Open Season on Journalists; Israel Has Killed 66 Since October 7

Since the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7, Israel has killed at least 66 journalists, leaving an infamous record behind compared to other recent wars in history.

War reporters who dare to risk their lives for the sake of broadcasting the truth are worth noticing. While war parties must respect the job that reporters do, they are also obligated by international law not to attack these brave men and women for their efforts to tell the truth of the war to the world.

The story, however, seems to be different for Israel. Since October 7, when the war between Hamas and Israel broke out, Israeli air and ground attacks have taken the lives of dozens of media workers in Gaza.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), since October 7 till this Saturday, at least 66 journalists and media workers have been killed in what the organization called “the deadliest month for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992.” To date, 55 Palestinians, four Israelis and three Lebanese reporters have been killed.

“We’ve never seen anything like this. It’s unprecedented,” Sherif Mansour, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, said in a statement issued Saturday, adding also that “for journalists in Gaza specifically, the exponential risk is possibly the most dangerous we have seen.”

Confirming Israel’s open season on journalists in Gaza, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate issued a similar report this Saturday and noted the killing of “66 journalists since the beginning of the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7.”

In a statement, the syndicate said that there are two missing journalists and 31 journalists have been detained by the occupation authorities in the Palestinian lands. The Syndicate then called on all international, Arab, and Palestinian institutions working in the human rights-related sectors to monitor and pursue the Israeli occupation for its crimes against journalists.

This Friday, a four-day humanitarian pause in the Gaza Strip was implemented, a move that is hoped to facilitate the release of the detained journalists.

Following the truce deal between Israel and Hamas, the two sides swapped 24 Israelis and foreigners for 39 Palestinians from Israeli jails on the first day of the humanitarian pause.     None of the released prisoners, however, was one of the detained journalists.

Heart-breaking scenes that Israel is responsible for

Israel’s brutality in arbitrary killing journalists in the past seven weeks of the Gaza war has created heart-breaking scenes. One of such shows of inhumanity against reporters was when journalist Salman Al-Bashir from the Palestine News Agency was reporting that his colleague, Mohammad Abu Hattab, had been killed in an Israeli airstrike, along with 11 members of his family.

While reporting the tragedy that happened to his colleague during the live broadcast, Al-Bashir tore off his blue helmet and protective vest, labeled “press,” and threw them to the ground, asking, “Why do we bother wearing this if we’re going to be killed anyway?” Back in the studio, the news anchor interviewing Al-Bashir wept as he spoke to Al-Bashir.

No war has seen so many journalists killed, figures say

Comparing the number of the killed journalists in less than two months during the Gaza war with other conflicts shows just how brutal Israel has so far been to media workers.

Just as an example, in the war between Russia and Ukraine, only 17 journalists in total have been killed since the war started in 2022.

Likewise, during the first month of the US-led invasion of Iraq back in 2003, only 11 journalists were killed. The war in Syria that began in 2011 also left zero journalist causalities in its first two months of conflict.