Humanitarian disaster and historical injustice: CNN and Al Jazeera’s discursive construction of the Palestine–Israel conflict

This article analyses how CNN and Al Jazeera construct discourses on the Palestine–Israel conflict using the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA). Through textual, visual, and historical analysis, CNN is shown to frame the conflict as a humanitarian crisis intertwined with security concerns, frequently emphasizing Israeli victimhood while presenting Palestinian suffering in collective terms. By contrast, Al Jazeera stresses occupation, deprivation, and historical continuity, prioritizing Palestinian perspectives. The study contributes to Middle Eastern media studies by demonstrating how divergent editorial orientations reproduce distinct ideological narratives, yet both reveal the scale of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza in ways that cannot be obscured.