More journalists have been killed in Israel’s genocide in Gaza than in the past seven major U.S.-involved wars combined, marking the “worst ever conflict” for reporters in history, a new report says.
As of late March, at least 232 journalists have been killed in the Gaza genocide, with the vast majority being Palestinians, according to a new paper by the Costs of War project in Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Nearly 380 journalists have been wounded in the violence as of January, per the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate.
This is the highest journalist death toll of any U.S. war since the Civil War, the group says — and, in fact, tops the combined toll of journalist casualties in the U.S. Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the U.S.’s assaults on Cambodia and Laos), the Yugoslav Wars, the War in Afghanistan, and the ongoing Ukraine War.
In the first month of Israel’s genocide alone, at least 37 journalists were killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists — marking the deadliest month on record for journalists worldwide, the group said.
The report, written by journalist Nick Turse, tallies the journalist death toll based on accounting by Al Jazeera and the Committee to Protect Journalists. The toll calculated by Turse is far higher than the oft-cited death toll tallied by the latter group.
As the report notes, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said that the death toll of journalists as of a year ago was about 10 percent of Gaza’s journalist community — equivalent to killing 8,500 journalists in the U.S. That number would be even higher if the journalism profession in the U.S. had not been gutted over the past decades.
It’s unclear how many of these killings were deliberate targeting of journalists, but it’s clear that Israel has “unleashed an unrelenting war on the press,” the analysis says. Reporters Sans Frontières has counted at least 35 cases where there is sufficient evidence of direct targeting — though press freedom groups and experts have repeatedly said that it is clear that Israel is undertaking a concerted effort to slaughter those documenting the genocide.
Those directly targeted by Israeli forces include 23-year-old journalist Hossam Shabat, who Israel killed in an airstrike last week. The young journalist had become well-known throughout the genocide for his unrelenting coverage of northern Gaza in the face of Israel’s intense assault and siege on the region. Israel has acknowledged his killing, claiming, without evidence, that Shabat was a terrorist.
On Tuesday, the same day that the report was released, the Palestinian Journalists Protection Committee announced that Israel had targeted and killed another journalist, Al-Aqsa Radio reporter Mohammed Saleh Al-Bardawil, also killing his wife and three children.
In addition to targeting and killing journalists, “Israel has employed a full spectrum effort to undermine the free flow of information,” the report says, through the Israeli military’s destruction of the communications system in Gaza and intimidation and widespread repression of the press.
Israel’s targeting of journalists is an escalation of the erosion of journalism across the world.
“Across the globe, the economics of the industry, the violence of war, and coordinated censorship campaigns threaten to turn an increasing number of conflict zones into news graveyards, with Gaza being the most extreme example,” the report says.
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