In Coverage of the Har Habayis, Media Outlets Echo the Propaganda of Hamas

By Rinat Harash

 On Sunday, August 3, major media outlets amplified a distorted Palestinian narrative about Jerusalem’s Temple Mount — Judaism’s holiest site — in a way that did more than just misinform. It helped legitimize the very rhetoric used by Hamas to justify its October 7, 2023 massacre.

From factual errors to sensationalism, the coverage of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s brief visit to the Al-Aqsa compound on Tisha B’Av — the Jewish day of mourning for the destruction of the ancient Temples — was painted as a dangerous provocation, a spark threatening to ignite further regional instability.

This is more than bad reporting. It’s complicity in a lie that kills.

While Jewish prayer at the site — the third holiest for Muslims — is forbidden, any outlet that paints such a non-violent act as dangerous automatically adopts the point of view of the real extremists, forgetting that such coverage fuels terrorist propaganda.

Compound Vs. Mosque

Outlets like The Guardian and The Times of London suggested Ben-Gvir had literally entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque and prayed inside.

He didn’t.\

He visited the broader Temple Mount compound, which includes the mosque, but also happens to be the site of the First and Second Jewish Temples. He said a short, silent prayer to mark the day Jews mourn the destruction of those temples. That’s it.

The International Business Times even suggested that the Al-Aqsa Mosque itself is sacred to Jews — a basic factual error that betrays either ignorance or ideological bias. Neither reflects well on a journalist.

Meanwhile, The Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press left out any context about the significance of the day for Jews, and instead used the opportunity to link Ben-Gvir’s visit to unrelated violence in Gaza.

The BBC avoided using the Hebrew term “Har HaBayit” (Temple Mount) altogether, referring to it only by the Arabic “Haram al-Sharif,” as though the Jewish connection to the site is some kind of fringe claim.

Fueling the Flames

Such coverage — whether through carelessness or design — frames Jews as the problem. And that’s exactly the kind of narrative that fuels genocidal violence, like the one launched on October 7, 2023.

As Hamas itself stated after slaughtering 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping hundreds into Gaza, operation “Al-Aqsa Flood” was a legitimate response against “the Israeli judaization plans of the blessed al-Aqsa Mosque” and “the intensification of the Israeli settlers’ incursions into the holy Mosque.”

By repeating this framing — that a Jew praying at his holiest site is a threat to Muslims — the media feed the propaganda machine that fuels antisemitic violence.

Let’s be clear: any outlet that claims Jewish prayer sparked “outrage” or “anger” is not reporting — it’s siding with the murderers. Men too fragile to hear Hebrew on the Temple Mount, yet brutal enough to slit Jewish throats.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.