Since October 7th 2023 Israel has killed 131 journalists in Gaza, Lebanon and the occupied West Bank. This figure comes from the Committee to Protect Journalists, CPJ, an American NGO founded in 1981, whose first Honorary Chair was the veteran broadcaster Walter Cronkite. The CPJ publishes reports on the safety of journalists everywhere in the world.
Israel’s post-October 7th war is special; the kill rate is extraordinarily, astonishingly high. According to Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the CPJ, it is the deadliest conflict for journalists that the CPJ has ever documented. By contrast, between 1965 and 1974 the Vietnam War killed 63 journalists, not counting other media workers, among a total death toll of more than a million. The Syrian civil war, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, even World War II -- nothing else comes close (Wikipedia has pages on casualties in 22 different armed conflicts, though its figures for Israel-Palestine only cover the period before October 7th 2023).
It may be relevant that Israel prohibits foreign journalists from entering Gaza. In July, Free Press Unlimited together with 60 media and civil society organisations, said that:
Nine months into the war, international reporters are still being denied access to Gaza except for rare and escorted trips arranged by the Israeli military. This effective ban on foreign reporting has placed an impossible and unreasonable burden on local reporters to document a war through which they are living.
Hence most of the journalists that Israel kills are Palestinians. This is one reason why their death toll is not more widely known. Indeed, according to Palestinian sources, the true number is closer to 160. As Palestinians, they are routinely described as being supporters of Hamas – so their deaths can be dismissed. If you find yourself swayed by this argument, note the implication if it is applied in reverse -- more than 70% of Israelis support Israel’s war on Gaza.
Scouring all the resources I could access, an astonishing fact gradually became clear: in all recorded armed conflicts in the history of the world, only the Mexican drug wars have killed more journalists, but over two decades. This cannot be compared to what Israel has done in a single year since October 7th 2023 .
In Mexico, the drug cartels selectively target journalists – around 190 have been murdered or disappeared over the last 21 years. Israel too has a record of targeting journalists, even before the present special military action. In May 2022 Israeli forces killed Shireen Abu Akleh, a prominent Palestinian journalist who worked for Al Jazeera for 25 years, while she was reporting on an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp, and even though she was wearing a blue press vest. The Wikipedia account, including Israel’s denials and attacks on her funeral procession, is interesting reading.
Don’t take my word for any of this. Check the sources for yourself. The links in this blog are to uncontroversial sources. Similar figures for the number of journalists killed in Gaza are given by the International Federation of Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, and the UK’s National Union of Journalists.
Of course, more than 160 Jewish journalists were likely murdered by the Nazis, though as Jews rather than as journalists, and hundreds of thousands of educated people, no doubt including many journalists, were murdered by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. But it tells us something, that to find anything approaching Israel’s kill rate of journalists, we must examine genocides and the worst of organised crime.
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Online sources linked to in this blog:
A Guardian article published on November 25th gives more details on the killing of the three journalists in Hasbaya. The location was far from any fighting, and was clearly designated as a place where journalists were staying. They were killed when a jet fired two US-made bombs, at least one of which was precision-guided, at the house the journalists were staying in. The house was within sight of three Israeli observation posts.