As the war escalated and Israeli forces laid siege to Beirut and civilian deaths mounted, AP coverage grew more critical and journalists pushed back against propaganda, maintaining a healthy degree of skepticism. They challenged key elements of Israel’s narrative — not only human shield allegations, but also its denials of the use of cluster and phosphorus bombs and their false assertion that civilians were not deliberately targeted. The reporting became more thorough and human-centered, with a strong focus on civilian suffering and the broader consequences of the war.
Israel’s history of deliberately targeting civilians has been well-documented, according to Chomsky - though mainstream American media journalists likely weren’t even aware of it. To support his argument, Chomsky cited a 1979 interview the leftist Israeli daily Al Hamishmar had with General Mordechai Gur, former Israeli chief of staff and Labor Party member, a year after Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon in 1978. That invasion, dubbed “Operation Litani,” resulted in Israel arming and organizing its proxy force, the South Lebanon Army (SLA).
In the interview, Gur admitted that the Israeli military made no distinction between civilian and non-civilian populations during its wars and operations in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, asking: “Do you think I pretend not to know what we have done all these years?”
What did we do the entire length of the Suez Canal? A million and a half refugees! … We bombarded Ismailia, Suez, Port Said, Port Fuad. A million and a half refugees. Since when has the population of south Lebanon become so sacred?
Referring specifically to the 1978 invasion and reiterating Israel’s false claim that Lebanese civilians were complicit in harboring guerrillas, Gur said, “They knew perfectly well what the terrorists were doing. After the massacre at Avivim, I had four villages in south Lebanon bombed without authorization.”
When pressed on whether Israel differentiated between civilians and combatants, Gur replied: “What distinction? What had the inhabitants of Irbid [a Palestinian-majority town in northern Jordan] done to deserve bombing by us?”
The interviewer noted that military communiqués always spoke of returning fire and striking “terrorist objectives.”
“Please be serious,” replied Gur. “Did you not know that the entire valley of the Jordan had been emptied of its inhabitants as a result of the war of attrition [1969–70]?”
He went further: “I have never had any doubts about that. When I authorized Yanush [nickname for Major General Avigdor Ben-Gal, the commander of the northern front in charge of the 1978 invasion] to use aviation, artillery and tanks, I knew exactly what I was doing. It has been thirty years — from the time of our Independence War until now — that we have been fighting against the civilian [Palestinian] population which inhabited the villages and towns. And every time we do it, the same question gets asked: ‘Should we or should we not strike at civilians?’”
Gur’s remarks underline the origins and political motivations behind Israel’s frequent charges of “human shields” — a theme explored in later chapters. His statements stand as some of the most revealing explanations for the term’s application. According to Israeli military analyst Ze’ev Schiff, the significance of Gur’s comments lay in “the admission that the Israeli army had always struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously.”
In a 1982 Knesset (parliament) debate, Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin cited Gur’s comments to deflect criticism from Labor Party legislators who were condemning him for bombing civilians in Lebanon, reminding them that similar actions had occurred under their own governments.
Chomsky noted that Gur’s 1979 remarks applied “with considerable accuracy to the Lebanese invasion four years later, and with still more force.” He traced the underlying military doctrine back to Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who wrote in his Independence War Diary on January 1, 1948: “What is necessary is cruel and strong reactions. We need precision in time, place and casualties. If we know the family, strike mercilessly, women and children included. Otherwise the reaction is inefficient. At the place of action there is no need to distinguish between guilty and innocent. Where there was no attack — we should not strike.”
And all the while, said Chomsky, the American media was “accused of failing to recognize the amazing and historically unique Israeli efforts to spare civilians and of exaggerating the scale of the destruction and terror.”
Amid escalating civilian casualties and overall Western mainstream media coverage growing increasingly critical in 1982, the Israeli government found itself regularly forced to deny or defend itself against reports of using cluster and phosphorus bombs on civilians. In parallel, Israel’s supporters in the U.S. launched a fierce campaign to discredit the media — particularly the television networks.
