As this issue of The Progressive goes to press, at least eighty-three media workers, many of them freelancers, have been killed in Israel’s ongoing brutal war in Gaza.
In one case in early January, Hamza al-Dahdouh, a camera operator for Al Jazeera and the son of the network’s Gaza bureau chief, and Mustafa Thuraya, a freelance videographer working for Agence France-Presse, were killed when the car they were traveling in was hit by an Israeli airstrike in the southern Gaza Strip, in what appears to have been a targeted attack.
A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed in a January 7 statement that they had targeted the vehicle: “An IDF aircraft identified and struck a terrorist who operated an aircraft [a small drone] that posed a threat to IDF troops . . . . We are aware of the reports that during the strike, two other suspects who were in the same vehicle as the terrorist were also hit,” the statement said.
In a later statement on X (formerly Twitter), the IDF claimed that the journalists were members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad—an accusation that the journalists’ families reject. News organizations including the BBC and NBC News were also unable to find any evidence for the allegation. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which documents hundreds of attacks on the press each year, has called for a formal probe into whether the incident was a targeted killing.
The same week, Reporters Without Borders—a thirty-nine-year-old nongovernmental organization that monitors press freedom, trains journalists in safety techniques, and issues calls for action when journalists are under threat—said they had received word from Karim Khan, a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, that it will include attacks on journalists in its ongoing investigation of war crimes allegedly committed by Israel.
Reporting in conflict zones is always risky, especially for independent journalists who do not have the support of large media organizations. “Freelancers are some of the most valuable and most vulnerable members of our craft,” Bill Gentile, director and producer of the 2018 documentary Freelancers, tells The Progressive. “They are the men and women upon whom staff journalists traveling to foreign countries rely to help explain the freelancers’ home countries, customs, and even languages. Very often they are young, struggling financially, and tempting fate in dangerous war zones, but they do so because they take great pride in helping to document, and even to participate in, historic events shaping their own countries. Sadly, they too often are not properly supported by the media outlets that hire them.”
In the 1980s, Gentile and I both worked in Central America, where more than eighty journalists were killed in the conflicts—but over a period of fifteen years (1978-1993). These deaths were spread across three civil wars in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. The war in Gaza is different. Since the October 7 attack by Hamas in southern Israel, which killed approximately 1,200 Israelis, Israel’s response has been the deadliest in modern history for media workers and their family members. This amounts to the largest number of journalists ever killed in such a short time period during an armed conflict.
This is partly due to the massive bombing of densely populated urban areas. But in many cases, such as in the murder of al-Dahdouh and Thuraya, the killings appear to be targeted attacks because the victims had been bringing news out of a war zone as well as exposing evidence of potential war crimes.
Alisdare Hickson (CC BY-SA 2.0)
A woman holds photos of Shireen Abu Akleh during a protest in London, May 2022. Abu Akleh was assassinated by the IDF in May 2022 while covering a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.
In the 2022 assassination of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, the IDF admitted that one of their soldiers had killed her—but only after her death had prompted an international outcry, followed by several independent investigations.
In late December, The Progressive spoke with Sherif Mansour, the CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator. Founded in 1981, the CPJ tracks cases in which journalists are imprisoned or killed, and advocates on behalf of reporters who are censored, threatened, spied upon, or otherwise impeded from doing their jobs. The following is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for space and clarity.
Q: What is the focus of your work?
Sherif Mansour: I have been with CPJ since November 2012. This is my third Gaza war. And in the Middle East, we have mainly been covering Syria, the deadliest country for journalists over the past decade. But [we have] also [covered] Iraq, which at its highest saw fifty-three journalists killed in 2006. In Syria, at the height of the Syrian civil war, thirty journalists were killed between 2012 and 2015.
CPJ.ORG
Gaza has long been dangerous for journalists. Before this war, thirteen journalists were killed in Gaza out of twenty killed overall by IDF fire since 2001. So that’s a majority of them. Also, 90 percent were Palestinian journalists, and this is a similar pattern we see in this [current] war.
We’ve seen journalists in Gaza forced to flee, living out of makeshift tents near areas where they could get Internet or electricity, and, of course, now facing ground invasion—even in the south, where they were told they would be safe.
