By Muslim Mirror Staff
A new investigation on the predatory profile of Israeli military’s atrocities against journalists finds one in ten reporters in Gaza have been killed in the ongoing genocidal war.
“We are afraid to wear press vests and helmets. People around us fear they will be harmed by association, making it hard for us to rent an apartment or get transportation, which is already difficult in a war.”
These words from a reporter in Gaza are enough to discern what it means to be a journalist while Israel relentlessly unleashes terror against Palestinians.
Over four months, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), collaborated with 13 other news organisations to investigate the killing, injury, detention, and threats against Palestinian journalists and the destruction of media offices in Gaza as well as the West Bank.
The investigation found that more than 100 journalists had been killed in the nine months of the war, marking it as the deadliest conflict on record for reporters, making it even worse than World War II, which lasted six years.
Despite telecommunication blackouts, the consortium interviewed 120 witnesses in the Gaza Strip and West Bank and consulted around 25 weapons experts and analysts.
ARIJ had also surveyed 213 journalists from Gaza in June.
Reporting in the time of genocide
When Israel initiated its onslaught in Gaza, on October 7, following the “Al Aqsa Floods” resistance operation by Hamas, the lives of journalists in the Gaza Strip were anticipated to be in danger. However, no one imagined the scale of loss and pain to this extent.
Though the exact number of journalists who have been killed is difficult to determine as different organisations collect information in distinct ways, all of them agree that the number is record-breaking.
According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ),108 Palestinian reporters and other media workers were documented as killed till June 25.
CJP claims that this is the deadliest war for journalists worldwide since the organisation began collecting data in 1992.
“They’ve been killed while picking out food. They’ve been killed while resting in a tent,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, program director at CPJ. “They’ve been killed while reporting on the aftermath of a bombing.”
Another collective, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (SPJ), a nonprofit based in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, records a higher figure of 140 journalists and media workers killed from the start of the war, and another 176 injured.
According to Shuruq As’ad, a spokesperson for the syndicate, the deaths account for 10 percent of the total number of journalists currently working in Gaza.
“Journalists everywhere should be protected regardless of the country they work in,” she added.
While the vast majority of journalists — 89 — were killed in airstrikes, 16 were killed while working and at least 56 were killed at home.
Notably, 12 of the dead journalists were women, and most of the time, family members were also killed with them. ( With Agencies Inputs )
