ABSTRACT
The events of October 7, 2023, were reflexively framed in Western media discourse as a historical rupture comparable to September 11, 2001, reshaping public interpretations of the war in Gaza. Such analogies carry significant implications for how violence, responsibility, and political legitimacy are constructed in international news coverage. Drawing on Robert Entman’s framing theory, alongside insights from Edward Said and Antonio Gramsci, this study employs qualitative discourse analysis to examine how BBC reporting structured these interpretive boundaries. This article argues that BBC coverage of the Gaza war following October 7, 2023, not only reflected existing political divi- sions but also actively participated in constructing them, normalizing Israeli military action within a securitized logic while limiting the historical and political intelligibility of Palestinian claims. By discursively repositioning October 7 as a foundational rupture analogous to September 11, 2001, BBC reporting embedded subsequent events within a counterterrorism paradigm that marginalized broader histories of occupation, blockade, and structural violence. The findings demonstrate that, across Entman’s four framing functions, problem definition centered on terrorism; causal interpretation emphasized Hamas’ responsibility, including recurrent references to human shields; moral evaluation displayed asymmetries in the personalization and humanization of Israeli and Palestinian suffering; and treatment recommendations prioritized Israeli security-centered responses over structural political solutions. Collectively, these patterns suggest that BBC coverage functioned as a site of epistemic ordering, shaping interpretive hierarchies in which Israeli military actions were rendered intelligible within security logics while Palestinian political claims were more narrowly contextualized in an asymmetrical conflict.