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.