Israel Poisoned Lebanon’s Farms. Then Killed the 262nd Reporter.

Cover-Ups GriftMatrix

The evidence grows while the witnesses disappear

I want to talk about two things that are happening at the same time, ’cause I think when you put them next to each other it tells you something nobody’s really saying out loud.

The first thing is that Mohammed Wishah, an Al Jazeera correspondent who’d been with the network since 2018, was killed yesterday by an Israeli drone strike in Gaza. His car was hit on al-Rashid Street. It caught fire. He’s the 262nd journalist killed by Israeli forces since October 2023.

262 journalists.

Ten of them from Al Jazeera alone. I’m gonna name them ’cause somebody should.

Samer Abu Daqqa. Hamza Al Dahdouh. Ismail Al Ghoul. Ahmed Al Louh. Hossam Shabat. Ibrahim Thaher. Mohammed Qreiqea. Mohammed Nofal. Anas Al Sharif. And now Mohammed Wishah.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says this is the deadliest period for the press in recorded history. Not just in this conflict. In the history of keeping track.

Israel said Wishah was a former Hamas commander based on seized documents. Al Jazeera rejected the claim. And this is the part that should make you uncomfortable regardless of where you fall on this – you accuse someone of being a militant after they’re already dead. The person can’t respond. You can say whatever you want about a dead journalist.

Okay. Now the second thing.

Back in January and February, Israeli military aircraft flew low over villages in southern Lebanon and Syria’s Quneitra province and sprayed something on the farmland. Lebanese authorities ran lab tests. It was glyphosate – that’s the active ingredient in Roundup. The World Health Organization classified it as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015.

But it wasn’t normal spraying. The concentrations were 20 to 50 times higher than standard agricultural use. They covered 8.5 square kilometers of farmland, forests, and livestock grazing areas. The crops are dead. The vegetation is dead. Lebanese officials said it could contaminate the water and the food chain for multiple growing seasons. A farmer in Quneitra told a reporter: “We lost everything.”

Israel’s official explanation is that this was a security operation to deny militants cover. They had to kill the crops so fighters can’t hide in them.

The European Parliament has opened a formal inquiry into whether this is a war crime. PAX, the Dutch peace organization, called it “collective punishment of civilian populations through environmental destruction.” Lebanon is filing a complaint with the UN Security Council.

And here’s why I’m putting these two things together.

The people who would normally cover the glyphosate story – who would go to southern Lebanon and photograph the dead fields, interview the farmers, document the soil tests, test the water, put it in front of cameras – those people are disappearing.
262 of them.

At a rate nobody has ever seen in any conflict. The coverage of the herbicide spraying has been thin, and it’s not hard to figure out why. There aren’t enough reporters left alive to cover it.

You spray the fields. You kill the crops. And the people who would’ve reported on the dead crops keep getting killed by drone strikes.

I don’t know what to call that. But I know it’s not a coincidence that the two things are happening at the same time, and I know that 262 dead journalists means there’s a lot of stuff we’re just never gonna hear about.

Sources