Israel justified its murder of Al Jazeera’s crew on the grounds that one among them, Anas al-Sharif, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, was secretly a “Hamas terrorist”.

Sharif, we are told, similarly found time between breaks from his 22-month, frantic reporting schedule - much of it on camera - to serve as a Hamas commander “directing rocket attacks on Israeli civilians”.

We now know exactly where this ridiculous story originated: from something Israel calls its “Legitimisation Cell”. The intelligence unit’s name, which was surely never supposed to come to light, is the give-away. Its job has been to legitimise Israel’s atrocities with stories vilifying its victims and thereby making the genocide more palatable to Israeli and western audiences.

The Israeli news website +972 exposed the cell within days of Sharif’s killing this month, reporting that it was formed after 7 October 2023 - the day Hamas and other groups broke out of their Gaza prison camp, spreading carnage, following 17 years of a brutal siege.

But while Israeli mendacity is entirely to be expected - after all, it is the whole purpose of its official hasbara industry - what astonishes most is the western media’s continuing connivance in promoting Israel’s litany of lies.

Germany’s most popular paper, Bild, published a front page that might as well have been written by the Israeli military: “Terrorist disguised as a journalist killed in Gaza.” No claim, no quote marks. Just a statement of fact.

The UK media was little better, with most outlets prominently featuring Israel’s unevidenced “legitimisation” smears of Sharif in headlines and coverage. Astonishingly, BBC coverage on its flagship News at Ten swallowed whole Israel’s framing of Sharif as a legitimate target - as well as uncritically peddling the presumption that Israel was targeting him and him alone.

The context that has been missing from western coverage is this: Israel has killed more than 240 Palestinian journalists in Gaza over the past two years - more than all the journalists killed in both World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the Afghanistan War combined.

This is a pattern - a glaring one - but seemingly one to which western journalists are entirely blind, even as Israel continues to bar them from reporting in Gaza, nearly two years into its genocide.