Objective: On October 7, 2023, the Hamas group launched a multi-pronged attack from the Gaza Strip to the south of Israel. This action, which was the beginning of armed conflicts between Israel and Palestinian militant groups led by Hamas, has been named the “Al-Aqsa storm operation” by Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups and “Black Saturday” or “Simchat Torah Massacre” by Israel.
In today's world, the media, an integral part of human life, are the main tools people use to make sense of the world. The media's importance in war conditions and crises has doubled, and they have become the most essential sources of reliable information and awareness of the world and its changes.
The start of the Hamas attacks on Israel quickly made headlines around the world, and based on their news policies, the media took specific approaches to reflecting this event. The present study investigates the media representation of the Israel-Gaza war in the IRNA news agency, BBC Persian website, Al-Arabiya Persian website, and Deutsche Welle Persian website.
For this purpose, Theon Van Dijk's critical discourse analysis method was used in this article to investigate the media representation of the Israel-Gaza war in the IRNA news agency, BBC Persian website, Al-Arabiya Persian website, and Deutsche Welle Persian website and to answer the research questions including "1. How is the media representation of the Israel-Gaza war in different media outlets including IRNA news agency, BBC Persian website, Al-Arabiya Persian website, and Deutsche Welle Persian website?” and “2. What are the differences and similarities between the discourses of these media outlets in the construction of the Israel-Gaza war?”
Methods: Based on the presented definitions, discourse can be considered an intellectual system consisting of expressions and cognitive and epistemological attitudes that creates a specific way of thinking that serves the interests of a specific group. Some sociologists also consider discourse to be synonymous with ideology.
Theon Van Dijk believes that ideology is the basis of common social representations of a group and influences attitudes, judgments, and what members of the group consider to be right or wrong. Van Dijk considers ideologies as cognitive symmetries of power and states that they should work best to serve the interests of a particular group.
Critical discourse analysis seeks to answer the question of how discourses reproduce the involved macrostructures.
Results: The results of this research showed that the mentioned media have presented different discourses on the Israel-Gaza war, each expressing the ideological position from which they operate. Therefore, the media seek to construct reality rather than act as a mirror that reflects the developing events. IRNA news agency’s discourse emphasized that the return of the issue of Palestine to its rightful place in the world’s public opinion was the primary goal of carrying out the Al-Aqsa storm operation. At the same time, this issue is the consequence of the actions of the international community, especially some countries in the Islamic world that sought to normalize relations with the Zionist regime.
IRNA news agency sees breaking the silence of the international community in response to the Palestinian issue and Israel's actions, disrupting the process of normalizing relations between the Arab governments and the Zionist regime, returning the Palestinian issue to its rightful place, and dealing a solid blow to the information and propaganda power of the Zionist regime among the achievements of this operation.
In BBC Persian’s discourse, the actions of Hamas were considered to be the leading cause of the war, and the subsequent decision of Israel to start the war was seen as a retaliatory action. BBC Persian describes Hamas fighters as violent and merciless people who have attacked Israeli settlements without any warning and have committed terrible crimes in these areas; therefore, the international community should support the Israeli people and soldiers who are united to fight Hamas.
Conclusions:The result of this discourse-making method that was presented in the early days of the war was that when Israel attacked Gaza in the following months, BBC Persian was biased in reporting the fate of the people of Gaza and representing the crimes committed by Israel.
In the review of Deutsche Welle Persian news website, a point of view similar to that of BBC Persian was observed; however, Deutsche Welle tried to show Islam as the main cause of these actions, placing Islam in opposition to the West. In this medium's discourse, Hamas is introduced as an ideology and political idea formed on the axis of religion. This issue has caused Hamas to emerge as a social movement that has many followers in Palestine, and the Palestinian people participate in what this group does by supporting Hamas's ideology. In this regard, Deutsche Welle refers to the battles and struggles of the Western allies of Israel with other Islamic extremist groups, such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, to show Hamas as a part of the Islamic world, which past experiences have shown to be the birthplace of the most extremist ideas.
Al-Arabiya Persian's discourse emphasized Iran's role as a negotiator in preventing Hezbollah's involvement in this war. In addition, in the early days of this operation, Al-Arabiya Persian reduced it to the level of an individual reaction, seeking to minimize the disruption of Israel’s relations with Arab countries. What is important to Al-Arabiya Persian is not to create tension in Arab-Israeli relations.