For nearly three years, the world has been told that Israel is killing journalists in Gaza at an unprecedented rate.
The numbers (and allegations) have been repeated as nauseum: newspapers, mainstream media broadcasts, activists and international organizations… all with the implication, in some cases explicitly stated, that Israel is “intentionally targeting journalists.” Except the evidence doesn’t support that claim, and now, some of the names behind those statistics are quietly disappearing.
Reporters Without Borders, or RSF, recently removed Mohammad Jarghoun from its database after Hamas’s military wing identified him as a member of the Rafah Brigade’s Martyr Muhammad Abu Harb Battalion. RSF had previously described Jarghoun as a journalist for Smart Media who was killed while covering fighting on October 7, 2023.
Another name removed from RSF’s records was Mohamed Nasr Abu Huwaidi, who had been described as a journalist killed while wearing a press vest. Palestinian Islamic Jihad later identified Abu Huwaidi as a commander in its Central Military Media Unit. In both cases, the information did not come from Israel. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad identified the men themselves.
Yet RSF did not issue a major correction acknowledging that people it had counted as journalists were in fact members of terrorist organizations. Their names simply disappeared quietly from the database.
The Committee to Protect Journalists is facing the same problem on a larger scale. On June 25, CPJ announced a full review of its Gaza casualty database after Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad published obituaries identifying people whom CPJ had classified as journalists as members of their armed groups. CPJ removed eight people after determining that they had participated in hostilities, along with another 12 names removed for other reasons.
For years, CPJ’s figures were treated as authoritative evidence that Israel was responsible for an unprecedented slaughter of journalists. Those figures were cited by major news organizations and used to bolster allegations that Israel was intentionally targeting the press.
Then Hamas and Islamic Jihad began identifying some of those same “journalists” as their own fighters. CPJ said its wider review would be completed in July. It is now August, and that review still has not been published.
The problem with this is that the original numbers (as allegations) have already made their way around the world and back, and defined a story that simply isn’t true.
More disturbingly, CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, has documented cases in which major outlets continued citing CPJ’s statistics even after CPJ publicly acknowledged that its database required review. In July, The New York Times cited CPJ figures in a story involving Australian pianist Jayson Gillham, who had accused Israel of intentionally killing journalists. The article made no mention of the fact that CPJ had just begun auditing its own list after terror groups identified people on it as combatants. This is how slanderous accusations become accepted as fact.
But while most of themedia has woefully failed to do their job researching the facts, media watchdog groups like CAMERA and HonestReporting have been documenting this problem throughout the war. HonestReporting has spent years examining the backgrounds of Palestinians appearing on journalist casualty lists, including their social-media activity, terrorist-group ‘martyr’ notices and affiliations with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or other designated terrorist organizations.
In June, HonestReporting identified 112 of the 207 people then appearing on CPJ’s list as having some form of affiliation with terrorist organizations. For organizations like CJP, they produce supposedly authoritative lists of journalists killed by Israel, in the name of “supporting journalists” only to be whitewashing the people actively endangering journalists in war zones by pretending to be them. Repeatedly included dozens of Palestinians with documented links to the very terror organizations fighting Israel is completely irresponsible — for CJP, and for the mainstream media.
Sadly, CPJ and RSF are not isolated cases.
In July, HonestReporting reported that the International Federation of Journalists had quietly removed eight terrorism-linked individuals from its own list of Palestinian media workers killed during the war. Three of those individuals had also been removed by CPJ after it determined that they had participated in combat.
Yet these revisions receive nothing close to the attention given to the original casualty figures, and the discrepancy is the story.
When Israel is accused of killing another journalist, the allegation can be on front pages within minutes. The number gets added to a running total and cited as further proof that Israel is waging a war on the press. When Hamas later identifies that same person as one of its fighters, the correction is buried in a database update, if it is acknowledged at all.
A press vest does not erase terrorist affiliation. Neither does a camera, a byline or employment by a media outlet. Yet throughout this war, those distinctions have repeatedly been erased in order to produce a much simpler story: Israel is targeting journalists. The evidence is now forcing some of the organizations that helped create that lie to revise their own records. While the names are disappearing from the list, the headlines they helped generate are not.