Israel is deliberately targeting journalists in Gaza: Experts
Palestinian journalist Salma al-Qadoumi is taken to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital after being injured in the back by Israeli fire in Khan Younis, in Deir el-Balah, Gaza on 18 August 2024
Justin Salhani reports in Al Jazeera on 23 September 2024:
On Friday, December 15, Al Jazeera journalists Samer Abudaqa and Wael Dahdouh were reporting at the Farhana school in Khan Younis when Israel struck from the air.
Dahdouh took shrapnel to his upper arm but was able to apply pressure to the wound and escape to a nearby hospital for help. But Abudaqa was unable to move. Rescue teams tried to reach him, but couldn’t due to Israeli bombardment. For more than five agonising hours, as he lay bleeding, campaigns were launched online and in traditional media to save his life.
“I made that call on air,” Jonathan Dagher, head of the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Middle East Desk, told Al Jazeera from the RSF offices in Paris. “On Al Jazeera, I said: ‘We call upon the Israeli authorities to allow first aid to reach Samer.’” Despite the repeated calls, medical aid wasn’t able to reach Abudaqa, who died of his wounds that day.
‘A pattern’… of killing journalists
Abudaqa is one of at least 130 journalists and media workers, based on RSF’s count, killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7, 2023. Other media rights groups have different numbers based on their own criteria, while the Government Media Office in Gaza counts the number of dead journalists and media workers at 173.
This has made working as a reporter one of the deadliest professions in an already treacherous situation. The International Federation of Journalists said the mortality rate for media workers in Gaza is over 10 percent. Seventy-five percent of all reporters killed in the world in 2023 were killed between October 7 and the end of last year.
In December 2023, just two months into the war, the Committee to Protect Journalists said the war zone in Gaza was the “most dangerous ever” for reporters. Nearly 11 months later, Israel is still killing journalists in Gaza.
“If there are no journalists, there’s no one who can independently verify this and tell the world,” Dagher said. “Then the Israeli army becomes the source of information.” Some reporters in Gaza have been able to leave, but “most of them are trapped and those that were able to leave cannot come back in,” Dagher said. “There’s a pattern,” Dagher said. “We’re 10 months in and we’re not at five or six journalists killed, which already would have been a tragedy. We are at [more than] 130 journalists killed.”
Among the more than 130 media workers and journalists who have been killed, says RSF, are 31 credible cases where there is enough information to confirm the journalists were directly targeted because of their profession.
With the death rate of reporters so high, researchers who monitor the issue told Al Jazeera that they have come to believe Israel is intentionally killing journalists and media workers, in addition to destroying Gaza’s media infrastructure.
One of these people was the co-founder of the media outlet Ain Media. In October 2023, he communicated with Forensic Architecture, a research group investigating state violence and human rights violations, to look into the disappearances of a number of his colleagues. Al Jazeera asked to speak with the co-founder of Ain Media, but a programme manager at Forensic Architecture replied, saying he had been “killed in an Israeli air strike several months ago at his home in a targeted attack”.