁰ The New York Times’ “Screams Without Words”, syndicated and discussed around the Western world, was later subjected to its own internal review after its principal sourcing fell apart.⁴¹

Make the Enemy Into the Devil You Already Know

“Hamas is ISIS” wasn’t a description. It was a strategy, used by Netanyahu, Biden, Blinken and Austin to drag the Gaza war inside the emotional playbook of the war on terror.⁴² Netanyahu had made the same equation to Ban Ki-moon a decade earlier.⁴³ Australian media performed the translation with enthusiasm: a submission by Free Palestine Melbourne counts at least 40 uses of “worse than ISIS” or “ISIS-like” across Sky News Australia, The Australian, the Herald Sun, the Sydney Morning Herald and news.com.au in the war’s first year,³⁶ alongside the recycled “human animals” rhetoric. By November 2025, a racial-discrimination complaint filed in the Federal Court against News Corp and Sky News, supported by figures including Claudia Karvan, catalogued dozens of dehumanising phrases allegedly used by their hosts about Palestinians and their supporters: “rats”, “cockroaches”, “human animals”, “full of lies”.⁴⁴ Peter Dutton demanded Australia treat Hamas’s war as Australia’s war and slammed the government for not endorsing Israel at the UN.⁴⁵ Then watch the frame turn on its own allies. When the Netherlands barred Ben-Gvir and Smotrich from entering the country and the EU moved to partially suspend Israel from a €900 million science-and-technology program, Smotrich’s reply was that European leaders had surrendered to “the lies of radical Islam.”⁴⁶

Calling Hamas “ISIS” isn’t about accuracy. It’s about permission. In “Is Hamas the same as ISIS? No, and yes”, scholars writing for The Conversation note the tactical overlap and the ideological gulf, and they explain why the analogy was made anyway: it imports the coalition, the license, and the “no negotiation, only annihilation” frame of 2014–15. Consider October 2023: we’re told the media always sides with Palestine, yet the same outlets that couldn’t say “genocide”, “ethnic cleansing”, or"atrocities" for Israeli crimes had no trouble comparing the multi-faith, secular Palestinian resistance to ISIS.

The Saturation Machine

The asymmetry is also quantitative. An Australian press that found “40 beheaded babies” impossible to check found these easy to bury: the February 2024 UN finding on the mistreatment of thousands of Palestinian detainees;⁴⁷ the June 2024 torture rapporteur’s report;³¹ the July 2024 Sde Teiman gang-rape allegations and the storming of the bases by Israeli mobs;³³ the August 2024 leaked video;^{34 48 36} the November 2024 indictments. The Guardian put the inquest on its front page; the BBC, CNN, Le Monde and CBS did their versions. In Australia: one wire item.³⁷

The imagery machine ran the other way. Nine’s papers front-paged “the children of Deir al-Balah killed on their way to get water”, attributed, as usual, to “the Hamas-run health ministry”. The Australian front-paged “War and Appeasement”, “Repugnant Diplomacy” and “Abandonment of Israel” across a single week in October 2024 (the University of Technology Sydney’s Centre for Media Transition is still examining those claims).⁴⁹ When Nine’s editors declined to let staff sign an open letter on Gaza coverage, Crikey tallied who had taken the Rambam Fellowship junket to Israel: 130-plus names, including four Nine editors, the Guardian Australia editor, the SBS managing director, the Daily Telegraph editor, AAP’s CEO, and a roll-call of their star columnists. The practice stretches back decades.^{50 51}

Count it the other way and the numbers invert. A joint quantitative study by Deepcut and the media watchdog Newscord, the first focused on Australian coverage, examined 81 clusters of stories in which the ABC, the BBC, Al Jazeera and CNN covered the same events between October 2023 and May 2025.⁵² On every metric the playbook predicts, the ABC skewed Israeli. Humanising words (“mother”, “father”, “child”, “family”) appeared 1.58 times as often for Israelis as for Palestinians. Israeli sources were cited 53 percent more often than Palestinian ones. The average article gave 22.1 percent of its space to the official Israeli position, against 12 percent for the Palestinian perspective and 4.7 percent for international organisations. The ABC’s humanisation gap was wider than CNN’s and wider than the BBC’s, which sat near parity; Al Jazeera was the only one of the four to humanise Palestinians more than Israelis. Same machine, repackaged: the structure held, the tone softened.

The machine also works in bursts. In the week the October 2025 ceasefire returned the hostages, the ABC’s national site ran the reunion genre in near-daily succession: “Israeli hostages reunite with their loved ones”;⁵³ “Israelis shared mixed emotions in Hostage Square”;⁵⁴ “Emotional scenes as Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners freed”;⁵⁵ “Families of Israeli hostages prepare to be reunited with their loved ones”.⁵⁶ Even the peace-plan explainer’s headline seated “Israel hostage families” first and left “Palestinians wait” trailing as a subordinate clause.⁵⁷ One people’s wing named, the other’s grammatically dependent. Roughly two thousand Palestinian detainees went free the same week, many banished from their own towns as a condition of the deal. There was no burst of reunions for them, and none for the families walking north through the rubble of Gaza City to the sites of homes that no longer exist.

Sell the double standard at home

By 2025–26, the backlash came from home. The ABC unlawfully sacked Antoinette Lattouf over pro-Palestine social posts after a coordinated campaign of complaints.⁵⁸ The ABC’s own review of its Israel-Gaza coverage found no editorial breaches while counting, on the program studied, 92 Israeli and 40 Palestinian guests, seven invitations to the same Israeli spokesman, and 22 instances of unverified lurid claims aired without challenge.³⁸ Sky News Australia put Sharri Markson “live from Israel Monday to Thursday”.⁵⁹ The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age then republished the RDIS targets as if the complaint itself was the news.⁴⁵

When the antisemitism apparatus produced its own investigations, the media covered the investigations more than the data. Two free-advice bodies provide the legal servicing for the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion’s submission process. One of them, the Jewish Centre for Law and Justice, is a Zionist legal organization that, critics note, has already provided legal assistance in a tribunal case, a case that established that the phrase “all Zionists are terrorists” breaches hate-speech laws. ^{60 61 62} Community campaigns urged Jewish Australians to open their homes for “storytelling” submissions;⁶³ a counter-campaign urged the reverse.⁶⁴ This is not fraud. Bondi was real, and so were the arsons before it.⁶⁵ But the record being built is carefully shaped, and the coverage will inherit the curation.

Conclusion

The claim that Australian mainstream media has a pro-Palestinian bias is false; it inverts the public record. From how fast unverified claims spread in October 2023 to how little coverage state-perpetrated abuses at Sde Teiman received, the gap in editorial rigor is structural. Official statements from one side get front-page treatment without verification. Documented violations against the other land in back-page wire summaries, if they appear at all. This asymmetry relies on a deliberate collapse of nuance: it reduces a multi-confessional, secular national struggle to a monolithic civilizational threat, and recasts peaceful diaspora advocacy as an insidious religious plot. By importing geopolitical frames like “Hamas is ISIS” and adopting institutional double standards at home, Australian legacy outlets keep the humanity, suffering, and political existence of Palestinians grammatically and morally secondary. That is worse than bad journalism. The curated narrative manufactures public consent for mass violence. It shields state power from accountability, and it erodes free expression and civil rights at home.