In Gaza, Israel is waging a war on journalists, too
After sealing Gaza off from international reporters and blocking the world's eyes from its genocide, Israel has moved to the next phase of its blackout strategy: hunting down Palestinian journalists inside Gaza. The goal is obvious: silence the last independent witnesses so that the genocide and starvation of an entire people proceed unseen, unrecorded, and unchecked by the global community.
The latest murders are of two of Gaza's most prominent TV correspondents—Anas Al-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh—as well as four other reporters who were in a tent outside a Gaza hospital. This brings the number of Palestinian media workers killed by Israel to more than 230, the highest killed by any country, in any conflict.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. This is not just in Gaza; let us not forget Israel's cold-blooded murder of American-Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022 in the West Bank. Then, as now, Israel followed the same familiar playbook pattern: lie, deny, and distort the truth, before claiming, months later, that Abu Akleh was "accidentally" killed by a sniper's bullet.
Israel bars international journalists from covering its atrocities, and when local reporters defy the blackout, silencing them becomes a calculated item on its "to-do list". Israel sends a clear message with every murder to those still breathing: report the truth, and you will join them.
Political Zionism, from its inception, has perfected the art of pairing the crime with the lie. Israel fabricates evidence, if any, and then the Western media unquestionably market the lie. For example, the headline for Reuters was: "Israel kills Al Jazeera journalist it says was Hamas leader." Instead of highlighting the documented Israeli death threats against the journalist or the fact that Al-Sharif's father was murdered by Israel in December 2023, Reuters, NBC and others chose to spread the unverified Israeli narrative.
This is not unique; Western media almost always treat Israeli statements with a nuance of credibility they deny non-Westerners. Consider Benjamin Netanyahu, a proven habitual liar, not by his enemies but by his close allies. He claims Israel wants to "liberate" Gaza from Hamas and relocate civilians to so-called "safe areas." Despite his proven record of deceit, Netanyahu's false assertions are well covered and repeated uncritically by Western media outlets.
Contrast this with the treatment of Russia's claims that its war in Ukraine is to "liberate" the country from neo-Nazis. Those claims are met with great scepticism, fact-checks, and ridicule. Why does the same media grant Israeli lies a pass? Is it because of bias in favour of Israel, or an anti-Russian bias? Either way, it is hypocrisy, and it eats on the very principles that journalism is supposed to uphold.
Just over a year ago, an Israeli drone strike murdered Al-Sharif's colleague Mohamed El Ghoul, and his coworker inside a clearly marked press car. Israel made the same claim then: he was a Hamas member; to kosher its murders. If Russia did this to reporters in Ukraine, the outrage would never end. But when Israel kills journalists, the story is framed, softened, or buried.
This is how Israel's decades-long dehumanisation of Palestinians works: demonise them, diminish their suffering until their deaths generate less outrage than the injury of a dog. I wrote recently about a viral story of a dog in Gaza whose plight drew more global sympathy than the Palestinian who saved it. That was not a fluke; it was the "logical response" for people who were also victims of a propaganda that dehumanises Palestinians.
Israel could not succeed in this without help. Embedded by dual citizen Israelis and Western Zionist voices in the international media, those terrified by the "antisemitism" smear act as marketeers of Israeli hasbara. They parrot Netanyahu's denial of mass starvation, even when hundreds of humanitarian agencies, including the United Nations, say otherwise.
Western outlets would never have extended that courtesy, say, to Myanmar's generals or Sudan's warlords, denying starvation in those countries. But the lie of a European Israeli, of Polish descent, carries more weight in their newsrooms than the truth of the nonwhite victims.
Arab media are hardly immune. Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya have both handed Netanyahu and Israeli spokespersons airtime to lie without challenge, even though the former's coverage of this war has been nothing short of remarkable given the threat on the ground. However, in the name of "balance," most global media outlets have become conduits for a propaganda that justifies starving children. The idea of presenting "both sides" is meaningless when one side is propagating lies. There is no balance between lies and truths.
When a journalist is killed, their archives, contacts, and testimony are buried with them. When survivors are too afraid to speak, official lies become the only record. Israel understands this perfectly. It has turned the killing of journalists into a weapon of war, knowing that without witnesses, there is no record, and without documents, justice fails.
Allowing Israel to normalise the killing of journalists is not only a betrayal of the truth, but it is a heinous violation of the supposed mission of journalism. The press cannot claim to be the guardians of free expression while accepting that a state may carry on targeted execution of reporters and normalising the silencing of Palestinian journalists.
Targeting journalists is not just about silencing the present; it is about monopolising the future. No witnesses, no crimes—that is the darkness Israel is building; a darkness that will swallow not only Gaza, but the soul of humanity.
Jamal Kanj is the author of Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Arab world issues.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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