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abby martin
Israel's Killing of Journalists in Gaza 'Unparalleled,' Says Watchdog
The Committee to Protect Journalists—which recorded 68 media professionals killed since October 7—said it is particularly concerned by Israel's "apparent pattern of targeting journalists and their families."
Dec 22, 2023
Journalists are being slain during Israel's current assault on Gaza at a rate unseen in modern history—with more killed in the last 10 weeks alone than have been killed in any country in any whole year since records began, the Committee to Protect Journalists revealed on Thursday.
CPJ said that at least 68 media professionals—61 Palestinians, four Israelis, and three Lebanese—have been killed since the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel and the Israeli military's retaliatory obliteration of the Gaza Strip.
Of particular concern to CPJ is Israel's "apparent
pattern of targeting journalists and their families."
"In at least one case, a journalist was killed while clearly wearing press insignia in a location where no fighting was taking place," the group said. "In at least two other cases, journalists reported receiving threats from Israeli officials and IDF officers before their family members were killed."
In October, Al Jazeera reporter and Gaza bureau chief Wael Al-Dahdouh found out during a live broadcast that his wife, son, daughter, and grandson had been killed in an Israeli airstrike.
Additionally, CPJ said 15 journalists have been injured—some seriously, like Agence France-Presse photojournalist Christina Assi, whose legs were blown off while she and a group of journalists were covering cross-border clashes between Israel and the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah.
At least 20 media professionals have also been arrested and others have reported being abused by Israeli troops—including one CNN Türk photojournalist who was assaulted during a live broadcast. Three other journalists are missing.
"The concentration of journalists killed in the Israel-Gaza war is unparalleled in CPJ's history and underscores how grave the situation is for press on the ground," CPJ president Jodie Ginsberg said Thursday.
CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program coordinator Sherif Mansour asserted that "with every journalist killed, the war becomes harder to document and to understand."
Some critics say that's the point—and the same reason that Israel denies permission for foreign journalists to report from Gaza.
"They don't want us to see the truth. That's why they're taking out the journalists," U.S. journalist Abby Martin toldMiddle East Eye earlier this month.
After Israeli forces killed Lebanese Reuters photojournalist Issam Abdallah in an attack that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International called "apparently deliberate," Ziad Makary, Lebanon's information minister, asserted that "it is in the military strategy of Israel to kill journalists so that they kill the truth."
Previous probes—like the investigation into Israeli troops' 2022 killing of renowned Palestinian American Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh—have confirmed that Israel has deliberately targeted journalists and other civilians in the past.
In May, CPJ published Deadly Pattern, a report that found Israeli troops had killed at least 20 journalists over the past 22 years with utter impunity. While some of the slain journalists have been foreigners—including Italian Associated Press reporter Simone Camilli and British cameraman and filmmaker James Miller—the vast majority of victims have been Palestinian.
Israeli forces have also attacked newsrooms in every major assault on Gaza, including in May 2021 when the 11-story al-Jalaa Tower, which housed offices of Al Jazeera, The Associated Press, and other media outlets, was completely destroyed in an airstrike.
The new CPJ report comes as the death toll from Israel's 77-day war on Gaza topped 20,000, with more than 50,000 other Palestinians maimed or missing. More than 1.9 million of the besieged enclave's 2.3 million people have also been forcibly displaced, with most of their homes damaged or destroyed by Israeli bombardment. Gazans are also facing an imminent risk of famine and contagious disease.
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DC Belmarsh Tribunal Urges Biden to Drop Assange Charges
"How is it acceptable that perpetrators of the illegal invasion of Iraq are the ones who get to decide if the man who exposed their crimes is a journalist?" asked Abby Martin.
Dec 11, 2023
Seeking to pressure the Biden administration into dropping charges against jailed Australian WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, human rights and press freedom defenders gathered in Washington, D.C. over the weekend for the second U.S. session of the Belmarsh Tribunal.
The tribunal—organized by Progressive International in partnership with the Wau Holland Foundation—was held Saturday at the National Press Club, where Assange first premiered "Collateral Murder," a video showing a U.S. Army helicopter crew killing a group of Iraqi civilians and then laughing about it.
"As long as the Espionage Act is deployed to imprison those who expose war crimes, no publisher and no journalist will be safe. It is time to free the truth."
