Hunted.
That is how Hossam Shabat recently described his life as a journalist in northern Gaza.
Just days earlier, the Israeli military accused him and five other Al Jazeera journalists of being fighters in Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The accusations, which the network has said are “baseless” and which Mr. Shabat and the others have denied, effectively put targets on these journalists and come amid a horrific recent Israeli offensive in northern Gaza. In the past month, this small group of journalists has provided important documentation of what the United Nations human rights chief has said are possible “crimes against humanity.”
At least 129 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed since the war in Gaza started last year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists; the Gaza media office puts that number much higher, at 188. This has been the deadliest year for journalists since the C.P.J. began recording the numbers in 1992. The group has said that in the first 10 weeks of the war, more journalists were killed than had been killed in any country over an entire year.
The C.P.J. has also determined that five journalists who were killed, including one in Lebanon, were “directly targeted” by Israeli forces, and the organization is investigating more than 20 others. (The Israel Defense Forces has repeatedly denied targeting journalists.)
The record number of journalists killed has been met with little response from Israel’s most important ally, the United States. The Biden administration has powerful tools to help pursue accountability for these killings. It could ensure independent investigations, enforce the Leahy law, which prohibits the United States from assisting foreign military units suspected of having committed human rights abuses, or even impose sanctions, which it did for far less just a few months ago in response to a Georgian law that could limit press freedoms.
Decades of what rights groups have called a pattern of Israeli impunity in the killings of journalists, combined with its accusations of reporters of being fighters, compromises the world’s ability to know what’s happening in Gaza. And Washington’s anemic response tells the Israeli military there will be no consequences.
Two weeks before Israeli authorities accused the six journalists of having ties to militant groups in Gaza, Mr. Shabat and one of the other journalists, Anas al-Sharif, survived what they said was a harrowing attack by Israeli forces. One of their colleagues, a cameraman named Fadi al-Wahidi, was shot in the neck as the group tried to flee a quadcopter that chased and then fired on them, according to Mr. al-Sharif. After Mr. al-Wahidi was shot, his colleagues began to film. In the footage, he can be seen lying facedown on a sidewalk. His navy blue press jacket is stark against his white shirt, starker still for how little protection it offered him.
The image of Mr. al-Wahidi lying prone as his colleagues cried out to him is a haunting echo of the shooting of another journalist, the Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed in the occupied West Bank in May 2022. In video of that attack, Ms. Abu Akleh was also shown facedown in the street, motionless, the “Press” label on her flak jacket large and clearly visible. Several investigations found that Ms. Abu Akleh and the other journalists she was with were most likely targeted. A few months after her killing, the Israeli military said that there was a “high possibility” that she was shot by an Israeli soldier but that she was not targeted and that no soldier would be charged.
In 2022 my colleagues and I investigated her killing for Al Jazeera English, where I was previously a documentary producer. We interviewed her brother, Anton, in his home in East Jerusalem, where he was surrounded by photos of her, his only sibling. He told us not just about who she was and why journalism was important to her but also about his family’s near-impossible search for justice. “If no one is held accountable,” he told us, “it will just go on and on.”
Her family is still waiting. Although Ms. Abu Akleh was an American citizen, the Biden administration issued a cursory summary of the killing based on reports from the Israeli military and the Palestinian Authority, in addition to an inconclusive ballistics analysis. Two years ago, there were reports of an F.B.I. investigation opened independently of the White House, but it has yet to release any concrete findings.
In the two decades before Ms. Abu Akleh’s death, the C.P.J. found that at least 19 other journalists were killed by Israeli forces in the occupied territories. No one was charged in any of those attacks, either. A May 2023 report by the C.P.J. found a pattern of Israeli response “that appears designed to evade responsibility” and said that Israeli authorities regularly accused journalists of being terrorists without providing credible evidence. Israeli forces have admitted they have killed Palestinian journalists, both during and before the current war. In some instances they said the reporters were caught in the crossfire; in others they justified the killings by claiming the journalists were combatants or had ties to militant groups, releasing documents they said they had found as proof. Watchdog and human rights groups that looked at some of the allegations found them to be unproven or not credible.
An Al Jazeera correspondent, Ismail al-Ghoul, was killed on July 31, along with a cameraman, Rami al-Rifi. After their killings, the Israeli military released a document it said supported several claims, including that Mr. al-Ghoul received a military ranking from Hamas in 2007 — when he was 10 years old. Mr. al-Ghoul and Mr. al-Rifi were two of the five journalists the C.P.J. has determined died in targeted killings.
The most recent accusations against the six men are brazen and chilling. It’s difficult to see the list of names as anything short of a hit list. The military claims its intelligence backs up its accusations, but the head of the C.P.J. said the documents did not appear credible. She also said she was concerned the accusations were an attempt “to excuse any potential future attack on these six journalists. It makes them extremely vulnerable, and they were already extremely vulnerable.”
The timing of the accusations against the six is impossible to ignore, coming during one of the most intense and devastating phases of Israel’s war in Gaza yet. Israeli officials have ordered about 400,000 people to leave their homes in the north, with no true guarantee of safety or return. The entire population is at risk of starvation, and each new statement from U.N. officials and the few remaining doctors there is increasingly dire. With Israel continuing to bar foreign media from entering Gaza independently, the burden of documenting this war has fallen almost entirely to Palestinian journalists. With every journalist killed, another voice is silenced, and the world’s window on Gaza becomes even smaller.
According to an Al Jazeera spokesperson, Mr. al-Wahidi, the Al Jazeera cameraman who was shot on Oct. 9, was paralyzed as a result of his injuries and is in a coma in a hospital in Gaza. With Gaza’s health system destroyed, he, along with Ali al-Attar, another Al Jazeera journalist injured in a separate attack, are in need of immediate medical evacuation that Israeli authorities have, as of yet, not allowed.
“For an entire year, we have been sharing the same scenes — the same displacement, the same massacres and the same bombings over the heads of civilians,” Mr. Shabat recently said in a livestream. “All we need is for you not to leave us alone, screaming until our voices go hoarse, with no one to hear us.”
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