During the war in Lebanon last year, when journalists drove through bombed out areas wearing flak jackets in the car – for fear of Israeli air strikes – we also took another precaution. We put a foreign sim card into a phone and placed it on the dashboard, hoping the Israeli drones could detect it. This was due to the common belief that Israel was less likely to target foreign journalists than local ones.
Even writing this, I am disgusted with the privilege; the assumption about what will prompt global outcry and condemnation.
Like so many others, I witnessed the killing of more Palestinian colleagues this week with familiar horror. The murders took place even as the journalists documented and livestreamed: a double-tap strike on civilians in a hospital; a war crime within a war crime, as many are describing it.
Palestinian lives are not worth less than anyone else’s. Maybe they are worth more, given what our colleagues in Gaza have been going through: their bravery and dedication; their suffering.
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Israel denies deliberately targeting journalists, but the facts speak for themselves. And Israel continues to be armed and supported by western countries.
The five journalists killed on Monday included two working for wire services: Hussam Al-Masri, with Reuters; and Mariam Abu Dagga, with the Associated Press (AP). For readers who don’t understand the gravity: this means their reporting is reproduced by outlets across the world, including Irish ones like The Irish Times, RTÉ and the Irish Independent. Reuters and AP make up two of the three major global wires: the third, Agence France-Presse (AFP), recently called on Israel to allow the evacuation of its reporters from Gaza after its journalists’ association warned they risked starving to death.
Last month, I stood around a kilometre from Gaza and saw its destruction with my own eyes. In just a few random minutes, I heard explosions, gunfire and a drone, and witnessed smoke rising over a vast expanse of rubble. There was no way for me to enter.
On the other side of that blockade, Gaza’s journalists have lived through nearly two years of this.
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Many of those killed were freelancers, without job security or the related protection. Much of the global news industry runs off freelancers, who largely do this work because of their deep belief in its importance.
I have met journalists from countries across the world. There is often the same sense of idealism, the belief that speaking truth to power and highlighting the voices of the vulnerable is a necessary public service – it pushes decision makers to act in the right way; it makes the world a better place. Yet, the challenges we face are not the same.
In Gaza, the number of Palestinian journalists killed by Israel since October 2023 ranges from 189 to more than 240, depending on the source. As Palestinian journalists are murdered, attempts are made to discredit them.
Israeli investigative journalist and Oscar winner Yuval Abraham recently reported on the Israeli military’s so-called “legitimisation cell,” whose work includes “identifying Gaza-based journalists it could portray as undercover Hamas operatives, in an effort to blunt growing global outrage over Israel’s killing of reporters”.
All journalists know well how attacks on credibility can be utilised by people unhappy with truths you expose. Our colleagues in Gaza are facing this on a whole new level, accusations against them widely repeated despite a lack of substantive or credible evidence.
Deliberately targeting journalists is a war crime, regardless of their affiliation or past positions, unless they are taking an active role in hostilities, international lawyers say. Killing journalists is an effort to silence the truth.
None of this is to say that journalists’ lives are more important than other civilians, but it is obvious that when you attack journalists you stop the world from learning about anything else that is happening; the assaults on everyone else.
Journalism is the first draft of history and killing journalists can allow history to be rewritten by their murderers.
Israel’s mass killing of journalists has been going on for almost two years now – and not only in Gaza. On October 13th, 2023, Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah was killed in southern Lebanon, when two strikes targeted a group of journalists clearly marked as press. Abdallah’s friend, AFP journalist Christina Assi, suffered life-changing injuries.
Assi, who has had more than 30 surgeries since then, wrote on Instagram that she woke up, following her final operation this week, to see more journalists being “executed on my live feed”.
Her subsequent thoughts underline another important factor: a widespread belief that western media outlets have played a key role in enabling Israeli impunity and whitewashing Israel’s slaughter. This is something I hear regularly from Middle East-based journalist friends who are distressed with how their stories are edited, the framing shifted, the headlines changed.
“Fuck Israel. Fuck this world. Fuck everyone responsible ... Fuck every ‘western’ journalist begging for access like the story only matters when they’re in it. Fuck your double standards. Fuck your signed petitions and statements,” Assi wrote. “You are all complicit, and that is exactly why Israel is still brutally killing journalists without even hiding it. One day we will wake up to find no Palestinian journalists left and that’s when Israel will give you access to launder their lies.”
Assi’s words echoed those, just a fortnight earlier, of Gaza-based field reporter Maram Humaid, following the targeted killing of well-known Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif and his team on August 10th.
“Where were all these voices, all this media noise, during the Israeli campaigns against [Sharif]?” Humaid wrote on Instagram. “The truth is that everyone failed, everyone stayed silent, and everyone waited for our deaths, moment by moment, frame by frame, over two years of killing, genocide and starvation ... The truth is this: in Gaza, you die day after day, while the world waits for it to happen.”