Shifting Frames
AP’s Stephen K. Hindy contended that American mainstream media — apart from a brief interruption in the summer of 1982 and a year after that — had largely accepted Israel’s version of events at face value. During that period of “opening,” journalists could report more independently largely because many Israel-based reporters were in Lebanon at the time, witnessing events firsthand, explained Hindy.
That shift in perspective was reinforced by changes in Washington, where relative independence was reinforced by a subtle change in the political climate as U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s administration began to slightly diverge from Israel on key points - especially after the number of civilian deaths increased - creating space for more critical coverage
For this reason, said Tatro, American media did not hand Israel the same “carte blanche” they had before the war.
Since mainstream media “tend to very closely do whatever the government position is,” Chomsky said in an interview with the author, when that position shifts, “the media’s interpretation changes.”
Pro-Israel commentator Daniel Pipes’ explanation of the critical reporting in 1982 resonates with the argument put forward by former ABC correspondent Charles Glass, who attributed the media shift to journalists’ disillusionment with Israel. Pipes complained that Israel was held to “impossible moral standards” because of America’s huge interest in and familiarity with Israel and Jews — “in contrast to the alien quality of Muslim life.”
Prior to 1982 and the so-called opening, Hindy recalled that AP’s coverage leaned toward Israel. What stood out most to him was the tension with colleagues in the Tel Aviv bureau in the lead-up to the invasion.
“We were always fighting with the Israeli point of view. It was extremely frustrating because we would actually be there and see things, see shelling and see wounded people and then the Israeli military spokesman’s account would be given equal weight to our eyewitness account,” said Hindy. “The frustration I had was that when it got to the foreign desk and it got to the A-wire, the Israeli military spokesman would be given as much credibility as the guys who were on the ground in Lebanon.”
The “tug of war” between AP’s Beirut and Tel Aviv bureaus was relentless. With no direct phone lines between the two countries — technically at war — they communicated only through AP’s internal message wire. “Tel Aviv would, for instance, tell Beirut, ‘Hey, this is what the Israeli military spokesman is telling us’ in an attempt to discredit Beirut’s reports,” recalled Hindy. “We had a dueling story on virtually everything. It was a tug of war and they won. ... I think New York more often than not sided with Tel Aviv.”
Hindy cited an incident two years before the invasion to illustrate the tense relationship between the Beirut and Tel Aviv bureaus: A UN convoy he was traveling in on April 18, 1980 was ambushed by Lebanese militiamen who later killed two Irish peacekeepers and wounded a third. In his report, Hindy identified one of the attackers as a member of an Israeli-backed militia. The Tel Aviv bureau challenged the story, citing an Israeli military denial that the gunmen were Israeli allies. New York sided with Tel Aviv and altered the story, referring to the abductors as “Arab villagers.”
This “tug of war” underscored the deeper tensions over competing narratives, interpretations, and the very conception of news. It revealed how reporting decisions were shaped — not just by facts on the ground, but by the selection of sources, editorial gatekeeping, and, often, political considerations.
In this case, Hindy, as an eyewitness, was the primary source of the story. He knew the area, spoke Arabic, cited a UN officer who identified one of the gunmen and also interviewed the UN commander for official comment. In contrast, Tel Aviv bureau chief Frank Crepeau relied exclusively on the Israeli military as his main source, which he trusted more than the UN, as he stated in a letter of complaint to Hindy’s superior.
“I was there, they could not deny what I saw, but in spite of that, the story they wrote ended up… putting a big spin on my story,” recalled Hindy.
However, coverage of the 1982 invasion unfolded under different circumstances: Logistical barriers limited direct communication between Beirut and New York, giving the Beirut bureau more latitude in deciding how to report the story. All senior editors and correspondents interviewed agreed that AP’s New York headquarters rarely, if ever, interfered with Beirut’s coverage at the time.
“Basically we decided internally what the story was,” recalled Tatro. “I don’t remember getting any guidance from the outside — headquarters or anywhere else. I think we had a real good sense of what was going on, talking to diplomats and so forth. ... [Today], there are people micromanaging you, applying what they learned at journalism school to organize the newsroom — with great emphasis on management, not so much on leadership.”
