The 'Unchilding' of Palestinian boy Adel Al-Najjar
A deep dive into recent misleading Australian headlines on Palestine and Lebanon.
Headlines are often the only part of a news story that people read. The way they are framed therefore plays a powerful role in shaping the public’s understanding of political issues and events.
When it comes to the Australian mainstream media’s coverage of Israel you can quickly identify several persistent framing patterns: Israel is often not named as the perpetrator; euphemisms are used to obscure the scale of its actions; Israeli talking points are presented uncritically as fact; and Palestinians, including children, are dehumanised, either by erasing their identities or reducing their deaths to a statistic.
The result is a distorted picture of the reality on the ground, with the horrors of Israel’s actions downplayed and the suffering of Palestinians minimised.
And as the Israeli military employs the same strategies that devastated Gaza in Lebanon, similar patterns can also be observed in Australian media coverage, where framing choices continue to shield audiences from Israel’s ongoing atrocities.
Over the past 12 days, a number of particularly egregious headlines have appeared in Australian media. This article examines two of them as case studies in media framing.
How AAP sanitised Israel’s targeting and killing of a Palestinian child
On April 29, AAP ran this headline: “Five killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza Strip: medics”. This is grossly disconnected from what the article goes on to report:
A nine-year old Palestinian boy named Adel Al-Najjar was collecting cardboard for his family’s cooking fire in the southern city of Khan Yunis. Israeli soldiers saw him and then targeted and killed him with a drone. The Israeli military said he posed an “imminent threat” to soldiers because he was approaching the “Yellow Line”, which demarcates the part of Gaza occupied by Israel. AAP repeats this Israeli talking point without noting the inherent contradiction of a child holding cardboard being a military danger. The paragraph concludes by noting that the military “did not provide evidence the individual posed a threat”, a framing that implicitly normalises the premise that a Palestinian child could constitute such a threat. The article further reports that a separate Israeli airstrike targeted a car in Gaza City, killing another four Palestinians.
AAP employs several framing techniques to distance the reader from this reality in the headline, such as:
Using passive voice to delink Israel’s actions from their outcomes. i.e., “Five killed in Israeli strikes,” rather than active voice - “Israeli strikes kill five people.”
Dehumanising Palestinians by erasing their identity and reducing their deaths to a number.
“Unchilding” Palestinian children by omitting that a nine-year old boy was killed, stifling the emotional response that the targeting of a child would naturally elicit.
A more accurate headline would look like this:
This headline isn’t an anomaly. We have seen countless examples in Western media in which the identity of a Palestinian child is erased, either through omission or the portrayal of them as adults. This process is what Palestinian academic Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has coined “unchilding” in order to expose the dehumanisation that accompanies violence against children in a colonial context. As Yara Hawari, co-director of Al-Shabaka writes, “in occupied and colonised Palestine, Palestinian children are stripped of their childhood in order to justify the brutality that is inflicted upon them”.
Further, a June 2024 Australian study conducted by DeepCut and NewsCord found that the ABC used humanising words 1.58 times for Israelis to every 1 instance for Palestinians. Similarly, a 2023 study by Islamophobia Register Australia found that across six major Australian outlets the active voice was more likely to be used when describing attacks on Israel, while the passive voice used more frequently used to describe what was happening in Gaza.
How The Canberra Times shielded Israel from accountability
On April 23, The Canberra Times came out with this headline: “Lebanon attacks strain ceasefire on eve of US talks”.
As reported in the article, the “attacks” mentioned refer to Israeli strikes that killed four Lebanese people and Hezbollah launching a drone at Israeli forces in southern Lebanon. Placing these on equal footing under the label “Lebanon attacks” creates a false equivalence, presenting disproportionate events as comparable acts of aggression. This reflects a broader pattern in Western media coverage that presents Israel as engaged in even-handed conflict (whether in Lebanon or Palestine), despite the reality of asymmetric warfare.
The Canberra Times employs several framing techniques to distort this reality in the headline, such as:
Omitting Israel as the perpetrator
Leading with location to frame Lebanon as the aggressor
Dehumanising the Lebanese by erasing their deaths
A more accurate headline would look like this:
Again, this headline isn’t an anomaly. As of the weekend, Israeli strikes in Lebanon have killed 2,659 Lebanese since the current war began on March 2, including more than a hundred heath care workers. Yet, the scale of this loss of life is rarely reflected in Australian media coverage. We conducted a quick scan of 200 headlines across mainstream outlets over the past two months and found that only 14 centred Lebanese people killed in airstrikes, with just over half of those attributing responsibility to Israel. And despite the Israeli military having systematically flattened or partially destroyed more than 55 Lebanese towns and villages in the south, only one headline centred this fact. Across the sample, Australian headlines more often centred Israeli military operations and diplomatic developments, such as negotiations and ceasefires.
As noted, these two misleading headlines are not isolated. They are part of a systemic pattern in Australian media where headlines and framing consistently reflect a pro-Israel narrative, “unchild” and dehumanise, and conceal the true scale of Israel’s catastrophic destruction. By diminishing a sense of urgency or public outrage that Israel’s ongoing atrocities, including genocide, should elicit, this coverage effectively shields Israel and its Australian and Western backers from accountability.
You can read our short form analyses of recent misleading Australian headlines on our Instagram page, including how the ABC sanitised Israel’s forced displacement of Lebanese civilians.
And if you’d like to hear more about Mssing Context, you can watch or listen to my recent chat with Joel Jenkins from the Bogan Intelligentsia podcast, where we unpack the failings in Australian media coverage on Palestine, unchecked political claims post-Bondi, and the consequences of those claims going unchallenged.