Back in September, as I was writing about an anti-Israel hoax spread by a medical professional in Gaza, a particular term she used caught my attention. The story arose from an interview that the journalists Ryan Grim and his co-host Emily Jashinsky conducted with a Canadian nurse in the war zone. In the recorded interview, the nurse, with Grim’s and Jashinsky’s encouragement, spread a debunked claim that Israel was planting exploding tuna cans so that hungry Gazan children would be maimed or killed while foraging for food.
Although it should have been recognized as false immediately—it’s a fairly ridiculous accusation—weapons experts in the U.S. and Europe quickly put it to rest. (A France24 fact-check was particularly thorough.)
What had caught my attention but what I didn’t think worth mentioning at the time was that in the video and transcript, the nurse says that she thinks the alleged exploding food containers were left in residential areas “when the IOF is, you know, raiding homes and stuff.”
The IOF is an abbreviation for “Israeli occupation forces.” It’s a derogatory term used by anti-Israel partisans to refer to the Israeli military. Generally, people who use it see Israel as an illegitimate state—as you can see from the context, the term is used to describe Israeli troops of any kind.
I thought of that nurse’s interview again this afternoon when I watched CNN’s Christiane Amanpour interview a Palestinian and Israeli filmmaking team who oppose the demolition of unauthorized Palestinian structures built on an IDF training plot. (Israel’s Supreme Court approved the demolitions after it was proved that the structures were built well after the site was designated for the IDF.) A clip making the rounds showed Amanpour saying to the Arab member of the duo: “I understand why you would want to film what’s happening to your own villages from the settlers and the Israeli occupation forces.”
The term is rarely used by mainstream journalists, for obvious reasons, unless they’re directly quoting parties to the conflict and NGOs. It has been used to describe Israeli forces in Lebanon over the years, though in those cases it was referring to an actual military occupation, not IDF forces conducting antiterror raids in places in which they are not stationed and certainly not in Gaza.
What struck me when I watched the interview from the beginning is that Amanpour was the first to use the phrase—she introduced “Israeli occupation forces” into the conversation.
The phrase is a tell. Anyone who changes a subject’s name to a derogatory nickname made up by that subject’s proclaimed enemies is not practicing straight journalism. That is why you usually see “Israeli occupation forces” in opinion columns, not news reporting. Amanpour has had a long career as a star news correspondent, and she now anchors a “global affairs” show.
Her behavior throughout the war has raised ethical concerns. Amanpour has reportedly complained about CNN’s strict use of its fact-checking team for war-related reporting. Her confrontation with CNN brass seemed to work, as she then aired a segment on a “mass grave” in Khan Younis that was blamed on the Israelis but turned out to have been dug by Palestinians. In October, she ran a segment that appeared to use staged footage and fabricated scenes in Gaza.
Her use of “Israeli occupation forces” is revealing, just as it was in the case of the nurse. When someone uses made-up names in their reporting, it’s not shocking to find other inaccuracies in their work. But the obligations of Amanpour and the nurse differ. The nurse isn’t pretending to be a journalist. Is Amanpour?