Israel’s Foreign Ministry attacked an orchestrated media campaign by Reporters without Borders, which directed more than a hundred news outlets to simultaneously condemn the Jewish state on Monday for killing local journalists and preventing the entry of foreign media into Gaza.
Israel maintains that many of the so-called journalists are terrorist operatives.
“When 150 media outlets choose in a synchronized manner to stop reporting news, to throw values of the press and plurality of opinions into the trash, and instead publish a uniform, pre-scripted political manifesto against Israel—that tells you how great the bias against Israel is in the global media,” the Foreign Ministry posted to X on Monday.
“The reports we see in the global media regarding Gaza do not tell the real story there. They tell the campaign of lies that Hamas spreads. This is not journalism. This is politics,” the ministry added.
Reporters without Borders (RSF) said that more than 250 news outlets in over 70 countries participated in the “media blackout” campaign to protest against the deaths of journalists in the Gaza Strip.
Joining RSF in the campaign (the acronym is based on the organization’s name in French—Reporters sans frontières) is Avaaz, an online community organizing platform for left-wing causes, and the International Federation of Journalists.
A document, obtained by pro-Israel activists in Europe and viewed by JNS, asked outlets to broadcast the following message:
“At the rate journalists are being killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, there will soon be no one left to keep you informed. In nearly 23 months, at least 210 journalists have been killed by the Israeli army in this territory, according to Reporters Without Borders. We, and more than 150 other media outlets across the world, condemn these crimes. And we call on the Israeli authorities to allow independent access for the international press in the Gaza Strip.”
When 150 media outlets choose in a synchronized manner to stop reporting news, to throw values of the press and plurality of opinions into the trash, and instead publish a uniform, pre-scripted political manifesto against Israel – that tells you how great the bias against Israel… pic.twitter.com/TqLlyREudN
— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) September 1, 2025
In June, Reporters without Borders organized an appeal together with the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), accusing the Israeli military of an “unprecedented massacre” of journalists.
Reporters without Borders based its numbers on those of CPJ, which have long since been debunked.
“Over the past 22 months far too many people wearing press jackets have been exposed as terrorists to take any claim about the targeting of journalists seriously. Which means those who still try to argue for their innocence are choosing to be deliberately blind to the truth,” U.K.-based investigative journalist David Collier told JNS on Sunday.
In a January 2024 report, Collier found that CPJ’s journalist list was basically a whitewashed Hamas list.
At the time of Collier’s report, the Hamas list of journalists killed numbered 107 people—a remarkable figure, surpassing the number of journalists killed in World War II and the Vietnam War.
The CPJ list numbered about 60 to 70 journalists at the time of Collier’s report. All the names on it came from the Hamas list, Collier discovered. Collier surmised that CPJ had culled the list to strike off those individuals who were most obviously terrorist operatives and least defensible as journalists.
Collier was able to identify 93% of the 107 people listed through their social media accounts. He found that 35 of the 70 (50%) on the CPJ list worked for proscribed terrorist groups. About 19 (27%) weren’t journalists at all.
Seventy-nine percent endorsed terrorism and the killing of innocents. For Collier, the most egregious example was Hassuna Salim, who worked for Hamas-affiliated Quds News Network, and posted on a Telegram channel on Oct. 7, 2023, at 6:36 a.m., the time of the Hamas invasion of Israel, a directive from Palestinian Islamic Jihad calling for everyone to pick up a gun and fight.
“Messages such as these sent 100s of armed ‘civilians’ across into Israel to help Hamas rape and murder,” Collier’s report noted.
Others celebrated terrorist attacks against Israelis over a period of years. Duaa Sharaf, who worked for Hamas-affiliated Radio Al-Aqsa, posted to social media on April 7, 2022, after a mass shooting in Tel Aviv, “Kill them. May Allah punish them with your hands, and humiliate them, and help you against them, and heal the hearts of a believing nation.”
“Hit Tel Aviv. Hit it,” wrote Assem Kamal Moussa, a journalist with news site Palestine Now, of the same attack. On May 2, 2023, he posted a picture of Hamas rockets launched at Israel: “And you are on your way to transfer the occupier’s life to the sanctuaries of hell.”
Collier described CPJ’s research as “sloppy,” “consistently amateurish” and “significantly compromised,” noting that all the information he worked from was publicly available. “This was the real letdown with the CPJ,” he said. “Why the hell didn’t they do that work? How could they not bother to check anybody on social media?”
In Oct. 2024, the IDF released intelligence documents found in Gaza confirming the terrorist affiliation of six Al Jazeera journalists.
Al Jazeera has itself been accused of inciting to violence and spreading Islamist propaganda. It has been banned in several Middle Eastern countries, including Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Reporters without Borders boasts on its website that since October 2023, the month of the Hamas attack that sparked the war, “RSF has filed four complaints with the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes committed by the Israeli army in the Palestinian enclave.”
Its director of advocacy and assistance, Antoine Bernard, has called on the European Union to suspend its bilateral trade agreement with Israel and for the Netanyahu government to be sanctioned.
