The Committee to Protect Journalists said that it removed 22 more people from its list of journalists killed in Israel, Gaza and Judea and Samaria—the latter which it calls “occupied”—after Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad obituaries identified some of those listed as combatants.
The review, released on Thursday, found that 20 of the 22 engaged in combat. The committee said that the other three did not qualify as journalists or media workers. It also added six, whom it had dropped from the list, and reclassified 12 others.
The New York-based group still maintained that Israel remains responsible for “by far the majority of killings of journalists and media workers worldwide since 2023.”
The committee had removed 20 people from its database, including eight whom it said fought for Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
A spokesman for HonestReporting, a media watchdog, told JNS that “Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are no longer even bothering to hide how their operatives have posed as journalists.”
“Why would they when the CPJ has been such a willing participant in the charade?” the spokesman said. “Gaza’s media ecosystem has been contaminated by proximity to Hamas and its allies. This is something CPJ simply refuses to admit despite being shown, repeatedly, to be complicit in helping the system to perpetuate while placing the blame on Israel.”
Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists, stated that “the accuracy and credibility of CPJ’s research are fundamental to our mission and to efforts to seek accountability and justice for journalists and media workers around the world.”
The committee bases the “determinations we make solely on whether individuals meet our definitions of who we consider to be a journalist, not an individual’s affiliation or views, nor in response to pressure or intimidation from any government or interest group,” she stated. “Our review and a subsequent audit of our work show that CPJ has done just that.”
Ginsberg has previously said that “Israel has a long history of smearing Palestinian journalists as terrorists without providing credible evidence, and with deadly consequences.”
The committee said that it reviewed 229 deaths recorded between October 2023 and August 2026.
Among the six who were reinstated was Assaad Shamlakh, whom the committee previously determined was not a journalist or media worker. In August, Airwars, a nonprofit London-based airstrike monitoring group, reclassified Shamlakh as a militant after a Palestinian Islamic Jihad-affiliated Telegram account identified him as a “fighter.”
The committee nonetheless restored him to its casualty list after the review.
‘New evidence emerged’
CPJ also reinstated Mohamed Khaireddine, whom the organization had removed after saying that his family clarified that he was neither a journalist nor a media support worker.
The other reinstated Palestinians were Ahmed Fatima and Mohamed al-Jaja, both of whom the committee removed after determining they were not journalists or media workers.
The committee also restored Shai Regev and Ayelet Arnin, two Israeli reporters whom it had removed from its list after their outlets said they were “not on assignment” at the Nova music festival.
Regev was reinstated after her sister and Maariv editor-in-chief Golan Bar-Yosef confirmed that she was on assignment and sending news updates during the attack.
Arnin was reinstated after Lior Landenberg, director of news at Kan, told CPJ that “while Arnin attended the festival in a private capacity, she began sending videos and live news to the outlet as the attack unfolded.”
Anat Saragusti, head of the Union of Journalists in Israel, also confirmed to the committee that Arnin was working as a journalist when she was murdered.
The committee launched the review in June after Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad published obituaries identifying as combatants some individuals whom the group had listed as journalists.
The group has “historically always excluded journalists from its lists if they are found to be engaging in combat,” it stated.
As part of its review, CPJ said that researchers “reviewed the published work, social media posts, photographs, videos and statements of deceased journalists and any other published materials.”
“In each case where new evidence emerged, the researchers sought to speak with at least two new sources who had known the person killed,” the group stated.
CPJ said researchers were able to speak with at least two new sources in 220 of the 229 cases.
In August, an HonestReporting audit found that at least 120 of the 209 names then on CPJ’s list had ties to terror organizations, including 56 whom the watchdog identified as “active, violent militants” when they were killed.
CPJ said at the time that it could not comment on the findings while its own review was underway.
“The CPJ removed almost two dozen terrorists HonestReporting had already identified, yet reinstated PIJ operative Assaad Shamlakh, left on terrorists like Hamas’s Ahmed Abu Mhadi and nearly 60 employees of terrorist-affiliated media remain on its list,” the HonestReporting spokesman told JNS.
“It’s time the CPJ properly examined the flaws in its own methodology, as no such self-examination or reflection appear in this audit,” it said.
