Press in peril: This is how Israel killed 165 Gaza journalists in 300 days

On July 31, Al Jazeera reporter Ismail al Ghoul and cameraman Rami al Rifi were killed in an Israeli missile strike on their car in Gaza City. They were on their way back from the al Shati refugee camp, where the slain Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh grew up.

One of their colleagues posted a video of himself grieving beside al-Ghoul’s body. “This is Ismail. No head. This is the situation of journalists in Gaza,” he screams into the camera.

Al Jazeera has called the killing of its journalists a “cold-blooded assassination,” stressing that both men were wearing press vests and that the vehicle they were travelling in had clear markers identifying them as journalists.

Al Ghoul and al Rifi are the latest casualties in the journalist fraternity since October 7, when Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza that has left nearly 40,000 people dead in just 300 days.

The number of journalists and media workers killed since October 7 now stands at 165, according to the Government Media Office in Gaza.

“More journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of the Israel-Gaza war than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year,” the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said in December.

Though its tally of killed journalists is much lower at 113, the organisation says it is also “investigating almost 350 additional cases of potential killings, arrests and injuries”.

‘Deadliest period’

The CPJ has described the war as the “deadliest period for journalists”. And comparative numbers bear this fact: between 1967 and 2022, the number of journalists killed in Palestine was 86, according to the Palestinian Journalism Syndicate.

The relentless targeting of members of the media community flies in the face of Israel’s claim that its security forces don’t target journalists, a falsehood it had reiterated after soldiers shot dead Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was wearing her distinct press jacket at that time.

Back then, a formal complaint was filed in the International Criminal Court by the International Federation of Journalists, the Palestinian Journalists' Syndicate and the International Centre for Justice for Palestinians on the repeated targeting of journalists in Palestine.

In January this year, the United Nations too had expressed concern over the high number of journalists casualties in targeted Israeli strikes.

More recently, Reporters with Borders filed two complaints with the ICC for alleged Israeli war crimes against Palestinian journalists in Gaza.

Press protest

On July 29, journalists in Gaza held a press conference to protest the unrelenting targeting of Palestinian journalists and their families by Israel.

“We call on the International Federation of Journalists, the Federation of Arab Journalists, and all other journalistic institutions and unions to stand within the limits of their professional and ethical responsibilities [in Gaza],” they pleaded.

They removed their press jackets in a symbolic gesture to show their meaninglessness in the current context of the genocidal war against their people, where they have as little protection as any other Palestinian.

Two investigative reports also expose Israel’s deliberate killing of Palestinian journalists, described as an attempt by the Zionist state to muzzle the flow of information from the besieged enclave, which has turned into a dystopian wasteland littered with mass grave

The first investigation by the United Nations found that Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah was killed in south Lebanon when an Israeli tank fired at a group of “clearly identifiable journalists” wearing press jackets.

The second was a Washington Post investigation that reviewed drone footage and conducted eyewitness interviews from the scene of a missile strike on four Palestinian journalists near Khan Younis.

The Israeli military had claimed to have “identified and struck a terrorist who operated an aircraft that posed a threat to IDF troops,” referring to Thuraya’s drone, and that the men belonged to Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

But the Post investigation found “no indications that either man was operating as anything other than a journalist that day. Both passed through Israeli checkpoints on their way to the south early in the war; Dahdouh had recently been approved to leave Gaza, a rare privilege unlikely to have been granted to a known militant,” they reported.