Labelle, Middle East news editor from 1983 to 1985 and again in the 1990s — who was part of the AP team covering the invasion — described the Beirut operation in the early 1980s:
Since we thought of the Beirut story as an important one, we tended to cover every event we could. This was not discouraged by New York headquarters since, if it used the day-to-day story at all, it edited the story as it saw fit for distribution outside the Middle East.
Ellen Nimmons, AP’s former international editor who was on the foreign desk in New York in 1982, explained:
We couldn’t even call Beirut. We had to use the message wire. This probably increased the independence of the bureaus. …
In NY, we of course edited the stories; we had control insofar as get it through the desk. The American wire and world wires ran from New York. There were stories that would come in and we’d say ‘what?’ ‘What do you mean by this, why are you saying that?’ It was really difficult. We could hold things up or we could change them, but in terms of directing the coverage, not so much.
Unlike colleagues in Tel Aviv, AP staffers in Beirut worked without censorship and with broad freedom to decide what to report. Tatro said the only thing they witnessed from the PLO was some officials querying journalists:
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There was a blind man with a gun from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), who used to brief journalists in the lobby of the Commodore Hotel along with one of their older diplomats. ... PLO officials would ask questions such as: ‘are you going to talk to the Israelis? Where do you stand with Arafat on this?’ They came with some message. But Arafat’s Fatah group did not come to the Commodore. Reporters had to go to them at their offices with questions or for interviews. ... They were sort of rigid, like the Russians, difficult interviews because they always gave you the propaganda.
Fisher said she personally did not experience any intimidation or pressure from either the PLO or the Syrians. Nor did she self-censor her stories:
What were we going to censor? … I don’t recall ever feeling intimidated by Syrians or the PLO. Bombs dropping out of the sky, yes. ... I don’t think there was anything to be afraid of from the PLO at that point.
Across the Green Line on the Christian side of the capital, Israeli officers met with reporters at the Alexandre Hotel and many armed and in uniform watched with binoculars their bombings of west Beirut from the roof of the hotel. Journalists based there also watched much of the fighting from the roof of the Alexandre, a few blocks from the Museum crossing, where Beirut’s heaviest clashes took place.
Labelle said if self-censorship did exist, it may have been only exercised by some U.S. journalists whose audience was sympathetic toward Israel.
It’s impossible to say how widespread it was or accurately assess its effect on news copy. First, American reporters are writing for an audience that is sympathetic toward Israel because of the Holocaust in World War II, and Israel is well aware of this sympathy. I recall one somewhat silly example of self-censorship by the AP when I wrote a story from southern Lebanon quoting Shia militiamen gathered in a village mosque (probably the nascent Hezbollah) as saying they would keep fighting until they had driven Israeli forces out of Lebanon.
New York would not run the story, and an editor told me we couldn’t report this just because these guys said so. I am sure the supposed toughness of Israeli troops was on the editor’s mind. At any rate, the New York Times reported the same story from the same village a few days later, and my story was then deemed believable and was run. The fighters I talked to wouldn’t know it - their mosque with them inside was destroyed by Israel shortly thereafter - but their colleagues, or maybe even their children did eventually run Israeli forces out of southern Lebanon.
However, while reporting from Israel, journalists may have exercised some form of self-censorship, said Labelle, who served as AP’s news editor in Jerusalem in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Whenever we had a report of an attack on Palestinians, we always sought military or government comment. Partly this was standard journalistic practice, but I’m also sure we were motivated, too, by worries we would be challenged on the facts. I should add, however, that the AP bureau in Jerusalem did its utmost to keep an accurate list of both Palestinian and Israeli deaths, and our death figures were used by other news media.
Human Shield
One of Israel’s most contentious allegations was that the PLO used civilians as human shields, a charge it has often leveled against its enemies.
