On April 16th, at the place de la Bastille in Paris, there was a crowd of far too few people who joined a belated gathering in support of Palestinian journalists in Gaza. Yet all of our profession had, for several months already, been made aware of the Israeli army’s deliberate killings of our Gazan colleagues.
Since February 2024, Mediapart has been publishing the faces of the victims of the slaughter, and who now number more than 200 dead. That is a toll that has no known precedent. Never, be it during the two world wars of the last century or in any of the modern-day conflicts that followed them, have so many news gathering professionals been killed in one chronological and geographical sequence. Never have so many professional witnesses exercising a fundamental human right – that of informing about what is happening to our common humanity – been deliberately and cynically eliminated by one of the belligerents of an armed conflict.
During that protest at the place de la Bastille in April, Thibaut Bruttin, the head of the Paris-based NGO active in defending the rights of journalists, Reporters sans Frontières – more commonly known as RSF (or Reporters Without Borders in English) – expressed his concern over the extent of the indifference on the part of the media in France and, more broadly, the West in face of this deadly challenge against the very raison d’être of journalism: namely, the reporting of events, its freedom of action and the necessity of its existence. Bruttin got straight to the point (see him speaking in this video, as of timecode 33:40’). “The insidious poison of the Israeli armed forces has sometimes introduced itself within our own profession,” he said. “Over the ten years that I have worked at RSF, it’s the first time that I’ve been asked if the journalist is truly a journalist, when he’s dead.”
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The carnage, however, continues. Israel admitted responsibility for the assassination on August 10th of four Al Jazeera journalists, including the prominent Palestinian reporter Anas al-Sharif, 28, in a targeted attack on their tent in Gaza City. Israel claimed, without providing proof, that Sharif was "the head of a Hamas terrorist cell".
Accounts and evidence that must be eliminated
Amid the general savagery produced by a so-called war of civilisations led by Israel in Gaza, a new element has been included; journalism is no longer offered a protection, even less a sanctuary. It appears that every state, including one that still claims to be a democracy, can now proclaim that a journalist is a terrorist and, as such, execute them and the colleagues accompanying them. On the stage of the barbaric theatre of experimentation that is Gaza, Israel has put into definitive acts the dreams of every enemy of news reporting as a counter-force, one that challenges official accounts.
According to a report by RSF for the year 2024, “Gaza has become the most dangerous region in the world for journalists, a place where journalism itself is under threat of extinction”. The NGO has already submitted four complaints before the International Criminal Court (ICC) accusing Israel of committing war crimes against journalists in Gaza.
The ICC still features on its website the terms of an arrest warrant it issued on November 21st 2024 against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Netanyahu is described on the ICC webpage as being currently “At large”. It is a bitter and derisory illustration of the powerlessness of the law in face of the force of regimes, when the international community limits its interventions to words and not acts, such as issuing sanctions against the state of Israel.
Consequently, the issue of journalism might appear secondary; in the context of the extent of the disaster in Gaza that continues now more than ever, about which even the legal descriptions – war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide – fall short of illustrating the full and terrible reality, one can argue that the plight of journalists is but one aspect of a vast catastrophe. That view is all the more legitimate in that, if journalists are officially protected by international humanitarian laws (see here and here), the same applies to civilian populations, which in Gaza suffer the greatest injustice from a war explicitly waged for the destruction of Palestine.
There is however another dimension. The slaughter of journalists is not just one of many illustrations of the Israeli military’s total contempt for fundamental human rights. The targeting of journalists in Gaza is Israel’s admission of the crimes it has committed there. “In this war we have learned that what you don't see, you don't know,” wrote Yossi Klein, a columnist for the Israeli daily Harretz, in September 2024. More bluntly, what is unseen, what doesn’t present itself, and which is not documented, doesn’t exist.
No international media has been given access to the Gaza Strip since the start of the Israeli offensive in retaliation for the October 7th 2023 Hamas attacks. Palestinian journalists are explicitly targets, because they represent the threat of evidence, accounts and views that must be eliminated.
To commit crimes with impunity requires the absence of witnesses. The total war led by Israel’s leaders against journalism and news reporting is directly proportionate to their lucidity regarding the gravity of their actions. It goes hand-in-hand with their fierce attempts to discredit, punish and ban NGOs, United Nations agencies (and the UNRWA in particular) and even the Red Cross and the Red Crescent, whose medical staff have been killed while carrying out their duties.
Thankfully, in our inter-connected world, where civil society can itself sound the alarm and document events in real time, this near total blackout of news from Gaza has not prevented the vast crime committed there to be established: at the end of 2024 by Amnesty International (December 5th), by Médecins sans frontières (December 18th), by Human Rights Watch (December 19th) and at the beginning of 2025 by Forensic Architecture in a project entitled A Cartography of Genocide (January 21st). Most recently, that list was added to in July by the Israeli NGO B’Tselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), with its report Our Genocide.
The B’Tselem report, like also the exceptional work by Israeli historian Lee Mordechai, highlights the information stakes of Israel’s war in Gaza. Behind the caution of the words employed on the subject is the observation that the perpetrators of the crime wish to have no witnesses to their acts, in order to hide it. Consequently, there is no factual truth about what happened, no rigorous, independent account of the events, and instead there are alternative truths, thrown into a cage of opinions and manipulations.
With that in mind, any indifference, and notably amid our profession itself, towards the fate of journalists in Gaza becomes an indifference towards the very essence of journalism, namely to provide the truth about events. In this context, journalism cannot be neutral, except to serve the lies and propaganda. The truth is that a genocide has taken place in Gaza and is continuing still, where the Palestinians are the victims, in a criminal process driven by colonialism, with the dehumanization of the oppressed and the barbarity of the oppressor.
“Genocide goes beyond the horrific harm to its direct victims,” the NGO B’Tselem observes in the conclusions to its report Our Genocide. “It is an assault on humanity itself: on the fundamental belief that every life is precious, and the core principle that every human being is entitled to basic rights affording protection from arbitrary violence. History shows that attempting to eradicate a group of human beings is a crime with catastrophic consequences — a crime that every person has the duty to oppose and act to stop immediately. This is a moral, legal, and human imperative: to acknowledge the facts, call them by name, stand with the victims, and demand an end to destruction and extermination while they unfold.”
“[…] In the immediate term, the recognition that the Israeli regime is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip and the deep concern that it may expand to other areas where Palestinians live under Israeli rule demand urgent and unequivocal action from both Israeli society and the international community. This is the time to act. This is the time to save those who have not yet been lost forever, and use every means available under international law to stop Israel's genocide of the Palestinians.”
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- The original French version of this op-ed articlme can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse