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If you don’t have a good story to tell, a tried and tested tactic is to lampoon the press.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry, which is bracing for a United Nations report on its conduct during last year’s war in Gaza, gave it a shot this week.

It was lame. It wasn’t funny. It was offensive.

The ministry released an animated video depicting a clueless, blonde, American-accented television journalist reporting idiotically from the Gaza Strip as Hamas militants lurked in the background. The spoof echoes a longstanding claim by the Israeli government: that Western journalists reporting from Gaza are often biased against Israel and refrain from criticizing Hamas, the militant group that runs the occupied territory.

The majority of international journalists who report out of Gaza deliver nuanced, measured and indispensable coverage. They often do so at great personal risk. Covering asymmetrical conflicts as deadly as Israel’s campaigns against militants in Gaza, an occupied territory, is among the toughest work journalists do.

Juxtaposing the cartoon against the dispatches of Sherine Tadros, the stellar Sky News Middle East correspondent, or Quentin Sommerville of the B.B.C. makes Israel’s attempt at humor hard to swallow. Remembering the colleagues who have died reporting from Gaza makes it intolerable.

Israeli officials have a long history of unfairly maligning certain Western journalists. But recently, the government has become more aggressive as part of an effort to mend its reputation abroad.

Israel’s Foreign Press Association expressed alarm about the video.

“Israel’s diplomatic corps wants to be taken seriously in the world,” the group said in a statement. “Posting misleading and poorly conceived videos on YouTube is inappropriate, unhelpful and undermines the ministry, which says it respects the foreign press and its freedom to work in Gaza.”

Israel’s image problem is not the result of global misunderstanding of Hamas. The militant group is hardly championed or lionized abroad. Its tactics and abuses have been duly documented by the press.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry, so far, is laughing off the controversy around the video.

They’re laughing alone.