The Belmarsh Tribunal was first convened in London in 2021. The event is inspired by the Russell Tribunal, a 1966 event organized by philosophers Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre to hold the U.S. accountable for its escalating war crimes in Vietnam.
Saturday's gathering was co-hosted by Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and The Intercept D.C. bureau chief Ryan Grim.
"Believe it or not, there are only two persons in the world who have been punished for the war crimes that were revealed by WikiLeaks: Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange," Grim told attendees.
Srećko Horvat, the Croatian author, philosopher, and activist who co-founded the Belmarsh Tribunal,
said that "the pressure is mounting on the Biden administration to free Julian Assange."
"More than one man's life is at stake, but the First Amendment and freedom of the press itself," he added. "As long as the Espionage Act is deployed to imprison those who expose war crimes, no publisher and no journalist will be safe. It is time to free the truth."
Rebecca Vincent, director of campaigns at Reporters Without Borders, warned that "if the U.S. government succeeds to extradite Julian Assange to this country, he will become the first publisher imprisoned under the Espionage Act—but he will not be the last."
According to Progressive International:
U.S. congresspeople from both parties are lobbying U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and President Joe Biden to stop pursuing Assange under the Espionage Act. At the same time, Australian members of Parliament are making a major bipartisan push to demand the U.S. Justice Department end its legal campaign against Australian national Assange.
Assange—who suffers from physical and mental health problems including heart and respiratory issues—published classified materials, many of them provided by Manning, exposing U.S. and allied nations' war crimes, including the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and "Collateral Murder."
Since Assange's apprehension 13 years ago in London, he has been confined for seven years in the Ecuadorean Embassy while he was protected by the administration of former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, and jailed in the U.K. capital's maximum-security Belmarsh Prison. He's currently being held on remand in the notorious lockup pending extradition to the United States after the U.K. High Court rejected his final appeal earlier this year.
If fully convicted, Assange—who is 52 years old and is married with two children—could be sentenced to up to 175 years behind bars.
"How is it acceptable that perpetrators of the illegal invasion of Iraq are the ones who get to decide if the man who exposed their crimes is a journalist?" asked American journalist Abby Martin during the event.
Pivoting to Israel's current war on Gaza—which many experts and observers around the world are calling a genocide as over 70,000 Palestinians have been killed, maimed, or left missing and 80% of the strip's population has been forcibly displaced—Martin asserted that "the people of Gaza have risked and lost their lives to expose the war crimes of the U.S. and Israel."
"The people of Iraq did not have that chance," she added. "They had WikiLeaks."
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Groups Demand Probe of 'Apparently Deliberate' IDF Attack on Journalists
Amnesty International said that the October 13 Israeli tank strike that killed Issam Abdallah and blew the legs off Christina Assi was "likely a direct attack on civilians that must be investigated as a war crime."
Dec 07, 2023
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International on Thursday called for an official investigation of a deadly Israeli attack on a group of journalists, which HRW called "apparently deliberate" and a likely "war crime."
HRW, Amnesty, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse on Thursday all published their own separate investigations into the October 13 Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attack that killed 37-year-old Lebanese Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah and wounded half a dozen other journalists who were covering cross-border clashes between Israeli and Hezbollah troops near the village of Alma al-Shaab in southern Lebanon.
"This is not the first time that Israeli forces have apparently deliberately attacked journalists, with deadly and devastating results."
Reutersdetermined that an Israeli tank crew "fired two shells in quick succession" at the journalists, who HRW said were "clearly identifiable as members of the media, and had been stationary for at least 75 minutes." HRW "found no evidence of a military target near the journalists' location."
"This is not the first time that Israeli forces have apparently deliberately attacked journalists, with deadly and devastating results," HRW Lebanon researcher Ramzi Kaiss said in a statement. "Those responsible need to be held to account, and it needs to be made clear that journalists and other civilians are not lawful targets."
Amnesty International, meanwhile, asserted that the IDF strike was "likely a direct attack on civilians that must be investigated as a war crime."
The organization said it "verified over 100 videos and photographs, analyzed weapons fragments from the site, and interviewed nine witnesses. The findings indicate that the group was visibly identifiable as journalists and that the Israeli military knew or should have known that they were civilians yet attacked them anyway in two separate strikes 37 seconds apart."
