British Foreign Secretary David Lammy told a meeting of the House of Common foreign affairs committee last November that he could not verify his claim of widespread looting in Gaza, as there were “no journalists” in the territory.
Lammy meant no foreign journalists, because they are refused entry by Israel – but his stumble was revealing. Furthermore, he may yet be proved right.
At the rate at which Israeli forces are killing Palestinian journalists in Gaza – 245 by one count, and more than 273 by another – there could soon be no journalists left to record the genocide taking place in real time before our eyes.
This is the outcome that some Israeli journalists pray for.
It was starkly apparent from their reaction to the targeted killings on Monday of Middle East Eye journalists Mohamed Salama and Ahmed Abu Aziz, along with Reuters photojournalist Hussam al-Masri, freelance reporter Moaz Abu Taha, and Mariam Dagga, a freelancer who worked with several media outlets, including the Associated Press (AP).
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They took umbrage at their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, calling the double-tap bombing of Nasser hospital “a tragic mishap”. It was neither tragic nor a mishap, according to them.
Channel 14, which supports Netanyahu’s government and the war, reported military sources as saying the attack killed “terrorists disguised as journalists”. The sources said that soldiers targeted a Hamas “terror headquarters” in Nasser hospital.
“According to the current security concept, any place where terrorists operate, whether it used to be a school or a hospital, becomes a legitimate target,” the report noted.
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Soldiers involved in the attack told Channel 14 that it had been “approved and coordinated with the senior command, and they knew about it before it was carried out”. Similarly, Maariv reported that it was carried out “after receiving approvals from the command level”.
Zvi Yehezkeli, the Arab affairs correspondent for i24 News, praised the killings in Khan Younis: “These are Nukhba men in every way,” he said, referring to the slain journalists as members of an elite Hamas military unit. “If Israel decides to eliminate the journalists, then it’s better late than never.”
‘Countless lies’
Yehezkeli, a settler living in the occupied West Bank, is at least being honest.
That is more than can be said for two international news agencies, Reuters and the AP, that used the work of these slain journalists for whom, one naively assumes, they should feel a duty of care.
Apparently not. Both swiftly reported without qualification the Israeli military’s ever-changing excuse for targeting the hospital: that the Golani Brigade was targeting a camera used by Hamas. This provides no explanation for the second strike 15 minutes after the first, which wiped out the journalists.
Israel cannot stand looking at itself in the full-size mirror these journalists in Gaza hold up to it, day in and day out
In reporting this claim straight, as if Israel had the right to balance the assertion that the journalists were targeted with its own fabrication, Reuters and the AP offered no account of the fact that this “Hamas” camera could have indeed been the camera set up for Reuters to use as a live feed.
That is at least the picture that emerges from video footage of the aftermath of the carnage, and the balcony where the journalists were slain.
“We are outraged that independent journalists were among the victims of this strike on the hospital, a location that is protected under international law,” Reuters editor-in-chief Alessandra Galloni and AP executive editor Julie Pace wrote in a joint statement.
They should ask themselves why their organisations reported Israel’s claim that these journalists were legitimate targets without challenging such an account, even if some ambiguity was inserted into later updates.
Certainly, some photographers working for Reuters think enough is enough. Valerie Zink cut up her Reuters press card and posted a public farewell on Monday, referencing coverage of both the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif earlier this month and the double-tap strikes at Nasser hospital.
“When Israel murdered Anas al-Sharif, together with the entire Al-Jazeera crew in Gaza City on August 10, Reuters chose to publish Israel’s entirely baseless claim that al-Sharif was a Hamas operative – one of countless lies that media outlets like Reuters have dutifully repeated and dignified,” Zink wrote.
“Reuters’ willingness to perpetuate Israel’s propaganda has not spared their own reporters from Israel’s genocide.”
Blurting out the truth
All of this begs the question of what a “Hamas camera” or a “Nukhba journalist” actually is.
You might be tempted to think it is a camera that locates Israeli military positions to fire at. But you are wrong. The definition is far vaguer. It is is one hinted at by Yehezkeli and many others, such as Andrew Fox, the former British para who now parades under the title of “researcher” for the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society.
Yehezkeli said: “Just think about how much damage these journalists … you call them Nukhba journalists, how much damage they have done to Israel.”
Fox wrote after the assassination of Sharif: “There is a dangerous myth in modern conflict: that ‘combatant’ means a man with a rifle or a woman in a uniform.”
