On April 7, Israel targeted a tent in southern Gaza housing exclusively journalists with an airstrike, killing Hilmi al-Faqaawi and Ahmed Mansour of Palestine Today, wounding seven other journalists.
Prior to that, on March 24, Israel killed two journalists: Hossam Shabat of Al Jazeera and Mohammed Mansour of Palestine Today with targeted airstrikes. Shabat was killed in his car while Mansour was at home.
Journalists are protected as citizens under Article 79 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Convention and Rule 34 of Customary international humanitarian law under the International Committee of the Red Cross.
“International law is drawn both from treaties and from the behavior of states that states engage in with the understanding that they’re doing it as a matter of legal obligation, even from times when there is a treaty that a state hasn’t signed on to, and Israel hasn’t signed on to the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, the 1976 Protocol,” said international law professor Omar Dajani at University of Pacific’s McGeorge Law School.
“The protection of journalists, which is an extension of the general protection of civilians, which is the most fundamental rule of international humanitarian law, is also part of customary international law.”
On April 1, Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs published a report titled “News Graveyards: How Dangers to War Reporters Endanger the World,” stated that “The war in Gaza has, since October 7, 2023, killed more journalists than the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined.”
The report details at least 232 journalists have been killed since Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel has a history of targeting journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists detailed that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has a “decades-long pattern of targeting journalists with impunity,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg. Reporters without Borders filed four reports to the International Criminal Court alleging Israel is targeting journalists because “journalists are being slaughtered at an unprecedented pace,” said Antoine Bernard, RSF’s Director of Advocacy and Assistance.
On Oct. 23, 2024, the IDF published the names and photos of six Palestinian Al Jazeera journalists, which included Shabat, stating they were either a part of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. What makes this particularly interesting is that these journalists were some of the last journalists who remained in north Gaza after Israel closed the Netzarim Corridor, which separates the north and south of Gaza.
Additionally, on May 11, 2022, Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh of Al Jazeera was shot in the head and killed while she was reporting on an IDF raid in the West Bank and clearly wearing her press vest.
Dajani referred to her as “Palestine’s Christiane Amanpour.”
Journalists being targeted in such a manner leaves many questions for the treatment of war coverage reporters, and journalism as a whole.
“What the targeting of journalists by Israel really means for society is that this very vital occupation is going to endure even more derision than it already is, if not outright attacks, and it’s tolerated. Obviously this isn’t unique to Israel. There was the killing of a journalist by a Saudi prince a few years ago.” said Delta College journalism student Zackary Kirk-Newton, referring to the slaying of Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi authorities in 2018.
Kirk-Newton also sees a pattern being repeated here in America.
“It’s a very difficult thing to ask to be courageous enough to speak up, knowing you’ll face bodily harm or death, and I think that is the intended effect in a way, this chilling effect on journalism as a whole, and we’re seeing this to a degree in America already. We’re seeing this when, y’know, if you have a work visa, and you write an op-ed about immigration or anything critical of Trump, then you’re gone.” said Kirk-Newton.
The Israeli legislative body also voted unanimously to ban Al Jazeera, and doesn’t allow Western journalists to come into either Gaza or the West Bank.
This all begs the question: What is Israel so afraid of?
