On May 3, World Press Freedom Day, the Israeli government banned Al Jazeera from operating within Israeli-controlled territory. Israel had already killed scores of journalists, many of them from Al Jazeera, but to use powers granted under an emergency law to shut down the network’s operations on a day the United Nations created to underscore journalists’ right to do their work without retaliation was the cherry on top, a symbolic middle finger to Palestinian journalists who have been working heroically, on empty stomachs and often without electricity, to cover the genocide of their people.
This week saw more new assassinations of Palestinian journalists. Yesterday, journalists in Gaza had traveled to the home of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader who was assassinated early Wednesday while he was in Tehran attending Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian’s inauguration, a death Hamas has attributed to Israel.
Near Haniyeh’s home west of Gaza City in the al-Shati refugee camp, an Israeli air strike killed Al Jazeera Gaza correspondent Ismail al-Ghoul and cameraman Rami al-Rifi as they sat in their car, according to initial reports. Al Jazeera called the killing of its journalists “a cold-blooded assassination.”
Representative image: Palestine journalists. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Osps7/CC BY-SA 4.0
Al-Ghoul was a familiar presence to those following Israel’s now nearly year-long war on Gaza. He covered some of the year’s most horrific crimes, including Israel’s siege on al-Shifa Hospital. As al-Ghoul testified before his death, this work took a toll.
“I no longer know the taste of sleep,” he said. “The bodies of children and the screams of the injured and their blood-soaked images never leave my sight. The cries of mothers and the wailing of men who are missing their loved ones never fade from my hearing.”
He continued: “I can no longer bear the sound of children’s voices from beneath the rubble, nor can I forget the energy and power that reverberates at every moment, turning into a nightmare. It is no longer easy for me to stand before the rows of coffins, which are locked and extended, or to see the dead people more than the living who are fighting death beneath their homes, not finding a way out to safety and survival. I am tired, my friend.”
Following the deadly air strike, Gaza’s journalists staged a protest at al-Aqsa Hospital. They flung their unmistakable blue press vests on the ground before a podium, proclaiming that such supposedly protective attire is useless when Israel deliberately targets journalists, international law be damned.
That is not hyperbole: according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Israel has killed 113 media workers since the war began, making it the deadliest period for journalists since the organisation began gathering data in 1992. And that’s likely an undercount: journalists in Gaza say that the CPJ’s number has lagged in recent months, and Palestinian government officials now estimate that more than 160 journalists have been killed.
In another report, published in February, CPJ found that of the 99 journalists killed last year, some three-quarters were killed in the war. That number includes three Lebanese and two Israeli journalists; the rest are Palestinian. Several months ago, the International Federation of Journalists estimated that one in 10 journalists in Gaza had been killed; that number has only risen. More journalists were killed in the first three months of the war than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year.
“Journalists in Gaza are bearing witness on the front lines,” CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg said of the unprecedented killing of journalists. “The immense loss suffered by Palestinian journalists in this war will have long-term impacts for journalism not just in the Palestinian territories but for the region and beyond. Every journalist killed is a further blow to our understanding of the world.”
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This is nothing new for Israel. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has a long history of targeting journalists with impunity. Concerning the 20 journalists Israel killed in the two decades before the current war – most famously, Al Jazeera Arabic journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, whose funeral was then attacked – not a single person has been held accountable.
Palestinian journalists in Gaza threw their press vests to the ground in protest against Israel’s killing of Al Jazeera correspondent Ismail al-Ghoul and cameraman Rami al-Rifi. pic.twitter.com/Dmi4D1MoQ3
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) August 1, 2024
The reasons why a government would systematically hunt down and kill journalists and their families are not hard to discern: Israel is committing genocide, and it does not want the outside world to know the details. We are gaining further evidence of that from the testimonies of Palestinians detained by Israel in recent months, many of whom speak of torture, rape, beatings, and starvation while in Israeli prisons. Reaching for a comparison, these Palestinians cite Guantanamo.
Funeral of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh after her assassination in Palestine. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/alwatan_live/CC BY 3.0
Organisations like CPJ have been pushing for transparent investigations into the killing of journalists – reminding the IDF that deliberately targeting journalists is a war crime – and for Israel to allow foreign journalists into Gaza. Thus far, they have had little success in opening the area to outside scrutiny. Currently, only select news organisations are allowed into Gaza, accompanied by Israeli soldiers in excursions that offer little in the way of a view into the actual conditions on the ground. As IDF soldiers themselves have said, soldiers clear the area of corpses, for instance, before higher-ups enter the area; undoubtedly, the same is true when Western journalists enter.
Even as journalists’ professional organisations like CPJ have been raising the alarm bells, the response from Palestinian journalists’ counterparts in the United States, the country that is providing the weapons used to kill our colleagues in Gaza, remains notably muted. If US media were truly determined to put an end to this repression, the coverage would look a lot different. Their failure to do so, even as Israel makes a mockery of the concept of press freedom, is a stain on the profession.
On World Press Freedom Day, as Israel shut down Al Jazeera, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called on “every nation to do more to protect journalists,” reiterating his “unwavering support for free and independent media around the world.” In reality, Blinken has continued to send bombs to a state that is systematically killing journalists. It is hard to imagine a nation doing less to “protect journalists” around the world.
