Benjamin Netanyahu has three things to thank Bashar al-Assad for. Firstly, for having preserved, apart from two incidents in 2011, the ceasefire that has prevailed since 1974 between Israel and Syria, a ceasefire that nonetheless enabled Israel to annex the Syrian territory of the Golan Heights. Secondly, for having blindly ransacked the thousand-year-old heritage of Aleppo and the rest of Syria, setting a precedent for the ongoing ransacking of the thousand-year-old heritage of Gaza. Finally, for having bombed the suburbs of Damascus with chemical weapons with impunity in 2013, setting a precedent of impunity for such mass crimes. It is all the more revealing that Joe Biden, guarantor of Israeli impunity in the ongoing offensive against Gaza, was Barack Obama's vice president and the guarantor of Assad's impunity in 2013. The counter-example of Ukraine proves, however, that campaigns of denial of mass crimes can be defeated.

The key to minimising, or even concealing, the suffering inflicted collectively on an entire population lies in the ban on access to the field by the international media. It took the Assad dictatorship two long years, from 2011 to 2013, to effectively ban foreign journalists from observing the Syrian theater of war if they wished to work independently, i.e. without the constant surveillance of the regime's political police. Two long years of intimidation and violence, up to and including targeted attacks, as in the case of Rémi Ochlik and Marie Colvin, killed in 2012 in Homs.

Israel, on the other hand, has not had to expel foreign journalists from the Gaza Strip, from which they were in any case absent during the massacres perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023. All the Netanyahu government had to do was tighten the 16-year stranglehold on Gaza and, since the start of the current offensive, prohibit access by the international press, except for a few visits strictly supervised by the Israeli army, despite repeated requests from correspondents based in Israel.

Coverage of the conflict inside the Gaza Strip subsequently relies on Palestinian journalists whose credibility is systematically called into question by Israel and its relays around the world, even though these journalists have paid a terrible price for the bombardments (109 journalists killed according to the UN as of January 7, while Reporters Without Borders has already filed two complaints against Israel on this subject before the International Criminal Court).

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