The Committee to Protect Journalists asserts that in the Gaza war, “Israel is engaging in the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that CPJ has ever documented.”
As with the Gaza genocide slander, it’s not newsworthy enough that innocent people are losing their lives in a deadly war zone, but once Jews are accused of killing them on purpose, the story achieves front-page status.
Gaza journalists killed in the line of duty are the latest excuse mainstream media and press advocacy groups use to attack Israel. According to reports, Israel isn’t just killing journalists but targeting them, hunting them down and executing them for doing their jobs.
While the story makes juicy prime-time fodder, three major problems undermine this narrative and make it, instead, another sordid, antisemitic blood libel.
First, most of the 192 journalists the CPJ says were killed during the Gaza war were on “dangerous assignment,” where death is a plausible risk, while the rest were terrorists masquerading as journalists.
Second, it’s well known that the “press” in Gaza is not allowed to report the truth about the war, but rather that they are there to promote Hamas’s narrative to the world. Anyone who strays from that narrative is severely punished by the ruling terrorist group.
Finally, there’s absolutely no proof that the Israel Defense Forces purposely attacks journalists. The fact that many journalists have been killed during the war in Gaza doesn’t prove that Israel deliberately targets them. Rather, it is proof of Hamas’s morally repugnant practice of embedding itself within civilian institutions.
Conflict journalism is one of the world’s most dangerous jobs. According to CPJ, two-thirds of the 2,200 journalists killed since 1992 died in war zones or conflict areas. The job is especially deadly if you’re working around, at the behest of, or directly for, a terror organization like Hamas.
Indeed, a recent bombshell story recounts Gaza journalists being killed in Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, a facility used extensively during the war by Hamas as a headquarters and hostage prison. These journalists, like ordinary Gazans, are dispensable to Hamas, used heartlessly as human shields. Other “journalists” killed have turned out to be Hamas terror operatives by day and “reporters” by moonlight.
Terrorists masquerading as journalists. One notable example is Anas al-Sharif, an Al Jazeera correspondent killed on Aug. 10 in an Israeli airstrike. Mainstream media eulogized him as if he were a hero. CNN, for example, issued the headline, “Anas al-Sharif became the face of the war in Gaza for millions. Then Israel killed him.”
But Al-Sharif wasn’t really a journalist. Evidence shows he led a Hamas terror cell. Nevertheless, press associations and media outlets, including CPJ, Reporters Without Borders, BBC, The Guardian and Al Jazeera, rejected this assertion, citing a lack of proof.
In fact, Israel produced abundant evidence indicating al-Sharif was a Hamas terrorist, such as information on his affiliation with Hamas’s Nukhba unit, including his military ID number, and pictures of him alongside Hamas leaders like Yahya Sinwar. But press groups and media outlets chose to ignore this evidence.
Ian Williams, president of the Foreign Press Association, even dismissed Al-Sharif’s terrorist credentials, telling CNN, “I don’t care whether Al-Sharif was in Hamas or not.”
CPJ also lists among the journalists killed 16 individuals who worked for Hamas-affiliated Al-Aqsa TV, which is a U.S.-designated “Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity” that recruits children to be suicide bombers. Whether these semi-professional or dual professionals deserve to die is irrelevant. Rather, the wages of such a job dramatically raise the chances you’ll be killed by Israeli armaments. We might also ask: Do propagandists for a savage terrorist organization deserve sympathy when they die in the line of duty?
All journalists in Gaza serve as Hamas’s mouthpiece, not legitimate reporters seeking the truth. In fact, anyone reporting what Hamas doesn’t want the world to hear faces painful punishment. Mohammed Abu Aoun, a correspondent for Fatah-affiliated Awda TV, for example, was apprehended and beaten by Hamas thugs because he interviewed a woman who insulted the terrorist group and some of its leaders.
Tawfiq Abu Jarad, a 44-year-old correspondent for a radio station, was beaten and interrogated for hours by Hamas-affiliated masked assailants, accusing him of “covering events in the Gaza Strip calling for a coup.”
Press freedom violations by Hamas during the war have been vastly underreported. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, for instance, often documents Hamas attacks on media internally, but without publicizing them, for fear of reprisals, the group told CPJ. PJS deputy head Tahseen Al-Astal said, “Most journalists have begun to practice self-censorship in their writing to avoid any problems with security.”
In short, reporters are compelled to produce Hamas propaganda rather than actual, truth-telling stories.
Israel targets terrorists, not journalists. CPJ describes the current Gaza war as the deadliest conflict for journalists since it began keeping records in 1992. But this isn’t because Israel targets them. It’s because, as James Kirchick notes in The Wall Street Journal, press freedom groups are committing a category error by disingenuously classifying people working on behalf of terrorist organizations as journalists.
In fact, based on information provided by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center and the CJP, 72 of the 161 journalists killed in Gaza as of June 8 (roughly 45%) were either members or affiliates of Hamas or other terrorist groups. Furthermore, the CJP only lists 24 journalists that were allegedly “murdered” by Israel, most of whom worked for terrorist-aligned media outlets or were, according to Israel, terrorists themselves.
Hamas is infamous for its strategy of using human shields, putting themselves and their terrorist infrastructure among civilians to maximize civilian casualties, knowing Israel will be blamed for the bloodshed. Hamas’s use of journalists as human shields is part of this strategy. Hamas knows that if their members are killed by Israel wearing press vests rather than battle fatigues, mainstream media and press organizations will consider them journalists executed for simply doing their jobs and chastise the Jewish state.
Despite any fantasy that legacy media or press associations weave, a terrorist who pretends to be a journalist is still a terrorist. Claiming otherwise, as Kirchick writes, “dishonors the real journalists who risk and sometimes lose their lives endeavoring to bring us the truth.”
Originally published by Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME).
