Israel has killed about 250 journalists since launching its genocidal war on Gaza on October 7, 2023. That is more than the number of journalists killed in all wars in the past 150 years combined.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says Israel has engaged in “the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists” that the media watchdog has ever documented.
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Jonathan Dagher, the head of Reporters Without Borders’ Middle East desk, called the targeting of journalists “a tragedy for journalism”, while the United Nations human rights chief, Volker Turk, called Gaza “a ‘death trap’ for journalists”.
Yet, beyond the statements and condolences, Israel has never been held accountable for its killing of Palestinian journalists – a practice that long predates the genocidal war on Gaza, but that took on an industrial scale over the past three years.
Instead, the silence of the international community and lack of solidarity from Western media professionals emboldened Israel as it pursued the genocidal war and normalised journalists’ killings.
But despite trying to suppress the truth about its massacres and attempts at ethnic cleansing, Israel – historically an acknowledged master at propaganda – has largely failed in its efforts over the past three years, thanks to the bravery of the very voices it tried to silence.
That too is the story of how journalism has changed since October 7, 2023.
‘Neutral’ amid genocide
Western media outlets and their prominent faces often claimed to be “neutral” in their coverage of the genocidal war.
But the very concept of neutrality in journalism has come under question amid the genocide.
The Western media were rarely neutral when viewed according to the basic tenets of journalism and professional standards. More than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza so far. But Western outlets often framed headlines in the passive tense when reporting on these killings, conveniently shielding Israel from blame.
Palestinians were killed by Israel, mostly in circumstances that violated rules of war. These details were not highlighted, and the Israeli narrative that Hamas was using Palestinian civilians as a “human shield” was amplified.
When Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif was killed in a targeted attack in front of al-Shifa Hospital in August 2025, CNN carried the Israeli accusation that he worked for a Hamas cell in its second paragraph, an allegation Al Jazeera has rejected.
Weeks before the killing, Irene Khan, the UN’s special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, had warned against “repeated threats and accusations” against al-Sharif by the Israeli army.
Israel killed 22 people, including five journalists – one of whom worked for Al Jazeera – in a “double-tap” strike in September 2025. It claimed that it had targeted a “Hamas camera.” Most media outlets ran the story. The Reuters news agency, whose journalist was also killed in the attack, confirmed that the camera belonged to it.
Similarly, when Israel targeted media personnel in Lebanon early in the war, a Sky News post on X called it a hit on a “Hezbollah-linked” broadcaster.
Israel has also been accused of jailing and torturing Palestinian journalists for doing their job. During the genocidal war, it has tried to control the narrative domestically too, cracking down on Haaretz for its critical coverage of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failures on October 7, 2023, and the atrocities in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
The Netanyahu government imposed a ban on Al Jazeera, calling the network a security threat. Al Jazeera described the shutdown as a “criminal act” and warned that Israel’s suppression of the free press “stands in contravention of international and humanitarian law”.
This was not the first time Al Jazeera has been targeted. In 2021, a Gaza building housing Al Jazeera’s office was destroyed in an Israeli missile strike. Israel has killed many Al Jazeera journalists even before October 2023.
Shireen Abu Akleh, considered a voice of Palestine, was killed by an Israeli soldier while she was reporting in the occupied West Bank in 2022. Her killer was never charged for the murder.
Assal Rad, an activist and Middle East historian, has accused the Western media of enabling attacks on journalists.
“When you’re repeating what Israel says, you’re creating space to legitimise the targeting of their own colleagues,” she said in an interview with Columbia Journalism Review on September 30.
Double standards
While reporting on Russian aggression against Ukraine, media around the world rightly humanised the victims.
But that same journalistic standard was missing, far too often, when Western outlets reported on Palestinians killed by Israel. Instead, they were at times portrayed as collateral damage, their deaths the result of fighting between two sides.
Israel has killed more than 21,000 children in Gaza in the last three years. But the faces of thousands of babies, children and mothers, and their suffering and despair, were frequently buried under statistics. They were nameless, faceless, their lives and stories deemed unworthy of human treatment.
Moreover, Western reporting often lacked historical contextualisation, erasing the history of Israel’s brutal occupation, territorial expansion and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. More than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or displaced from their homes, leading up to the formation of Israel in 1948. Israel has since forcibly displaced more Palestinians from the occupied territory.
Israeli leaders now publicly oppose the establishment of Palestinian statehood as part of the so-called two-state solution and successive governments have expanded illegal settlements on Palestinian lands.
Western media often present settler violence and government-backed illegal settlement expansion as separate, when in fact, the Israeli government has armed, funded and granted impunity to those involved.
Fundamentally, treating Israel – an occupying power in Gaza and the West Bank – and Palestinians as equal sides is itself problematic. It is not objective journalism; it is far from it. It misses the asymmetry inherent in this equation. On the one hand is a major military power in illegal occupation of another people’s land, waging a genocidal war on them and seeking to ethnically cleanse them; on the other is a Palestinian resistance movement consisting of multiple strands united only in their struggle to achieve self-determination, a right guaranteed under the UN Charter.
Objectivity requires that news reports highlight Israel’s use of disproportionate force and the firing of banned weapons at civilian areas – violations of the rules of war and war crimes. Instead, Palestinian experts and commentators were the ones grilled and pressed to condemn Hamas as a condition for even being heard.
The challenge
Still, the Western media’s lopsided coverage did not go unchallenged. It triggered rebellion in several newsrooms, including the BBC and The New York Times.
More than 1,500 Western journalists from various news organisations signed an open letter in protest against the coverage of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Eight BBC journalists wrote an open letter, accusing the broadcaster of failing to accurately report on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
They accused their organisation of running with pro-Israel editorial biases, downplaying Palestinian casualties and suppressing terms like “genocide”, “apartheid” or “occupation”. Many journalists of colour resigned in protest.
This has dented the credibility of Western media’s reporting on critical international issues at a time of global upheaval.
However, the unprecedented Israeli attacks on journalists did not deter Palestinians from reporting. They risked their lives to get the story out via social media, especially TikTok and Instagram.
“They take revenge on us through our children? It doesn’t matter. We will stay. We will continue. This is our path, and we chose it knowingly. We will not stop,” said Wael al-Dahdouh, Al Jazeera Arabic’s then-Gaza bureau chief, after Israel killed his wife, daughter, two sons, and a grandson in separate Israeli air strikes.
People across the world, including young Americans who primarily consume news on social media, were horrified by the graphic images coming out of Palestine despite the efforts of legacy media outlets to sanitise the Gaza genocide.
It triggered student protests at Columbia University that soon spread to other campuses.
Palestinian journalists became “the eyes of Gaza”, showing the world what rights organisations dubbed Israel’s “livestreamed genocide” against Palestinians.
One of them, Bisan Owda, who won an Emmy Award for her reporting on daily life and survival during the genocidal war on Gaza, is known for her resilience as a Palestinian journalist.
“Hello, my name is Bisan, and I am still alive…” became Owda’s signature greeting in her social media posts.
“I no longer have any dreams. My only dream is to survive this, to tell the story of the people who didn’t,” she said on the 27th day of the genocidal war.
She and hundreds of Palestinian journalists have done just that. In the process, they have upended a media landscape where giant organisations beholden to power have long controlled who gets to be heard and seen.
Ultimately, Israel’s genocide in Gaza has also been a war on truth. Thanks to Owda and her Palestinian colleagues, that is a war Israel has lost.
