Journalists in Gaza Are Dying at an “Unprecedented” Rate

It took two decades of war in Vietnam for 63 journalists to be killed.

In Gaza, it took 63 days.

The first to die were Israeli journalists killed during Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 attack. Three were gunned down while covering a music festival. Another died alongside his wife and daughters. The vast majority of casualties since that day have been Arabs; their bodies blown apart by airstrikes, tank shells and gunfire that have rained down on them since the war began.

On Friday, Al Jazeera confirmed the photojournalist Samer Abu Daqqa was killed by an Israel Defense Force drone strike in southern Gaza. 

“Following Samer’s injury, he was left to bleed to death for over five hours, as Israeli forces prevented ambulances and rescue workers from reaching him, denying the much-needed emergency treatment,” Al Jazeera said in a statement. “The Network holds Israel accountable for systematically targeting and killing Al Jazeera journalists and their families.”

He is the 64th journalist killed during the war, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Samer is also one of over a dozen Al Jazeera reporters who’ve been killed by the IDF since the network launched in 1996.

What’s happening to journalists in Gaza doesn’t feel like collateral damage. What’s happening seems a lot more like an assault on truth led by a prime minister who knows he’ll be removed from office and prosecuted for corruption when the fighting stops. And until the fighting stops, journalists will continue to die in droves.

“(Journalists) in Gaza, in particular, have paid, and continue to pay, an unprecedented toll,” the CPJ’s Sherif Monsour wrote, in a statement to The Rover. “Many have lost colleagues, families, and media facilities, and have fled seeking safety when there is no safe haven or exit.”

Journalists aren’t some separate, protected category of civilians in times of war. 

We’re just civilians — our lives aren’t any more important than the thousands of children and hundreds of aid workers who’ve died in the last two months. But the fact that so many of our colleagues have been slaughtered should be alarming.

For starters, consider the basic mission of journalism: to bear witness. 

Support Independent Journalism.

Every time the IDF kills a journalist — whether by accident or design — they’re destroying evidence. The people of Israel deserve to know if their military is committing war crimes that could escalate the conflict into a regional one. And how can voters in the West — citizens whose governments provide billions in arms to Israel every year — make sense of this war if they only get the IDF’s heavily redacted accounting of it?

With a military siege cutting off Gazans from the outside world, it’s impossible for outside journalists to make it into the war zone. All we have left are the Palestinian, Lebanese and Israeli reporters risking their lives to provide us with information on a conflict that’s killed an estimated 18,000 Palestinians and 1,200 Israelis. 

And those witnesses are dying.

A second, equally important point: if this many reporters are dying, the IDF has given up on the pretence that it doesn’t target civilians. Because if they can justify killing journalists from outlets like CNN, Reuters and Sky News, what chance does the average Palestinian have? 

Indeed, evidence uncovered by the independent +972 Magazine suggests the IDF is intentionally ramping up strikes on civilian infrastructure to create “civilian pressure” on Hamas. Quoting military and intelligence sources, the report found Israel has vastly increased the number of civilian deaths it considers acceptable while targeting Hamas leadership.

“So, in the past, according to sources, for a single assassination attempt, dozens of Palestinian civilians would be allowed to be killed,” said Yuval Abraham, a journalist with +728 Magazine said in an interview with PBS last week. “This has become 10 times or 20 times the number than was allowed in the past.”

Most of the journalists killed in this war worked in Palestinian media, belonging to a press corps that frequently clashed with the Hamas government. In Gaza, it wasn’t uncommon for reporters to be jailed, beaten and intimidated for their coverage, according to Human Rights Watch. Something as mundane as a news site running a photo Hamas didn’t like could end with an arrest and torture.

But the scale and nature of violence the IDF has unleashed on journalists goes beyond anything seen in modern warfare.

Consider the Oct. 13 killing of Issam Abdallah, a Reuters photographer working in Southern Lebanon when he was hit by an artillery strike. Abdallah, 37, was with his colleagues from Agence France Presse and Al Jazeera, filming an IDF outpost from across the Lebanese border when the first shell struck.

