This study examines linguistic features, ‘Transitivity selections’, used in the British Press (The Guardian and The Times) to cover the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip. This study aims to identify the linguistic structures, show how the Israelis and the Palestinians were represented and show the ideological-political dimensions behind the representation in the coverage of the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip. To achieve these objectives, I follow Halliday’s Systematic Functional Grammar as a tool in CDA and Critical linguistic generally. In particular, I focus on the Transitivity to analyse four news reports as the data corpus gathered from The Guardian and The Times in the period from 1 December 2007 to 28 February 2008.

The analysis shows that the main representation of the Israeli participants is ‘Sensor’ and ‘Sayer’ and that the processes attributed to those participants are ‘Mental’ and ‘Verbal’. On contrary, the main representation of the Palestinian participants is ‘Actor’ in the role of ‘attackers’ and ‘enemy’ and the processes accompanied with those Actors are ‘Material’. Behind the Transitivity selections, the analysis shows also ideological-political dimensions represented in the exclusion of the Palestinian voice in the British newspapers and the transferring of the moral responsibility of the occupation of Palestinian Gaza Strip from Israel to Egypt especially after the breaking of the border ‘the Wall’ (different from the Wall in the occupied West Bank/East Jerusalem) between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. The study concludes with a summary of the results from the analysis of the BP’s coverage of the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip.