On Sunday, August 3, major media outlets amplified a distorted Palestinian narrative about Jerusalem’s Temple Mount — Judaism’s holiest site — in a way that did more than just misinform. It helped legitimize the very rhetoric used by Hamas to justify its October 7, 2023 massacre.

From factual errors to sensationalism, the coverage of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s brief visit to the Al-Aqsa compound on Tisha B’Av — the Jewish day of mourning for the destruction of the ancient Temples — was painted as a dangerous provocation, a spark threatening to ignite further regional instability.

This is more than bad reporting. It’s complicity in a lie that kills.

While Jewish prayer at the site — the third holiest for Muslims — is forbidden, any outlet that paints such a non-violent act as dangerous automatically adopts the point of view of the real extremists, forgetting that such coverage fuels terrorist propaganda.

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Here’s @guardian claiming Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir prayed at the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
He didn’t.

Let’s talk about the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, which also houses Al-Aqsa, Islam’s third holiest.

A thread on media confusion – and misrepresentation.  pic.twitter.com/8uBF6H3y1o

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) August 4, 2025

Compound Vs. Mosque

Outlets like The Guardian and The Times of London suggested Ben-Gvir had literally entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque and prayed inside.

He didn’t.

He visited the broader Temple Mount compound, which includes the mosque, but also happens to be the site of the First and Second Jewish Temples. He said a short, silent prayer to mark the day Jews mourn the destruction of those temples. That’s it.

The International Business Times even suggested that the Al-Aqsa Mosque itself is sacred to Jews — a basic factual error that betrays either ignorance or ideological bias. Neither reflects well on a journalist.

Meanwhile, The Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press left out any context about the significance of the day for Jews, and instead used the opportunity to link Ben-Gvir’s visit to unrelated violence in Gaza.

The BBC avoided using the Hebrew term “Har HaBayit” (Temple Mount) altogether, referring to it only by the Arabic “Haram al-Sharif,” as though the Jewish connection to the site is some kind of fringe claim.

Fueling the Flames

Such coverage — whether through carelessness or design — frames Jews as the problem. And that’s exactly the kind of narrative that fuels genocidal violence, like the one launched on October 7, 2023.

As Hamas itself stated after slaughtering 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping hundreds into Gaza, operation “Al-Aqsa Flood” was a legitimate response against “the Israeli judaization plans of the blessed al-Aqsa Mosque” and “the intensification of the Israeli settlers’ incursions into the holy Mosque.”

By repeating this framing — that a Jew praying at his holiest site is a threat to Muslims — the media feed the propaganda machine that fuels antisemitic violence.

Let’s be clear: any outlet that claims Jewish prayer sparked “outrage” or “anger” is not reporting — it’s siding with the murderers. Men too fragile to hear Hebrew on the Temple Mount, yet brutal enough to slit Jewish throats.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

Newly released research links South Africa’s expanding ties with Iran to its contentious genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), raising questions about the motives behind Pretoria’s legal battle.

Last month, the Middle East Africa Research Institute (MEARI) unveiled a report exploring the South African government’s relationship with Iran and the ways in which this partnership has shaped the country’s foreign policy.

The report — “Ties to Tehran: South Africa’s Democracy and Its Relationship With Iran: — argues that deepening ties with Tehran has led South Africa to compromise its democratic foundations and constitutional principles, aligning itself with a regime internationally condemned for terrorism, repression, and human rights abuses.

While Iran maintains support for South Africa’s coalition government in part due to a shared revolutionary, liberation ideology, Pretoria has frequently defended Tehran at the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) by voting against sanctions or choosing to abstain, the report says.

In doing so, the study claims that the South African government has both undermined its democratic values and bolstered Iran’s regional ambitions by defending its nuclear program and downplaying its human rights abuses.

Adam Charnas, an analyst at the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), condemned the government’s long-standing ties with Iran and other regimes with questionable human rights records, calling them deeply troubling.

“This relationship was notably underscored when, shortly after Oct. 7, then-Minister of International Relations, Naledi Pandor, visited Iran for a two-week period to meet with [then-Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi],” Charnas told The Algemeiner.

“South Africa’s foreign policy appears to be more concerned with enhancing relations with rogue states,” he continued. “This narrow and party-led strategy jeopardizes its relationship with key trading partners rather than with addressing domestic challenges or advancing the welfare of its citizens.”

MEARI’s report also questions whether South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ, the UN’s top court, was genuinely rooted in constitutional principles — or driven by outside political pressure.

According to the study, South Africa’s open hostility toward Israel and its biased approach in filing the case — failing to acknowledge Hamas’s role in launching the war with its Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel — undermines the government’s credibility.

At the time of the ICJ filing, senior South African officials were holding high-level meetings in Tehran.

The study explains that shortly afterward, the ruling African National Congress (ANC), struggling with financial difficulties, unexpectedly paid off a multi-million-rand debt, fueling speculation about possible covert support from Iran.

“The evidence for such a claim is entirely circumstantial, but bears relating. In early December 2023, the ANC, South Africa’s ruling party, faced imminent liquidation. It allegedly owed R102 million to a service provider, which it could not pay,” the report says.

In prior years, the ANC has on several occasions been unable to pay staff salaries. But just days after the South African government filed its case against Israel at the ICJ, which MEARI drescribes as “an undertaking involving a phalanx of lawyers of international stature that could cost as much as R1.5 billion [about $84.35 million] in taxpayer money,” the ANC announced that it had reached an out-of-court settlement with its creditor to settle its debt and turned its finances around.

However, since the party’s finances were not available to the public, a fact-check by a leading South African newspaper could not find evidence to prove that the ANC had received funding from any particular source, Iran or otherwise.