The Middle East [has been] one of the deadliest regions for journalists over the years, and even before this war, we said that there was a deadly pattern, primarily against Palestinian journalists covering IDF activities. We warned that there would be a chilling effect because of a lack of accountability for journalist killings. Even before this war, we’d seen a pattern of the Israeli army disregarding press insignia. No one was held accountable, which made the Palestinian journalists, specifically, more vulnerable and put [them] in a deadly, precarious situation.
Q: Do you have evidence of the direct targeting of journalists?
Mansour: Some of the first few who were killed were killed by Israeli army bullets. We have identified some patterns that show past threats to the journalists, their colleagues, people who work with them, or their families. For example, we talked about how, so far, three Al Jazeera journalists have lost family members, including one who had been receiving threats. And that happened with six journalists, not just Al Jazeera journalists, including CNN journalists.
There are also other more concerning cases that we said needed independent and international investigation, including the case of Bilal Jadallah [director of the nonprofit Press House-Palestine]. He had worked with CPJ on documenting that deadly pattern when we released our report in May. [He] helped us identify the work of the thirteen journalists from Gaza, and to reach out to the families. He distributed safety materials for journalists, and he was killed with a direct-hit shelling of his car. There are other cases where we see these kinds of patterns, including smear campaigns on social media accusing journalists of being agents or supportive of Hamas, and later having their family be targeted in attacks.
Q: The three Lebanese journalists who were killed on October 13 and November 21 were not even near a conflict site, right?
Mansour: Yes. Early on, we called for an independent investigation because we interviewed eyewitnesses, including journalists, who were injured [in the attacks], and their testimonies were corroborated by evidence from an independent investigation that Reuters, the Associated Press, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch have put out. [The witnesses] confirmed that [the reporters] posed no threat to Israeli [military] positions. They were not close to the border and were far from the Hezbollah forces.
Q: What are some possible avenues for accountability for these attacks?
Mansour: We have asked for [these cases] to be investigated criminally, and we have asked the FBI to announce its findings about the independent investigation by the U.S. government [in the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh]. It’s been more than a year, and we know nothing about what happened. Part of the IDF’s pattern of evading responsibility in the past was that they never announced the results [of internal investigations], and no one ever gets charged. Any international and independent investigation must be transparent, must be rapid, and must lead to holding the people behind the killing accountable.
Q: What about the Palestinians? What recourse do they have in terms of being able to bring charges?
Mansour: As we said in our Deadly Pattern report in May, there is no local avenue for justice for Palestinians. Some have tried over the years; they even ended up paying for the fees of the trial. There was one time [in 2005] when the Israeli army acknowledged [wrongdoing] in the killing of James Miller, a British journalist. His family fought for him for five years until the IDF agreed to pay 1.5 million pounds [$1.9 million], without taking responsibility for his killing.
Q: Is the CPJ working with any other organizations on these issues?
Mansour: We are working with a lot of partners, including local partners like the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, to provide some assistance to journalists in need. Other than this, we are also relying on them as the source of information about journalists who have been killed. They’ve been tracking their own casualties as well, including the number of media outlets being bombed. According to the count, right now, seventy media offices have been destroyed.
Internationally, other organizations are trying to help, not just to seek accountability, but also to pressure world leaders to raise [these issues] directly and publicly with Israeli officials, to reform the rules of engagement to include safeguards [so that] civilians and journalists are not targeted, in addition to following up with avenues of accountability, including the International Criminal Court.
Q: Article 19 of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees communication as a human right. What do we lose as a society by not having access to this information that journalists provide from these conflict zones?
Mansour: We rely on journalists for timely and accurate information and commentary. We say that press freedom is a firewall for democracy, but it’s also the antidote to the fog of war. We need the journalists in Gaza, because they provide eyewitness accounts and firsthand testimonials.
The two million people in Gaza are struggling to survive. They rely on lifesaving information to find food, shelter, and clean water. But there are millions of people in the region whose safety is directly impacted by the conflict, and many, many more millions who are following this heartbreaking war all over the world, trying to understand it. Part of it is that they need journalists in order to know the motivations of the warring parties and the impact of their policies, because without them, we’re left with misinformation that can only fuel the conflict.