The New York Times produced an article on Friday, March 21, bearing the headline “Israel Tries to Pressure Hamas to Free More Hostages.” In the first paragraph, readers were informed that Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz had undertaken to “turn up the pressure” by warning that Israel was “preparing to seize more territory in Gaza and intensify attacks by air, sea and land if the armed Palestinian group does not cooperate.”

This was no doubt a rather bland way of describing mass slaughter and illegal territorial conquest—not to mention a convenient distraction from the fact that Hamas is not the party that is currently guilty of a failure to cooperate. In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, Israel annihilated the ceasefire agreement that came into effect in January following 15 months of  genocide by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip.

Over those months, Israel officially killed at least 48,577 Palestinians in Gaza; in February, the death toll was bumped up to almost 62,000, to account for missing persons presumed to be dead beneath the rubble.

The first phase of the ceasefire ended at the beginning of March, and was scheduled to give way to a second phase, in which a permanent cessation of hostilities would be negotiated, along with the exchange of remaining hostages. Rather than “cooperate,” however, Israel and its BFF, the United States, opted to move the goalposts and insist on an extension of phase one—since, at the end of the day, an actual end to the war is the last thing Israel or the US wants.

After all, how will Donald Trump’s fantasy of converting Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” ever come to fruition if the territory is not thoroughly pulverized and depopulated first?

Israel’s US-endorsed resumption of all-out genocide on Tuesday killed at least 404  Palestinians right off the bat—but, hey, that’s just how Israel “turns up the pressure on Hamas.”

Committed to the deployment of euphemism

Were the US newspaper of record not so firmly committed to the deployment of grotesque euphemism on behalf of the Israeli war effort, perhaps the discussion of “pressure” might have included a mention of such statistics as that, between Tuesday and Friday alone, at least 200 children were among those massacred. But this, alas, would have required a humanization of Palestinians, and a dangerous encouragement of empathy fundamentally at odds with US/Israeli policy in the Middle East.

Instead, the Times simply noted that “Israel hopes to compel Hamas to free more of the remaining hostages” in its possession, estimated to consist of “as many as 24 living captives—and the remains of more than 30 others.” No reference was made to the thousands of  Palestinian captives held in mind-bogglingly inhumane conditions in Israel, though the Times did manage the—judgment-free—observation that,

even before the ceasefire collapsed this week, Israel had blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, preventing shipments of food and medicine from reaching Palestinians still recovering from more than a year of hunger and wartime deprivation.

As Amnesty International (3/3/25) pointed out, that particular Israeli maneuver amounted to a crime against humanity and a violation of international law. But the Western corporate media wouldn’t be the Western corporate media if they reported straight facts.

‘To pressure Hamas on hostages’

For its part, Reuters (3/21/25) explained on Friday that Israel had “intensified a military onslaught to press the Palestinian militant group [Hamas] to free remaining Israeli hostages.” The Wall Street Journal has, meanwhile, spent weeks preparing for the onslaught of “pressure” via such headlines as “Israel Draws Up New War Plans to Pressure Hamas” (3/8/25) and “Israel Chokes Electricity Supply to Gaza to Pressure Hamas on Hostages” (3/9/25).

A BBC article (3/21/25) on Katz’s orders to the military to “seize additional areas in Gaza” in the absence of a comprehensive hostage release is illustrative of the corporate media approach to round two of genocide. Specifying that “Israel and the US have accused Hamas of rejecting proposals to extend the ceasefire,” the BBC quoted Katz as warning that “the more Hamas continues its refusal, the more territory it will lose to Israel.” The article did allow Hamas a line of space in which to respond that it is “engaging with the mediators with full responsibility and seriousness,” but the sandwiching of this quote in between US/Israeli accusations intentionally implied its disingenuousness.

Of course, the unmutilated truth does intermittently seep into media output, as in CNN’s Friday dispatch (3/21/25) containing these two sentences that lay out, in straightforward fashion, who is cooperating and who is not:

Hamas has insisted on sticking to a timeline previously agreed with Israel and the US that would move the warring parties into a second phase of the truce, in which Israel would commit to ending the war. But Israel has refused, saying it wants to extend the first phase instead.

Overall, however, the function of the corporate media is to endow demonstrably false US/Israeli accusations with a veneer of solid credibility, and to portray Hamas as the perennial saboteurs. Ultimately, unquestioningly reporting that Israel and the US have accused Hamas of rejecting proposals to extend the ceasefire is about the equivalent, in terms of journalistic integrity, as unquestioningly reporting that Israel and the US have accused Hamas of manufacturing nuclear jelly beans.

By implicitly blaming Hamas for renewed hostilities and legitimizing Israeli “pressure,” media outlets have offered themselves up as platforms for the de facto justification of mass slaughter.

A Thursday Fox News intervention (3/20/25) on Israel’s decision to “expand… activities in Gaza” noted approvingly that “the Israeli air force has continued to target and dismantle terrorists and terrorist infrastructure throughout” the coastal enclave. The article naturally came equipped with the assertion that Israel had resumed operations “following a short-lived ceasefire after it said the terror group repeatedly rebuffed offers to release the remaining hostages.”

To be sure, “activities” is as good a euphemism for genocide as any. And as the corporate media carry on with their own militant activities, one wishes some sort of pressure could stop the truth from being held hostage.

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