On July 26, 1982, the Israeli Embassy in Washington claimed that PLO fighters had dug into residential neighborhood in West Beirut, endangering Lebanese and Palestinian civilians by firing on Lebanese and Israeli forces from behind them — a move it denounced as a blatant violation of the rules of warfare.
Repeated often enough, the charge inevitably seeped into media coverage, leaving editors and reporters to decide how to handle it. Labelle said the media usually reported the “human shield” claim as an accusation. “It’s hard to see a way around that,” he said. “The best a reporter can do to verify or refute the accusation is to quote authorities on the other side, or local people. It’s hard to absolutely do either since reporters are usually not on the scene before an Israeli attack to see in person what was happening at the time.”
Still, at least one of the claims may have had some basis - if not entirely - in 1982 -. In the early hours of June 7, Israeli warplanes bombed the Sidon Secondary School for Boys, killing at least 120 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians - mostly women and children who had fled Israeli bombardment of Tyre to the south. Fisher, who investigated the air raid, found that PLO fighters had placed a T-54 tank outside the school.
Hagai Tamir, a reservist major in the Israeli Air Force, was flying over Sidon when the liaison officer on the ground told him of his target: “a large building on top of a hill.” From above, the building looked like a hospital or a school, so he asked the officer for confirmation. The officer did not know but said, “they were shooting from there.” Unsatisfied, Tamir reported a “malfunction,” cut off radio contact and did not drop his bomb. A pair of jets that followed leveled the building.
“There was a T-54 tank, practically next to the school,” recalled Fisher in an interview. “And the dead people were supposedly from the Rashidiya camp [in Tyre] who had come north for shelter.” She estimated 300 people were in the basement of the L-shaped school building. She could only count 54 of the bodies piled on top of one another. “It was clearly only the top layer because there were arms and legs sticking out, besides the people who already had the right number of arms and legs and it looked like, given how far they were from the ceiling, that they were probably only half way up the wall.”
Fisher later returned to speak to the school principal and others, who said the bodies were buried at the end of a marked out basketball court. She wrote a sidebar on the attack that “started with something like the ‘sharp foul smell of death.’
“For the rest of the summer, said Fisher, foreign editor Nate Polowetzky wanted more “smell of death” stories.
Tatro, commenting on AP’s reporting on the human shield allegations, specifically the Sidon school, said:
The casualty count was challenged [by Israel], and secondly, it was alleged that the Israelis had gone after a military target and not just willy-nilly or without justification concentrated fire on a particular area. So what we found was that the casualties that Israel had suggested were true. We counted the bodies. We did find evidence that a Palestinian anti-aircraft battery was right next to that school. People had sheltered in the school. It wasn’t a school during a session, and then they got hit on a strike and the Palestinians weren’t thinking about all those people when they moved that artillery right there.
So neither side was right in this, you can assess the balance of it. All those people got killed and one anti-aircraft battery that probably never hit anything [destroyed]. Whether the Israelis knew somebody was in there or didn’t know is something that you’d have to find in military records in Israel. But we reported on it and we made, I thought, the best effort of anyone on a daily basis to check things out like that.
The fighting was in the midst of the civilian population and I think both sides are responsible, in greater or lesser degree, but both sides are responsible for all those people that got killed and wounded.
We found military positions or whatever next to a hospital, next to an orphanage, next to an old folks home. Those things were going on, but the Israelis seemed to be making a priority that their military thought was the target needed to be taken out no matter what and an apparent disregard for or at least not much regard for the civilian population.
However, John Kifner of the New York Times challenged Israel’s human shield claim when he visited the Sabra, Shatilla and Bourj el-Barajneh camps in Beirut. Reporters, he wrote, found “no heavy artillery or well-fortified positions” in the camps which had “taken a terrible pounding” since June 4. “There was not much left standing.” In the south, he said, “the Israelis have bulldozed refugee camps to make them uninhabitable,” causing the flight of half of their 125,000 inhabitants in the first few weeks of the war. The areas to which they escaped, particularly the Fak’hani quarter in Beirut, were also bombed.
Read Chapter One, Part 3, in the next post