Jewish Currents condemns the targeting of Palestinian journalists

On Wednesday, Israel’s army accused six Al Jazeera journalists reporting from Gaza of being members of Palestinian militant groups. Given Israel’s history of targeting and killing Palestinian journalists, these claims should be read as threats to murder them. As Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), said in response: “Israel has a long history of smearing Palestinian journalists as terrorists without providing credible evidence, and with deadly consequences.”

Jewish Currents condemns Israel’s targeting of Palestinian journalists in the strongest terms, and calls upon every media institution in the United States to do the same. As a journalistic institution, we generally refrain from putting out statements or calling on others to take action, but our position as media workers compels us to stand in solidarity with our colleagues in Gaza. The normalization of Israel’s flagrant targeting of journalists has implications for reporters around the world. Media institutions have a responsibility to speak out to deter the Israeli military from any further attacks on Palestinian journalists.

Since the beginning of Israel’s attack on Gaza, which experts in human rights and international law have called a genocide, Israel has banned foreign journalists from entering the besieged enclave. We at Currents have relied on the reports of Palestinians from Gaza to illuminate what Israel’s military assault has wrought. Every day, we tune into their social media and read their articles to find accounts of Israel’s campaign of starvation, its mass arrests of Palestinian men, its forced displacement of entire communities, and its indiscriminate bombing of Gaza. Without the documentation efforts of these journalists—particularly those in the north of Gaza, which has been effectively sealed off for over three weeks—the world would not know the full extent of Israel’s horrific assault. This is almost certainly why they are being targeted.

Even before Israel’s current military campaign in Gaza, Israel routinely killed Palestinian journalists: A CPJ report published in May 2023 documented Israel’s killings of 20 journalists (most of them Palestinian) over the past 22 years, and found that no soldier has ever faced accountability for their deaths. Since October 7th, the situation has become catastrophic: According to CPJ, Israel’s military has killed at least 123 Palestinian journalists in the past year; an investigation by Forbidden Stories found evidence suggesting that many of them were targeted while clearly identified as members of the press. In some cases, it even appears that the families of journalists were also targeted.

Al Jazeera in particular has been a frequent target of Israel. In May 2021, during Israel’s last assault on Gaza, the Israeli air force bombed the building housing the media outlet’s offices, as well as AP offices. The next year, an Israeli sniper shot and killed the prominent Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh during a raid in the West Bank city of Jenin; a CNN investigation suggested Abu Akleh was deliberately targeted. Over the past five months, following a government decision to ban the channel’s broadcasts, Israeli police have raided the outlet’s offices in Nazareth, East Jerusalem, and Ramallah and ordered them shut down. In July, an Israeli airstrike killed two Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza; the Israeli army claimed, without evidence, that they were actually fighters and thus legitimate targets. As CPJ pointed out in a statement, Israel claimed that one of them, Ismail Al Ghoul, received a Hamas military rank in 2007, when he was ten years old—a preposterous accusation. This month, Israel severely injured two Al Jazeera journalists working in northern Gaza; it has so far denied them the ability to evacuate Gaza to get treatment, which is tantamount to a death sentence considering their condition.

Israel’s threats against Palestinian journalists should be treated as a crisis for the international media. When journalists cannot safely inform the public, a crucial check on state violence disappears. And when states are allowed to kill journalists with impunity, it threatens journalists around the world.