By Katie Halper
Katie Halper examines Israel’s targeting of Palestinian journalists and Western media’s complicity in silencing their reporting on the Gaza genocide.
Three years into the genocide of Gaza—and despite near-total indifference from their supposed colleagues in Western media—Palestinian journalists there continue to show almost unimaginable bravery, risking their lives even as Israel maintains its murderous war on those who report the truth.
As of April 2025, the number of journalists killed in Gaza was already greater than the number killed in the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined.
These journalists are not merely being killed while doing their jobs. They’re being killed for doing their jobs in a targeted campaign that seeks to obliterate those who shine a light on the truth. Samer Abu Daqqa, a 45-year-old Palestinian journalist and cameraman, was covering the aftermath of an Israeli strike on a United Nations-run school sheltering displaced people in the center of Khan Yunis, when he was injured by a missile launched from an Israeli drone on December 15, 2025. Abu Daqqa did not die immediately. But Israel ensured his death by blocking ambulances and rescue workers from reaching him, causing him to bleed to death over 5 hours.
Journalists need not be “on the job” to be killed: Israel routinely targets their homes, murdering them along with their families when they are off duty.
Between October 2023 and October 2026, Israel destroyed 150 journalists’ homes, which, as Francesca Albanese notes, “signals (an) intent to persecute the media sector.” Photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, for example, was killed along with five family members when precision-guided munitions struck their apartment on April 16, 2025— one day after the Cannes film festival announced it would be screening a documentary about her.
Shady Abu Sedo, a cameraman with the Palestine Today television channel who was tortured at the notorious Sde Teiman prison, told Reporters Without Borders that his interrogator had said, “I killed all the journalists, and those I couldn’t kill, I brought them here.”
Israel takes no chances when it comes to murdering journalists: hence its pattern of so-called “double tap” strikes. For example, in August 2025 Israel struck a makeshift press area and camera set up on the balcony of Nasser hospital. The first strike killed Reuters cameraman Hussam Al-Masri. The second killed four more journalists who arrived soon afterward to cover the scene, as well as dozens of health and rescue workers who had come to help. Israel justified this by claiming it had targeted a “Hamas camera”— which, it turned out, was a Reuters camera.
This attempted justification wasn’t an improvised one-off. That same month, Israel’s +972 Magazine reported that the IDF has a special ‘Legitimization cell’ that, in part, seeks to paint journalists as “Hamas terrorists.”
One intelligence source admitted, “The (legitimization cell) team regularly collected intelligence that could be used for hasbara — say, a stockpile of (Hamas) weapons (found) in a school — anything that could bolster Israel’s international legitimacy to keep fighting…. The idea was to (allow the military to) operate without pressure, so countries like America wouldn’t stop supplying weapons.” Israel claimed several of the journalists they murdered were terrorists after the fact. But the IDF also prepares its smear campaigns ahead of time.
IDF Arabic spokesperson Avichay Adraee launched an online harassment and misinformation campaign claiming 28-year-old Palestinian journalist Anas Al-Sharif was a Hamas terrorist, after he cried on air while reporting on Israel’s starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.
On July 23, 2005, Anas tweeted,
“Important – Please share and tag all press freedom and human rights organizations. Once again, the Israeli army spokesperson has launched a campaign of threats and incitement against me because of my work as a journalist with Al Jazeera. I reaffirm: I, Anas Al-Sharif, am a journalist with no political affiliations. My only mission is to report the truth from the ground — as it is, without bias. At a time when a deadly famine is ravaging Gaza, speaking the truth has become, in the eyes of the occupation, a threat.”
On July 24, The Committee to Protect Journalists wrote, “We are deeply alarmed by the repeated threats made by Israeli army spokesperson Avichay Adraee against Al Jazeera’s Gaza correspondent Anas al-Sharif and call on the international community to protect him.”
Less than a month later, on August 10, Israel killed Anas along with five of his colleagues when it bombed an Al Jazeera tent inside the Al-Shifa medical complex. Israel claimed credit for this attack, and smeared Anas as a “Hamas terrorist”, not the journalist he was.
The international community did not protect Anas. Neither did Western journalists. A leaked email reveals that Global Journalism – part of the BBC Global News team- asked BBC News for an “essential amendment and correction” over its reporting that “The BBC understands Sharif did some work with a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current war.”
The email called for that lie to be replaced with “A source has told the BBC that Sharif had worked for a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current conflict, but Al Jazeera has denied this and the BBC News Arabic correspondent also says that he has seen no evidence.” BBC ignored this request and the smear is still online.
To be fair, the BBC was just one example of corporate media’s shameful response to the targeting of their colleagues in Gaza. Western media also parroted Israel’s talking points— in some cases, they did so on orders from up high.
In November 2023, The New York Times sent a memo to its reporters telling them not to use the words “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” or “occupied territory.” It even cautioned against the use of “refugee camp.” In late October and early November, CNN emailed its reporters to “remind our audiences of the immediate cause of this current conflict, namely the Hamas attack and mass murder and kidnap(ping) of Israeli civilians.” It also cautioned that “Hamas representatives are engaging in inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda. Most of it has been said many times before and is not newsworthy. We should be careful not to give it a platform.”
Media watchdog group FAIR looked at how 15 different news outlets (the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, BBC, Politico, Newsweek, Associated Press and Reuters) covered Israel’s murders.
