NYT Buries News That Experts on Genocide Say Israel Is Committing It

Saurav Sarkar

The Washington Post's headline (9/1/25) on the IAGS resolution didn't mince words--though it did get Israel calling the resolution "disgraceful" into the subhead.

The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) passed a resolution on August 31 declaring that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza, with 86% of voting members in agreement.

The declaration by the group, described as "the world's biggest academic association of genocide scholars" (Reuters, 9/1/25), was widely seen as significant news. Prominent US media sources like CNN (9/1/25), NBC (9/1/25), ABC (9/2/25), CBS (9/3/25), PBS (9/1/25), NPR (9/2/25), AP (9/2/25), Time (9/1/25) and Newsweek (9/1/25) published stories on the IAGS resolution. They bore headlines like the Washington Post's “Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza, Leading Scholars’ Association Says” (9/1/25). So, too, did numerous international news sources, with the BBC (9/1/25) running the headline “Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza, World's Leading Experts Say.”

But the New York Times (9/1/25), which has repeatedly come under fire for its bias against Palestinians during Israel’s two-year-long rampage in Gaza, buried the news in the 31st paragraph of a story headlined “Israel’s Push for a Permanent Gaza Deal May Mean a Longer War, Experts Say.” The article immediately followed the brief mention of the IAGS resolution with a response from the Israeli government that called it an “an embarrassment to the legal profession,” and “entirely based on Hamas’s campaign of lies and the laundering of those lies by others.”

The New York Times (9/1/25) thought the "experts" who thought Israel was risking a longer war were more newsworthy than the ones who thought Israel was committing genocide.

The Times' treatment as an afterthought of the confirmation by genocide scholars of an ongoing genocide in Gaza recalls the paper's real-time coverage of the Nazi Holocaust, which often relegated news of mass death to its back pages, and sometimes to the last paragraphs of unrelated stories (Extra!, Summer/89). Those pieces rarely quoted the genocidaires justifying their atrocities, however.

The Times story of the IAGS resolution included this little nugget that promoted the conflation of Palestinian civilians and Hamas fighters:

More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, including about 18,000 children and minors, according to Gaza health officials, whose toll does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

While the reporter on the story, Isabel Kershner, can’t be held responsible for the headline, FAIR has written previously on her history of misleading readers through pro-Israeli bias and her conflicts of interest. The activist organization Writers Against the War on Gaza has also thoroughly documented why she might not be the most objective source on Israel/Palestine.

But she may have just been following the directives of her editors, who warned staffers last year away from using the word "genocide" in relation to Gaza (FAIR.org, 8/4/25). "We should…set a high bar for allowing others to use it as an accusation, whether in quotations or not,” the memo told employees.

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