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wael al-dahdouh
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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Biden Accused of 'Genocide Denial' After Casting Doubt On Civilian Death Toll in Gaza
Palestinian officials, U.N. experts, and even Israeli media say nearly 7,000 men, women, and children have been killed by Israel's indiscriminate airstrikes and shelling.
Oct 26, 2023
The largest Muslim American civil rights group on Wednesday led condemnation of U.S. President Joe Biden for saying he had "no confidence" in Palestinian health officials' Gaza casualty reports—figures deemed reliable by United Nations agencies, human rights groups, international and Israeli mainstream media, and even the U.S. State Department.
Speaking at a Wednesday afternoon White House press conference, Biden—who earlier this month declared his "rock-solid and unwavering" commitment to Israel following a Hamas-led attack that killed more than 1,400 Israelis—said that "I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed."
"Everyone uses the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry because those are generally proven to be reliable."
"I'm sure innocents have been killed, and it's the price of waging a war," the president continued. "But I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using."
Responding to Biden's remarks, Palestinian American poet, author, and activist Remi Kanazi said: "Genocide denial has a long sordid history. Israel and Joe Biden know exactly what they are doing when they play down the death toll in Gaza."
The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) demanded Biden apologize for his "shocking and dehumanizing" comments.
"The Israeli government has openly admitted that it is targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure," CAIR executive director Nihad Awad said in a statement. "Journalists have confirmed the high number of casualties, and countless videos coming out of Gaza every day show mangled bodies of Palestinian women, and children—and entire city blocks leveled to the ground."
"President Biden should watch some of these videos and ask himself if the crushed children being dragged out of the ruins of their family homes are a fabrication or an acceptable price of war," said Awad. "They are neither. Biden should apologize for his comments, condemn the Israeli government for deliberately targeting civilians, and demand a cease-fire before more innocent people die."
After former U.S. Congressman Justin Amash (R-Mich.), who is Palestinian American, said that "several" of his relatives including an infant cousin were among at least 18 people killed in last week's Israeli airstrike on the Saint Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church, journalist Briahna Joy Gray asked Wednesday if Biden thinks he's lying.
While it is nearly impossible to immediately verify Gaza casualties because Israel does not allow foreign journalists into the besieged strip, many experts say figures provided by Palestinian health officials—including branches of the Palestinian Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank—are accurate. They say not only do U.N. agencies, international media, and Israeli news outlets rely upon them, but that the Israeli government and military have rarely if ever challenged the figures following the numerous wars Israel has waged against Gaza in recent decades.
"Everyone uses the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry because those are generally proven to be reliable," Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, toldThe Washington Post on Tuesday. "In the times in which we have done our own verification of numbers for particular strikes, I'm not aware of any time which there's been some major discrepancy."
"Unfortunately, when reality is too difficult to stomach, Israel and so many of its allies prefer to deny it or bury their head in the sand," Shakir said in a separate interview with The Guardian. "As long as they can create a fog of war and misinformation about what's taking place, it provides cover for this to continue. To continue to have 100-plus Palestinian children killed every day."
Mohammed El-Kurd, The Nation's Palestine correspondent, wrote that Biden's denial "isn't just racism. He's preemptively minimizing the scale of death the Israeli regime has planned for Gaza."
Calls to "flatten Gaza" began immediately—in both Israel and the United States—after Hamas' horrific mass murder and abduction of Israeli and foreign citizens on October 7.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed a "mighty vengeance" for the attacks, while far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that it is "time to be cruel."
Tally Gotliv, a member of parliament from Netanyahu's Likud party, posted on social media: "It's time to kiss doomsday. Shooting powerful missiles without limit. Not flattening a neighborhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza... Without mercy! Without mercy!"
Dehumanization of Palestinians flourished, with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant calling Gazans "human animals" and Israeli President Isaac Herzog asserting that there are "no innocent civilians in Gaza."
Meanwhile, some Israelis—especially young people—took to TikTok and other social media to post racist videos mocking Palestinians and gaslighting victims of Israel's attacks on Gaza by claiming grieving mothers were lying about their children being killed.
Perhaps most ominously of all, Ariel Kallner, another Likud lawmaker, called for a "Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of '48," a reference to the forced expulsion and ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Arabs from Palestine during the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1947-49.
In a likely war crime—one of many, according to Amnesty International—compared with Nakba massacres like Deir Yassin and the Lydda Death March, Israeli officials ordered 1.1 million residents of northern Gaza to flee for their lives ahead of an expected ground invasion and possible territorial conquest. Israeli forces then attacked the fleeing Gazans anyway. Around 70 people, mostly women and children, were killed in an October 13 strike on a fleeing convoy.