Since they all wore blue “PRESS” flak jackets used to identify themselves, the journalists assumed they’d be safe. But exactly 1 minute and 23 seconds after Abdallah turned his camera towards the IDF outpost, the group was hit with a 120 mm tank shell.

“I remember Issam’s leg falling in front of me,” said Dylan Collins, an Agence France Presse reporter, in an interview with Amnesty International. “I remember looking up and seeing (Al-Jazeera reporter Carmen Joukhadar) by the car, her face is black and she’s walking like a zombie. Her entire back is covered in shrapnel.”

Collins was applying a tourniquet to his colleague Christina Assi’s leg when the second blast left him stunned and dizzy. Though both her legs were blown off in the explosion, Assi survived thanks largely to the intervention of her coworkers. 

Abdallah was remembered as a cautious but daring reporter whose coverage of the war in Ukraine earned him international acclaim.

To see a journalist killed by a projectile that can down an attack helicopter should alarm our colleagues regardless of who the victim worked for. And yet, there’s been little advocacy from Western journalism federations beyond a few tweets and statements of condemnation. 

Prior to the outbreak of war, IDF soldiers killed some 20 journalists over a 22-year period in Gaza and the West Bank, according to a report by the CPJ. 

The report was published last May, exactly one year after the death of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. She was shot in the back of the head in what was likely a targeted attack by IDF gunmen, according to investigations by the Washington Post, United Nations and five human rights groups.

Among the CPJ’s most disturbing findings:

• Israel has never put an IDF soldier on trial for killing a journalist, despite numerous instances where evidence would warrant criminal charges.
• The IDF has repeatedly failed to respect press insignia. In 2008, an IDF tank fired on Reuters reporters who wore a “PRESS” vest and stood next to a van with giant “TV” decals. The attack killed Fadel Shana and wounded his colleague.
• The IDF is less likely to investigate the deaths of Palestinian journalists that don’t have a strong connection to an international or Western news outlet.
• The IDF frequently accuses Palestinian journalists who come under military fire of being terrorists but provides no evidence to back those claims. 

Another side effect of killing and maiming dozens of journalists: disinformation.

Since the war broke out, there have been tens of thousands of fake social media accounts created to spread disinformation designed to elicit a strong emotional reaction from users.

The Indian government has been linked to thousands of burner accounts on X (formerly Twitter) designed to spread anti-Palestinian propaganda, namely that Hamas fighters are using Israeli teenagers as sex slaves, kidnapping babies and that the Oct. 7 attack was a US-led psyop. 

Similarly, lies about the IDF and Israeli government have gone unchallenged on X and other major social media platforms.

Without a robust news operation on the ground in Gaza, false claims rack up millions of impressions online before they can be debunked. And right now — as Islamophobic and antisemitic attacks are sweeping across North America — that can lead to acts of extreme violence against our friends and neighbours.

Which brings me back to our colleagues in Gaza.

I’ve never signed a petition in 14 years of practicing journalism. When it’s your job to be the referee, aligning yourself with a cause muddies the waters. And while I don’t abide by all the customs of my trade — I hardly consider myself impartial — this is one line I don’t cross.

But last week, when a friend shared a petition in support of the journalists under fire in Gaza, I signed it. I don’t know all of the other 300-plus signatories but the ones I do know — dozens of people brave enough to risk their jobs in support of their colleagues — are my people.

Among them, there is a columnist who cradled my daughter when she was just a few days old. There are colleagues who’ve been assaulted, told to go back to their country and spat on while reporting on the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa last year. Colleagues who put their safety on the line to investigate white supremacist groups in Quebec.

In the end, I’m convinced that any reasonable person wants a peaceful resolution to the war and justice for those who’ve been destroyed by it. 

But we can’t achieve any of that without the truth.

And you can’t expect the truth if you keep killing journalists.