FOI reveals top Israeli general met media editors and Lammy to ‘enhance support for Israel’ during genocide

A freedom of Information Act request by Israeli lawyer Elad Man has revealed that former Israeli Chief of Staff and Gaza Division commander General Aviv Kohavi spent three days in the UK for private meetings with editors of major UK news media a month after Israel began its genocide in Gaza that has killed at least 200,000 civilians and reportedly as many as 700,000.

Kohavi met, among others, Guardian editor-in-chief Katherine Viner, director of BBC news content Richard Burgess, Sky News chairman David Rhodes and Financial Times editors including Roula Khalaf, to ‘enhance the trend of support for Israel’ – and held a ‘private meeting’ with Foreign Secretary (then-Shadow) David Lammy – according to the planning documents for the trip. Israel had already slaughtered more than ten thousand Palestinians by the time of the visit.

According to Declassified, Kohavi has:

justified attacks on journalists, saying the soldiers who shot reporter Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank “showed courage” and that he had not one “gram of regret” for flattening the Associated Press (AP) office in Gaza

and has boasted of giving the order to fire on unarmed Palestinian protesters, an order that led to the killing of more than two hundred Palestinians, including forty-six children.

BBC journalists could not recall any information about the ‘unprecedented’ and ‘outrageous’ meeting being circulated among the supposedly-impartial broadcaster’s staff – a departure from usual practice – suggesting that it was kept secret apart from a small circle. The BBC has been widely and rightly criticised for its anti-Palestinian editorial bias.

Meetings with senior British intelligence and military officials were also proposed, but it’s unclear whether these took place.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy have refused to mention, let alone condemn, Israel’s mass slaughter and continual atrocities in Gaza or its bombing of hospitals, schools, ambulances, tents, or its slaughter of doctors, journalists, academics – often along with their families – or even Israel’s murder of British aid workers or its now-admitted ‘Hannibal’ slaughter of its own people during the 7 October 2023 raid. Both have also refused to admit that Israel is committing genocide.

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