Although the ANC claimed it complies with South African law requiring the of donor funding exceeding R100,000, the law is “weakly enforced,” MEARI notes.

“It could be pure coincidence that Hamas thanked South Africa for bringing a genocide case against Israel at the ICJ, and that this case aligns perfectly with the ‘mutual bilateral interests’ of South Africa and Iran,” the report says, with a not-so-subtle bit of sarcasm. “It could be pure coincidence that within days of taking this grave step, South Africa’s the ruling party, the ANC, managed to pull back from the brink of bankruptcy by settling a substantial debt out of court after having ignored multiple court orders and left staff unpaid.”

Since December 2023, South Africa has been pursuing its case accusing Israel of committing “state-led genocide” in its defensive war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.

Both Iran and Hamas have publicly praised the South African government’s legal action.

For its part, Israeli leaders have condemned the case as an “obscene exploitation” of the Genocide Convention, noting that the Jewish state is targeting terrorists who use civilians as human shields in its military campaign.

Meanwhile, South Africa’s Jewish community has lambasted the case as “grandstanding” rather than actual concern for those killed in the Middle Eastern conflict.

Last year, the ICJ ruled there was “plausibility” to South Africa’s claims that Palestinians had a right to be protected from genocide.

However, the top UN court did not make a determination on the merits of South Africa’s allegations, nor did it call for Israel to halt its military campaign. Instead, the ICJ issued a more general directive that Israel must make sure it prevents acts of genocide.

The ruling also called for the release of the hostages kidnapped by Hamas during the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 rampage.

“It could be that South Africa simply did not have the resources to respond in international courts to the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the war crimes committed by the latter in the pursuit of that war of aggression,” the MEARI report says. “It could be that it didn’t feel there was sufficient historical solidarity to oblige it to speak out about genocides of Uyghurs in China, or Rohingya in Myanmar, but Israel just went a step too far.”

Since the start of the war in Gaza, the South African government has been one of the fiercest critics of Israel’s military campaign, which seeks to free the hostages kidnapped by the terrorists and dismantle Hamas’s military and administrative control in Gaza.

Beyond its open hostility toward Israel, South Africa has actively supported Iran’s terrorist proxy by hosting two Hamas officials at a state-backed conference expressing solidarity with the Palestinians in December 2023.

In one instance, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa led the crowd at an election rally in a chant of “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” — a popular slogan among anti-Israel activists that has been widely interpreted as a genocidal call for the destruction of the Jewish state, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Two leading German newspapers have released a joint investigation accusing Gaza-based photojournalists of staging images of hungry and despairing civilians, sparking fresh controversy over how the Israel-Hamas war is portrayed in international media coverage.

The report, published by BILD and Süddeutsche Zeitung, followed a recent controversy over a widely circulated image of a Gazan youth portrayed as starving — a photo later revealed to depict a boy with a genetic disorder, prompting outlets such as The New York Times to issue clarifications.

The German investigation focused on Palestinian photographer Anas Zayed Fteiha, a freelancer for the Turkish state-run Anadolu Agency, who allegedly staged images to dramatize civilian suffering and depict it as the result of Israeli actions.

Fteiha’s work has been published by major international outlets including CNN, Reuters, and the BBC, despite what the report described as openly biased photojournalism.

According to the German outlets, Fteiha has openly expressed anti-Israel views on social media, sharing inflammatory and antisemitic content.

The report further noted that, by working for a state-run Turkish news outlet whose government maintains longstanding ties to Hamas and a well-known hostile stance toward Israel, his work functions more as propaganda than as objective journalism.

On Tuesday, Israel’s Foreign Ministry praised the German investigation, saying it “reveals how Hamas uses ‘Pallywood,’ staged or selectively framed media, to manipulate global opinion.”

“With Hamas controlling nearly all media in Gaza, these photographers aren’t reporting, they’re producing propaganda,” the statement said.

“This investigation underscores how Pallywood has gone mainstream with staged images and ideological bias shaping international coverage, while the suffering of Israeli hostages and Hamas atrocities are pushed out of frame,” it continued.

Beware of fake news.
A joint investigation by @SZ and @BILD reveals how Hamas uses “Pallywood”, staged or selectively framed media, to manipulate global opinion.

At the center is Anas Zayed Fteiha, a Palestinian photographer for Anadolu and an open Israel- and Jew-hater, whose… pic.twitter.com/MrBfvylwCi

— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) August 5, 2025

“Pallywood” is a term used to describe the alleged practice by Palestinians of staging fake injuries, deaths, or scenes of devastation to elicit international sympathy and fuel hostility toward Israel.

According to the investigation, Fteiha selectively shares images that reinforce an anti-Israel narrative. For example, one of his widely circulated photos depicts desperate Gazan women and children holding pots and pans outside a food distribution site.

However, other photos taken at the same scene — showing mostly adult men calmly waiting in line and receiving aid — were not distributed by Fteiha and have gone largely unnoticed.

Gerhard Paul, emeritus professor of history and a leading expert on visual propaganda, told Süddeutsche Zeitung that these types of images serve a specific function by shaping narratives and influencing public opinion.

“They are intended to overwrite the brutal images of the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Many people don’t even remember these pictures,” Paul said. “Hamas is a master at staging images.”

He also explained that journalists and photographers in Gaza face significant risks and, because of their close proximity to Hamas terrorists, are unable to operate independently.

According to the German newspapers, part of the problem is that Israel restricts access to the Gaza Strip for independent journalists, allowing Hamas-controlled propaganda to dominate the coverage.

Shortly after the investigation was published, the German Press Agency and Agence France-Presse announced they would no longer work with Fteiha and would apply more rigorous scrutiny to photos from other photographers.

For its part, Reuters said Fteiha’s photos “meet the standards of accuracy, independence, and impartiality.”