After the Alabama Supreme Court ruled frozen human embryos should be treated with care, corporate media spent months lambasting invitro fertilization critics and advocating for killing the embryos at adults’ leisure. Outlets’ tunes, however, changed this week when stories began to circulate about Israel allegedly destroying the “majority of Gaza’s frozen embryos.”
Reuters published an article, video segment, and podcast last week lamenting a December airstrike it says destroyed an estimated 4,000 frozen embryos in Gaza City’s Al Basma IVF facility, as well as stored sperm and eggs. The Telegraph echoed the story and its angle.
“The embryos were the last hope for hundreds of Palestinian couples facing infertility,” the caption on the video post states. A line in the article echoes the sentiment.
The publication attributed the tragedy to Israel, which it claimed launched a shell in December that compromised the temperature requirements of five of the facility’s cryopreservation tanks, destroying thousands of frozen embryos, sperm, and eggs.
Reuters noted that “Israel denies intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure and has accused Hamas fighters of operating from medical facilities, which Hamas denies.” But it also repeatedly painted Israel’s retaliation for Hamas’s Oct. 7 rape and murder spree, the deadliest attack on Jewish civilians since the Holocaust, as an “all-out assault” on the terrorist-supporting territory.
The Guardian took it further in its “The Week in Patriarchy.” Columnist Arwa Mahdawi not only blamed Israel for the bomb “possibly provided by the US,” but snarkily suggested the “genocidal” country’s intelligence