Nowhere is safe. Al Jazeera Gaza bureau chief Wael Al-Dahdouh lost his wife, son, daughter, and 18-month-old grandson in an October 25 Israeli airstrike on a shelter in an area meant to be out of harm's way. They were killed after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken—who has also cast doubt on the Gaza death toll—reportedly asked the Qatari government, which funds Al Jazeera, to "tone down" its coverage of Israel's Gaza slaughter.
As of Thursday, Israel's relentless bombardment of Gaza has killed at least 6,850 people, including nearly 3,000 children, according to Palestinian health officials in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza. More than 17,000 others have been wounded, nearly half the homes in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, and over 1.4 million people have been displaced.
Hundreds of international legal scholars, and one of Israel's leading Holocaust scholars, have accused Israel of committing "genocide" in Gaza.
In the illegally occupied West Bank, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed more than 100 Palestinians and wounded nearly 2,000 others since October 7.
Scores of journalists and health workers have also been killed by Israeli strikes on Gaza. The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees said earlier this week that 35 of its humanitarian workers—many of them teachers—died in Israeli attacks.
Some observers noted Israel's long history of denying atrocities or blaming victims for their own deaths. Recent examples include lying about killing civilians, using banned white phosphorus weapons in urban areas, and the deliberate killing of Palestinian American Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh.
Israeli leaders have also targeted prominent international figures who, like U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, dare point out that Hamas terrorism "did not happen in a vacuum" and were the result of generations of illegal occupation, settler colonization, economic strangulation, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.
"Regardless of how many noncombatants Israel has blown to smithereens, for Netanyahu to deny them water is a war crime," U.S. Middle East expert and Informed Comment publisher Juan Cole noted Thursday.
"The ongoing genocide against the civilian population of Gaza, perpetrated by the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, is an embarrassment for the United States," he added, "which fully supports this reckless disregard for the lives of innocent noncombatants—men, women, and children."
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Al Jazeera Reporter's Family Massacred by Israeli Airstrike in Gaza
Journalist Wael Al-Dahdouh received the news while on-air, just hours after it was reported that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had pressured Qatar over the network's critical coverage.
Oct 25, 2023
The chief of Al Jazeera's Gaza bureau, Wael Al-Dahdouh, learned while reporting on-air Wednesday that his wife, son, daughter, and grandson had been killed in an Israeli airstrike like the ones the veteran journalist has been covering for nearly three weeks.
Al-Dahdouh was reporting live near Wafa Hospital in Gaza City when someone spoke to him about his family.
"What, what happened? They don't know where they are?" he asked, before being told that his daughter had been hospitalized.
His colleagues later broke the news to viewers that Al-Dahdouh's family members had been killed.
The channel aired footage of the bureau chief weeping over his son, who appeared to be laying on the floor of the nearby hospital. Medical providers have been warning for days that hospitals are overrun with victims of airstrikes and medical supplies and fuel and running dangerously low, putting the healthcare system in Gaza at risk of collapse.
Another son of Al-Dahdouh's, Yehia, was seriously injured and had to be operated on in a corridor, with doctors resorting to nonsurgical thread to stitch his wound.
While kneeling over his son, Al-Dahdouh reportedly said, "They're taking revenge by killing our children."
"What happened is clear, this is a series of targeted attacks on children, women and civilians," Al-Dahdouh said. "I was just reporting from Yarmouk about such an attack, and the Israeli raids have targeted many areas, including Nuseirat."
After being led out of the hospital by colleagues, the journalist said his family had been sheltering in what was "supposed to be the safe area."
Israel has issued evacuation orders for people in northern Gaza, but has then bombed areas in the south where civilians have been directed to go.
"We had some doubts that the Israeli army would leave this area unpunished," Al-Dahdouh said.
Al-Dahdouh's family was killed hours after Axios reported that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had told a group of Jewish American community leaders that he's asked the Qatari government, which provides funding to Al Jazeera, to "tone down" its reporting on Israel's attacks on Gaza. The network has provided in-depth coverage of civilian casualties, the plight of medical providers trying to keep the healthcare system running, and calls for a cease-fire from human rights advocates since the onslaught began nearly three weeks ago.
Israel, which the U.S. government has pledged support for and provided with military funding, has complained that Al Jazeera is a "propaganda mouthpiece" for Hamas.
A source told Axios that Blinken said he asked Qatar to "turn down the volume on Al Jazeera's coverage because it is full of anti-Israel incitement."
The reports of Blinken's comments suggest "the aim of American diplomacy is not to end the war but to end the COVERAGE of the war," said Trita Parsi, co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Al Jazeera strongly condemned the killing of Al-Dahdouhs family, releasing a statement saying that "the indiscriminate assault by the Israeli occupation forces resulted in the tragic loss of his wife, son, and daughter, while the rest of his family is buried under the rubble."
"We urge the international community to intervene and put an end to these attacks on civilians," the network said, "thereby safeguarding innocent lives."
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