Aya Majzoub, Amnesty's deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, noted that "direct attacks on civilians and indiscriminate attacks are absolutely prohibited by international humanitarian law and can amount to war crimes."
"Those responsible for Issam Abdallah's unlawful killing and the injuring of six other journalists must be held accountable," Majzoub added. "No journalist should ever be targeted or killed simply for carrying out their work. Israel must not be allowed to kill and attack journalists with impunity. There must be an independent and impartial investigation into this deadly attack."
According to HRW:
The journalists interviewed said that the first munition struck Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah and a short concrete wall, killing him instantly and badly injuring an Agence France-Presse photojournalist, Christina Assi. Thirty-seven seconds later, another attack destroyed the car belonging to Al Jazeera, igniting it in flames, and injuring six journalists, including Carmen Joukhadar and Elie Brakhya from Al Jazeera, Dylan Collins and Christina Assi from AFP, and Thaer al-Sudani and Maher Nazeh from Reuters.
Brakhya, an Al Jazeera cameraman, told Amnesty: "I was looking at Issam when we heard the [first] explosion. I saw Issam's body fly, with the glow and the heat behind his back… [I] ran up the hill, heard Christina shouting 'I can't feel my legs,' ran back to where she was, saw Dylan searching for the tourniquet."
Collins, an American deputy editor at Al Jazeera English, said that "as soon as I turned around, I heard Christina's voice saying, 'Oh my God!' I say, 'You're okay.' I ran to her directly and I see that her legs are blown off at the kneecap."
The second Israeli shell exploded as Collins tried to tie a tourniquet around Assi's legs.
"When the second blast hit, I was stunned and dizzy, but in my blurry memory, I remember Issam's leg falling in front of me, I remember looking up and seeing Carmen by the car, her face is black and she is walking like a zombie," he recalled. "Her entire back is covered in shrapnel."
The day after the attacks, IDF spokesperson Richard Hecht said that the Israeli military was "very sorry for the journalist's death."
Presented with Reuters' findings, Hecht later said that "we don't target journalists."
However, Kaiss argued that "the evidence strongly suggests that Israeli forces knew or should have known that the group that they were attacking were journalists."
"This was an unlawful and apparently deliberate attack on a very visible group of journalists," he added.
"They don't want us to see the truth. That's why they're taking out the journalists."
Numerous international observers accused Israeli forces of intentionally targeting journalists in an effort to prevent them from reporting the truth about what many critics call a genocidal war against Palestinians.
"I believe that it is in the military strategy of Israel to kill journalists so that they kill the truth," Lebanese Information Minister Ziad Makary told Reuters.
U.S. journalist Abby Martin toldMiddle East Eye Wednesday that Israel is "killing the truth."
"They don't want us to see the truth," she said. "That's why they're taking out the journalists."
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) responded to the rights groups' and media probes into the October 13 attacks by demanding an "immediate, independent, and transparent investigation that holds the perpetrators to account."
CPJ cited its May 2023 report, "which showed a pattern of lethal force by the Israel Defense Forces that left 20 journalists dead over the last 22 years. No one was ever held accountable."
According to the report, "The majority of the 20 journalists killed—at least 13—were clearly identified as members of the media or were inside vehicles with press insignia at the time of their deaths."
Since the IDF launched its war on Gaza following the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, CPJ has documented the killing of at least 63 media professionals, including 56 Palestinians, three Lebanese, and four Israelis.
"CPJ emphasizes that journalists are civilians doing important work during times of crisis and must not be targeted by warring parties," said Sherif Mansour, the group's Middle East and North Africa program coordinator.
Last month, after also concluding that the group in Lebanon was "deliberately targeted," the international press freedom group Reporters Without Borders called on the International Criminal Court to formally investigate the deaths of all journalists killed by Israeli troops and Hamas militants during the war.
"Journalists across the region are making great sacrifices to cover this heartbreaking conflict. Those in Gaza, in particular, have paid, and continue to pay, an unprecedented toll and face exponential threats," Mansour said. "Many have lost colleagues, families, and media facilities, and have fled seeking safety when there is no safe haven or exit."
Nazeh, a Reuters camera operator who survived the October 13 attack, demanded justice for his slain colleague Abdallah.
"We can't bring Issam back. Issam is gone," he said. "But he hears us, he sees us, and he's waiting for us to do something for him... to expose who hit him, who killed him, to the world."
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