I'm sure a reporter asked him to clarify what he meant about that speech he gave the IOF; there's no way journalists would be so ridiculously incompetent as to not ask for clarification; cause like, at that point it's not imposter syndrome, it's just genuine, actual incompetence and larping as a journalist.
He was asked to clarify, right?
I found a times of Israel article that claims his office said it meant specifically Hamas (which seems a bit strange then to mention women, children and even cattle, unless he thinks some cows from Diablo 2's secret cow level escaped and joined Hamas' struggle for liberation); but even in the recent speech at the UN, he seems to still denounce the Palestinian people, seemingly forgetting it's supposed to be Hamas he's at war with, not the civilian population. I'm not sure he was ever directly asked on camera or at least personally on the record to clarify his comments.
Hamas seems to have always been easy to directly speak with in regards to things they've said or their mission statements; Netanyahu though seems bizarrely difficult to speak with and to be asked direct questions like this.
I am curious why he keeps having scathing criticisms of the Palestinian people if it's not them he's 'at war' with; someone should remind him the narrative is it's Hamas he's 'at war' with, not the civilian population of Gaza. I'm sure a competent reporter has brought up his past speech and offered his current comments for comparison; like how unfit for your job would you have to be miss a major question like this?
If you're an access journalist, the only way you ask a sitting prime minister of a Western ally "hard questions" is as a setup for him to deflect and downplay criticism. If you would want to actually corner him on this, you would have to build an entire career around not doing that with anybody ever until you come off as harmless enough to get accredited to the press conference, then you'd have one shot at going off script and pressing him on clarification of the obvious, then you'd spend the rest of your career trying to monetize your substack because no network would ever employ you again.
To be fair, they'd most likely be picked up immediately by something like Zeteo.
I'd like to be understanding of the position these people would be in, but if ever there was a time to have integrity, calling out a genocide would be it; also there are people with far less in life sacrificing themselves to go to prison for to do their part to fight the genocide, like the people committing sabotage of weapons facilities.
But then it's really only spineless journalists who ever climb that ladder, or are allowed to climb it. If I recall correctly, Jimmy Kimmel got his opportunity to sit with Trump a number of years back and basically softballed the whole thing, and now when he says something minor he nearly loses his job for good (heck, they made him cry on screen to get his job back). The people climbing that ladder left their spines behind a long time ago.
From what I know, journalism doesn't exactly pay very well on average, and the highest paid journalists work for the AP, which isn't exactly that high compared to other fields. So with that being said, if the average journalist really wants to keep working in journalism, and not have to make a career change in the middle of their life, then they're going to have to buy into the system outright. So more often than not most of the people that go into it that are passionate about being a journalist probably just get beat down by it all, and figure that keeping your head down and trying to survive like everyone else is the most honorable thing to do.
It also doesn't exactly help that a portion of western journalists are either CIA mouth pieces (knowing and unknowing), current CIA agents, or are ex-CIA.
These are western journalists. "Integrity" is a word they only know exists because they sometimes have to put in headlines.