Middle East Eye editor writes to British PM over killing of MEE journalists
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He suggested that had Sharif just been a journalist for Al Jazeera – Fox parrots the libel that Sharif was a Hamas operative, without providing any evidence – that would still have been justification enough to kill him.
“When does a journalist become a legitimate military target? Maybe not often enough,” Fox mused.
They are blissfully unaware of this, but Fox and Yehezkeli are working against Israel’s interests in trying keep US President Donald Trump and the Republican Party from leaving a sinking ship.
Like the zealots they are, they can’t stop themselves from blurting out the truth: that these journalists are dangerous to Israel because they are doing their job.
Israel cannot stand looking at itself in the full-size mirror these journalists in Gaza hold up to it, day in and day out.
Israel cannot tolerate the images of emaciated children, whose famine its planners and strategists methodically engineered. It cannot stand the effect these images are having on global public opinion.
Fox should think, the next time he takes to X to expound his views on killing journalists, how many seconds he would last in front of commentators such as Tucker Carlson or Piers Morgan. He would be shredded.
Killing in silence
Because the figures are telling. A recent survey by Quinnipiac University found that 60 percent of voters disapprove of the US sending military aid to Israel, while 32 percent support additional aid. This, Politico reports, is the the highest level of opposition and lowest level of support for the US military alliance with Israel since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack.
Those who oppose military aid to Israel now include former US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.
Israel is not only losing the war in Gaza, but more importantly it is losing in the US, where it really matters.
It was on this same terrain, thousands of miles away from the killing fields of Vietnam and Cambodia, that the battle against the Viet Cong was lost five decades ago.
Like other genocidal regimes, Israel seeks to kill and starve Palestinians in silence, in an information blackout, while compliant media pour out a steady stream of lies and hate.
During the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the primary tools used to incite the Hutus to attack the Tutsi minority were “the radio and the machete”. It became known as the radio genocide, or death by radio.
This is happening in Hebrew in Israel right now. As a result of the local media output, a clear and consistent majority of Israelis believe that there are “no innocents” in Gaza.
Media was also integral to the genocide of six million Jews during the Holocaust. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels systematically dehumanised the Jews, justified their persecution, and secured public support for mass murder.
The concentration camps compelled prisoners to send postcards home saying they were being treated well. Concerts were filmed in Theresienstadt, after which the entire crew was sent to Auschwitz.
Propaganda that Jews were being “resettled in the east” was critical to the Nazi regime’s attempts to disguise its “final solution” in the gas chambers. Today, Israeli media reports on negotiations with South Sudan as the destination for an “evacuation” of Palestinians in Gaza as if it were the most normal and humanitarian thing in the world.
Role models of the profession
Language normalises genocide.
Israel can only operate in Gaza with journalists under its control, like the tame flocks of foreign correspondents who agreed to go as embeds in Israeli army tanks.
But the five journalists who died this week were made of stronger stuff.
I will say a few words about two of them, neither of whom worked for Middle East Eye.
Mariam Dagga, a freelance reporter who worked with several media outlets, including the AP, rose to prominence with a personal tragedy. She filmed the death of a protester shot at the Gaza fence with Israel during the 2018 Great March of Return – only to discover that the man who had bled to death was her brother.
The rest of us, who have the luxury of working as journalists and staying alive, should bow our heads in their memory
Her husband lives in the UAE, and she had the opportunity to leave Gaza with him and her son Ghaith, but she chose to stay behind and continue to work as a photojournalist.
“I want you to make me proud to become successful and excel, to prove yourself and to grow into a great businessman, my dear,” she wrote in a letter to her son. “When you grow up, get married and have a daughter, name her Mariam after me. You are my love, my heart, my support, my soul and my son whom I am proud of.”
Moaz Abu Taha was the journalist who helped Haaretz conduct a “virtual tour” of the children’s ward at Nasser hospital.
Haaretz reported at the time: “The camera moves to the next room. Lying in a bed, under a large painting of Maya the Bee, is Sham Qadeeh, a tiny child in a horrible state. She’s 2 years old and weighs only 4.4 kilos. Sham was born a short time before the war broke out, at a normal weight. Now her abdomen is bloated, her matchstick legs are crooked, her bones are sticking out, her skull is visible under the skin, her eyes are glazed over and her teeth have fallen out. She has the face of an elderly person.”
The journalists who died on Monday – and every Palestinian journalist killed reporting this conflict – are role models of their profession.
The rest of us, who have the luxury of working as journalists and staying alive, should bow our heads in their memory.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
