Today marks the deadliest period for journalists in at least 30 years. Tomorrow promises to continue the trend.
On April 1, the Israeli Knesset unanimously passed a law that allows the government to ban foreign broadcast media from operating within Gaza. The state is authorized to confiscate equipment and shut down broadcasting sites if it deems them a threat to national security. Yet, for local journalists on Palestinian soil, Israel’s media blackout has had much deadlier implications. The Committee to Protect Journalists has reported that a staggering 137 journalists have been killed and 47 injured in the Israeli conflicts in Palestine and Lebanon since October 7, 2023. Freelance journalists and reporters for the Qatari-based media outlet Al Jazeera have become targets of bombardments, airstrikes, and long-range sniper fire—even when outfitted with blue “PRESS” flak jackets and helmets. Journalists, weaving the truth of attrition on and away from the front lines, are drowning in the deadliest media suppression of the 21st century.
As the death toll continues to grow, Israeli news sources and Western media more broadly have enacted a campaign to delegitimize murdered Palestinian journalists. Labeled as “terrorists” or “security threats,” journalists disseminating on-the-ground information about the continuous war in Gaza are denigrated, silencing Palestine’s cries to the world. Many journalists, only recently martyred, are defamed and denounced, the fabric of their stories torn to shreds. As local voices and live coverage dissipate, uninformed residents of the United States become increasingly ignorant of atrocities committed on land far too disconnected from home. The silence deafens, and impunity festers.
On July 31, 2024, Ismail al-Ghoul, one of Al Jazeera’s most prolific wartime journalists, was killed in a drone strike while bearing the unmistakable press insignia. Months before, in the northern Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, al-Ghoul had been abducted, beaten, and interrogated for 12 hours by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during his coverage of the al-Shifa hospital siege. Al-Ghoul was one of six journalists identified as fighters for Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad by the IDF, which claimed to have discovered documentation that associated them with the militant groups. The IDF’s accusations against al-Ghoul, which labeled him as an elite fighter in the Nukhba brigade of Hamas’s military, have major holes. One of the most conspicuous inconsistencies is the claim that al-Ghoul earned a military rank in 2007, when he was only 10 years old. Instead, suppression of journalistic coverage as the IDF destroyed al-Shifa appears a likelier motivation for al-Ghoul’s forceful detainment.
Less than three months after al-Ghoul’s death, 19-year-old Hassan Hamad, a freelance journalist for the Gazan news organization MediaTown, was killed by Israeli artillery fire in the Jabalia refugee camp, located in northern Gaza. Ashraf Mashharawi, a colleague of Hamad’s at MediaTown, claims that the shell that hit Hamad’s bedroom was “fired intentionally to target him.” For more than a year, Hamad had been reporting on Israeli ground operations in Jabalia, noting the increasing prevalence of tanks, troops, and heavy airstrikes in the vulnerable refugee camp. Prior to his death, he received multiple threats through WhatsApp from Israeli area codes advising him to stop recording Israeli incursions into the Gaza Strip. One read, “We’ll come for you next… This is your last warning.” The threats were not idle: Israeli artillery shells and quadcopter drones had repeatedly targeted Hamad before. His story is evidence of a widespread epidemic of journalistic silence in the Middle Eastern territory: another innocent voice ripped from the fabric.
Yet, nuances in Gazan journalism are evident as well. Hamad’s MediaTown is closely associated with Al Jazeera, where al-Ghoul worked. Al Jazeera is the primary organization providing firsthand accounts of the war and Gaza’s humanitarian crisis and has come under fire from the Israeli government for allowing commentary from Hamas officials without criticism. Al Jazeera is funded by Qatar, a nation that has served as a refuge for Hamas’s political leaders. Hamas has even operated a political bureau in its capital, Doha, since 2012. However, Qatar has been the primary mediator in ceasefire and hostage negotiation efforts. The nation also recently promised to expel Hamas leaders amid pressure from the United States and Israel.
Despite Al Jazeera’s complex relationship with the war and its belligerents, the fact remains that killing journalists prevents any story from being woven for the world, no matter the organization’s background. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is using the law blocking international journalism to isolate Al Jazeera reporters and freelance journalists, a blockade method of censorship that enables a rolling wave of media blackouts in the warzone. Combined with recent smear campaigns against Al Jazeera journalists, actors like Hamad and al-Ghoul are neatly swept under the rug. Historically, occupying governments have labeled journalists as criminals to make citizens question the validity of local reporting. Many commentators believe the current assaults on journalists in Gaza serve to deliberately conceal the wartime destruction of Palestine, allowing the Israeli government to act without facing retribution. In the words of Sherif Mansour, the Middle East coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, “Impunity acts like a virus; it knows no borders and, like violence, it knows no boundaries.”
In Gaza, journalists have faced extreme risks in their mission to promulgate news on the world stage. They move among the 90 percent of Gazans who are displaced and bear witness to deadly Israeli airstrikes, the targeted destruction of 80 percent of Gaza’s infrastructure, and the weaponization of food and medical care. Gazan journalists are instrumental in exposing wartime events in great detail, and Israeli forces have repeatedly and mercilessly marked them for death. Media silence becomes a loaded weapon, breaking down the last pillar of humanity left amid razed cities and falling debris.
Independent reporting is a charge to write the world as it is, not as we hope it to be. It articulates the ambiguous and brings voice to the voiceless. Without it, the stories of Palestinian humanity near the Mediterranean Sea, woven into black and white netted scarves, drape unseen onto the rubble of a lost war. Voices are hushed, the hands of those who loomed the truth long buried under sandy coastal soil.
Through the gray of the conflict in Gaza, journalists stagger forward to relay a simple truth: What is silenced can be forgotten, and what is silenced can be repeated.