It found that “they overwhelmingly centered Israel’s narrative, attempted to delegitimize pro-Palestinian sources, and failed to contextualize the killings within the larger context of the genocide. (…) Establishment media used these courageous journalists’ murders as an opportunity to continue parroting the same Zionist talking points that contributed to manufacturing consent for their killings.” As their headline read, “Western Media Manufactured Consent for Israel’s Murder of Palestinian Journalists.”
When they weren’t overtly manufacturing consent for the killing of journalists, they failed to pay appropriate attention to it. In his book How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, Adam Johnson compares the coverage of journalists’ deaths in Gaza and Ukraine, respectively.
Within the first 100 days of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, “77 journalists were killed in Gaza versus eight in the first 100 days of Russia’s invasion. Yet, despite this huge disparity, deaths of media workers in Ukraine were given roughly equal mention, the analysis found: 196 mentions versus 198 mentions of Gaza journalists. This means that each journalist death in Gaza received the equivalent of 2.5 mentions, whereas each journalist death in Ukraine received the equivalent of 24 mentions.”
Perhaps the most shameful example of Western media complicity was the way it manufactured consent for genocide through its selective and dishonest coverage of rape and sexual assault—coverage that didn’t merely misrepresent reality but inverted it in order to dehumanize Palestinians.
Western corporate media spread the lie—never substantiated, and by now thoroughly debunked—that Hamas engaged in a systematic campaign of mass rape and sexual assault on October 7th. This is the same media that ignored Israel’s amply documented campaign of mass rape and sexual assault against Palestinians captive in its various torture dungeons.
Legacy media’s policy of untruth was clear and consistent: in a vicious feedback loop, Western media and politicians parroted Israel’s lies.
On CNN, Dana Bash spent an entire segment demanding that Representative Pramila Jayapal condemn Hamas’s rape of Israeli women, which the congresswoman had already done.
When Jayapal asked Bash to “show some balance and talk about the outrages committed against Palestinians,” mentioning the 15,000 Palestinian civilians who had been killed, Dana Bash was quick to reply: “And it’s horrible, but you don’t see Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women.” This is an explicit example of “atrocity propaganda” being used to justify actual atrocities while eliding or outright denying others.
The tactic is, of course, profoundly racist, playing on tropes of Israelis as enlightened, evolved Westerners too humane to engage in sexual violence, as opposed to their savage Palestinian foes whose depravity knows no bounds. Or as Israel’s then Defense Minister Yoav Gallant put it on October 9, 2023: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
None of the mainstream journalists who reported on the alleged “mass rape campaign” of October 7 ever retracted their claims even after those were thoroughly debunked, even after every alleged witness had recanted. What’s more, they ignored the actually documented rape of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, which was, unlike the alleged Hamas rapes, documented.
One notorious case was captured in a leaked video: Israeli soldiers raped a Palestinian at the notorious Sde Teiman detention facility in the Negev desert. Though the act was partially obscured by soldiers’ shields, it is clear enough that Israeli media rightly reported it as sexual assault.
When Israeli police detained some of the alleged rapists, Israelis rioted—not against the rape or the rapists, but against the arrest of the rapists, in protests that have been dubbed “right to rape” protests.
These protests were attended by members of the government. Nobody denied what happened. A member of the Knesset even said that inserting sticks into people’s rectums was “legitimate.” There is video of a rabbi blessing a rapist, and one of the rapists became a star and celebrity.
Incredibly, but perhaps predictably, corporate media ignored this undeniably newsworthy story. As I write this, US and Western media, and US political elites, are still talking about the rape that didn’t happen, yet have been silent on a campaign of sexual violence that has been recorded. Western corporate media has abandoned journalistic principles and practice in order to win public support for the goal of genocide.
But the courageous and unwavering media makers in Gaza show the world what journalism actually looks like. And they do it knowing full well the risks.
While the death toll among Gaza journalists is staggering and requires attention and condemnation, the people of Gaza “are not numbers,” as the organization We Are Not Numbers reminds us.
We must honor and memorialize the flesh-and-blood people who did their jobs, knowing full well the real risk it posed. As reporter Youmna El-Sayed stated, “wearing our press vests seems like putting ourselves in danger.”
As Anas al-Sharif wrote in his final message, posthumously published on his social media accounts. “If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice. I have lived through pain in all its details, tasted suffering and loss many times, yet I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification.”
Yet Israel has not silenced all the voices. Bisan Owda, Hind Khoudary, Hani Mahmoud, Tareq Abu Azzoum, Maram Humaid and Anas Baba are among those continuing to report from Gaza more than three years into the genocide. Their persistence leaves the rest of us with a question: what are we prepared to do with the testimony they risk their lives to bring us?
Journalists’ unions and professional associations must turn expressions of solidarity into sustained pressure: demand independent investigations into killings, support efforts to secure accountability, and press governments and international institutions to protect reporters.
Anas al-Sharif publicly asked for protection before he was killed. His unanswered appeal should push these institutions to act whenever a journalist raises the alarm.
Honoring the journalists already killed means standing beside those still reporting, with attention, resources and action while they are alive.
– Katie Halper is a writer, filmmaker and host of The Katie Halper Show and co-host of Useful Idiots. A vocal advocate for Palestinian rights, she was fired from The Hill’s Rising after defending Rashida Tlaib and describing Israel as an apartheid state. She is developing Never Again, a documentary featuring Holocaust survivors opposing the genocide in Gaza.