Reuters Covers For Israel’s White Phosphorus Use in Lebanon
On the afternoon of May 10, the official Reuters social media accounts posted a video. The video shows white phosphorus airbursting over south Lebanon. The unmistakable octopus pattern of an M825 round, bringing untold horrors to the citizens underneath, while marking an all too familiar and significant breach of international law. The caption on the video does not mention the illegality of the crime, it doesn’t even mention the illegal munition at all, Reuters simply calls it “thick smoke”. The video itself contains the words “Israeli strikes send smoke billowing over south Lebanon as Hezbollah tensions persist.”
There was no accompanying article, and the framing suggests that these are legitimate attacks against Hezbollah, despite international law and a ceasefire agreement dictating that this is not legal.
Reuters employs some of the best journalists working in conflict zones today. They report from Beirut, from Tyre, from Gaza, often under fire and often in defiance of the regimes they are documenting. This article is not focused on the journalists at Reuters, those are people we look up to here at Crust News, they are largely responsible for our existence. However, there is a layer above those journalist, and it is that layer that continues to taint excellent journalism with the mould of propaganda. There is a significant pattern of Reuters publishing a story that is paired with a headline that does an injustice to the reporting underneath it, this represents an entity that is increasingly more focused on how the reader may perceive things, rather than aiming at sharing truth. The reporters do journalism, the outlet increasingly does not, do not confuse them.
What the footage shows is not contested. The M825A1 is a 155mm base-ejection projectile of American manufacture, used by the Israeli regime in Lebanon and Gaza for years. On detonation it disperses 116 burning wedges of felt impregnated with white phosphorus across an area between 125 and 250 meters in diameter. Each wedge burns at around 815°C, and each keeps burning until it is consumed or starved of oxygen. On skin, it burns to the bone, when it reaches the skin of a child, it does so faster. The use of the weapons by Israel has been recorded for decades, with regular usage documented in Lebanon and Gaza in recent years.
The visual signature is the most recognizable in modern artillery. Any journalist covering geopolitics can recognise the weapons, specialists employed at Reuters are more than aware of the signature of the weapons. We cannot pretend this was some form of accident, especially as the post remains up, despite users far and wide calling out the outlet’s disgraceful piece of journalism.
The text in the video tells us the video was captured from Northern Israel. This is the firing side, and it is the side the post has chosen to look from. Literally and figuratively, Reuters chose the Israeli side.
We must also look at what is absent in the post from Reuters. There is no death toll. By the morning of May 10, the Lebanese health ministry’s running count had passed 2,750 dead in Israeli strikes since March 2, with more than 8,500 injured. There is no mention of Saturday’s strike near Nabatieh, in which an Israeli drone hit a Syrian man and his twelve-year-old daughter on a motorbike, returned to kill him after they had moved away from the first impact, and then attacked the daughter directly on a third pass. There is no mention of the more than one million Lebanese people displaced. There is no mention that the so-called ceasefire agreed in Washington on April 17 has been characterized by China’s UN envoy as a “lesser fire” and by Al Jazeera’s Beirut correspondent as a diplomatic fiction. In the absence of an accompanying article, we are forced to assume this is the level of information Reuters were willing to give their readers about this incident.
This works because of who is doing it. The Daily Mail could not run this post, Fox could not run this post, those outlets are so tainted that the wider public knows their games. Reuters can run it because Reuters has spent more than a century building a reputation for the very same journalism that I praised at the beginning of this piece. That reputation was built by reporters, reporters who now have their efforts misrepresented by the outlet.
The institutional layer above them has the use of that reputation as an asset. And what we are watching, with increasing frequency, is that asset being spent. The credibility built by people in the field has become a shield the desk hides behind, and a shield regularly offered to an Israeli military who commits war crimes with almost as much regularity as sunrises.
There is a hypothesis worth discussing. What if someone at Reuters wanted this video out there? Perhaps they knew what it shows, and they also knew that captioning it accurately, “Israeli white phosphorus attack on south Lebanon”, would kill the post before it left their computer, or introduce a threat to their own career at the outlet. For the record, this is the version of events I prefer, but one I cannot confirm. The respect I hold for the journalists at Reuters has left me this bias, that I need to believe someone knew.
If that is what happened, it does not exonerate Reuters. It means the laundering is not editorial accident or social-desk laziness. It is the price of publication. Someone at Reuters knew what this was, fought for the footage to go out, and lost the fight over what it would be called. The post is what surrender looks like in a wire-service newsroom in 2026, should this hypothesis be true.
The footage has reached millions. Most of those who see it will never click through, because there is nothing to click through to, there’s no article about it. Unless they open the comments, they will never learn this was a war crime. They will form an impression and move on, the impression the Reuters social desk has chosen to give them is that smoke rose in south Lebanon yesterday, that this followed some strikes, and that Hezbollah is the reason any of this is happening. Each of those impressions is, on its own, defensible as a fact. Stacked together and shorn of everything else, they are propaganda.
The Reuters social desk knows what white phosphorus looks like. They know what this attack meant for those on the ground in south Lebanon. They chose this caption anyway. The reporters who report from the rubble are owed better than that, and so is the audience who pay Reuters for their journalism. We know one thing for sure, we will never disrespect our readers in this manner, no matter who demands it of us.
Another day, another vicious Israeli war crime exposed - not by the journalists who wrote the story but by the evidence of the photos explained by those with knowledge. Shame on you Reuters for failing your journalists and the victims of the crime shown clearly in the photo you published without context. Legitimate or not, Israel exists. Their right to the land they were given was always doubtful, but as a white Australian the same can be said of me. First Nations people everywhere have claims ignored by the power-hungry money-grubbers who arrived without warning and claimed land to which they had no right. After five generations, I'm Australian and have no other home. The Israeli people have no other home. I know this and realise that many do not support Netanyahu. SO STOP HIM. The USA has committed it's fair share of war crimes, the current invasion of Iran among the most stupid. It seems these two rogue states co-operate as they continue their global assault. The world needs to unite and STOP THEM. We still use words that soften the crimes being committed. It's not a little excursion, and the victims are not collateral damage. A US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz wasn't a brilliant idea as stated by the Thief in Chief. Nor was killing the new Ayatollah's father and his wife and children. There IS regime change, but Iran doesn't want Donald Trump. They hate him even more now than previously. The rhetoric coming from the USA is nonsense. If action were to be taken to protect the citizens in Iran (and many were suffering under the brutal regime now in power), it is only legitimate if requested by the people of Iran and action taken by an international authority. Donald Trump announcing that he's decided to interfere in the affairs of another country is a crime, so arrest him and put him in prison. Netanyahu the same. They are murdering people and stealing their land. The brutality of war is unimaginable to those of us who have never been attacked. The photo that you show carries a weight of suffering that remains obscured to most of us. Thankyou for the clarity, painful though it is.