Western journalists are failing to stand up for their colleagues in Gaza

The Guardian

a day ago

For nearly two years, Israel has been systemically targeting and killing Palestinian journalists in Gaza. On Sunday night, the Israeli military brazenly killed another six journalists, who had been sheltering in a tent housing media workers in Gaza City. Among them was the 28-year-old Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif and the rest of the network's team reporting from the besieged territory.
Israel is able to kill Palestinian journalists with impunity not just because of the unconditional military and political support it receives from the US and other western powers, but also the failure of many western media organizations and journalists to stand up for their Palestinian colleagues. Western outlets are often willing to publicly criticize governments and campaign for journalists who are harassed or imprisoned by US adversaries like Russia, China or Iran. But these institutions are largely silent when it comes to Israel, a US ally.
This shameful hypocrisy of western, and especially US, media has been laid bare by Israel's targeting of journalists since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack. Journalists have the same protection as civilians under international law, which considers the targeted killing of journalists a war crime. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says that 192 journalists have been killed since 7 October – 184 of them Palestinians killed by Israel. Of the Palestinians killed, the CPJ found that at least 26 were deliberatively targeted for their work as journalists, but the group couldn't determine whether others were killed specifically for their work.
Other organizations put the number of media workers killed in Gaza even higher, with a recent study by the Costs of War project at Brown University finding that at least 232 were killed as of late March. In one of its starkest conclusions, the report found that more journalists have been killed in Gaza than in the US civil war, both world wars, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the wars in Yugoslavia and the US war in Afghanistan combined.
You would think such shocking figures would galvanize news organizations and journalists around the world to condemn Israel's targeting of their Palestinian colleagues. But US news outlets have been largely quiet, compared, for example, with the crusade many of them supported to free the Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich after he was arrested and accused of espionage by Russia in March 2023. Major news organizations framed their reporting around the idea that Gershkovich had been wrongfully detained by Russia and convicted in a sham trial on fabricated charges.
Yet these same news organizations are often unwilling to view Palestinian journalists as worthy of the same benefit of the doubt, and protection, against Israeli threats and smears. The Israeli military began threatening al-Sharif, the Al Jazeera correspondent killed on Sunday, in November 2023, when he reported receiving multiple calls from Israeli military officials telling him to stop his work and leave Gaza. A month later, al-Sharif's 90-year-old father was killed in an Israeli airstrike on the family's home.
Israel then deployed its well-worn playbook, accusing al-Sharif of being a 'terrorist', as it has done with other Palestinian journalists that it later killed, without providing credible evidence. In October 2024, the Israeli military claimed that al-Sharif was among six Al Jazeera journalists, all reporting from Gaza at the time, who were current or former members of either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Al Jazeera, along with press advocacy groups, viewed the accusations as a potential death sentence against the six journalists, one of whom was killed by Israel in March.
The Israeli military's smear campaign against al-Sharif intensified last month, after his harrowing reporting on Israel's siege and starvation of Gaza went viral, including one broadcast where he cried on air as a woman walking behind him collapsed from hunger. (I recently spent six weeks in my home country, Lebanon, often watching Al Jazeera's coverage, and it was clear to me that al-Sharif had become the face of the Gaza war for millions of viewers in the Arab world.) In fact, the CPJ was so alarmed by the Israeli threats against al-Sharif that it issued a statement last month saying it was 'gravely worried' about his safety and urging his protection.
But those pleas did not resonate in most US or other western newsrooms. There have been few media campaigns or statements of solidarity with Palestinian journalists – compared with similar efforts around Gershkovich and other western correspondents targeted by US adversaries. Major US news organizations have not published open letters in their newspapers calling attention to journalists who are being persecuted for doing their job, as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post had done for Gershkovich in May 2024 to mark World Press Freedom Day.
Press freedom and protection from persecution, it seems, are limited to western journalists.
In 2022, Shireen Abu Akleh, one of Al Jazeera's most prominent correspondents and a Palestinian-American, was killed by an Israeli soldier while reporting in the West Bank. Yet Joe Biden's administration refused to hold Israel accountable for Abu Akleh's killing. Biden's impotence sharpened Israel's sense of impunity. Once Israeli leaders realized that they would face no consequences for killing one of the Arab world's most prominent journalists, who also happened to be a US citizen, is it surprising they would later conclude that they could get away with killing many more Palestinian journalists in Gaza?
Western media outlets have made one consistent demand of Israel: to allow foreign reporters into Gaza, which the Israeli government has refused to do since October 2023, except for a few cases where journalists entered the territory while embedded with Israel troops. That's an admirable campaign for news organizations to take on, but it has also been framed in a problematic way. Some western outlets and journalists seem to think that only foreign reporters can provide full and impartial news coverage out of Gaza.
A longtime BBC journalist, John Simpson, recently echoed this argument, writing on X: 'The world needs honest, unbiased eyewitness reporting to help people make up their minds about the major issues of our time. This has so far been impossible in Gaza.'
That's hogwash, and it reinforces the worst colonial traditions of legacy media, which view western (often meaning white) journalists as the sole arbiters of truth. This debate reminds me of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, in which the British novelist mercilessly skewered foreign correspondents and sensationalist journalism in the 1930s. Unfortunately, Waugh's satire still resonates today.
One of the main problems with this conception of western journalists as the ultimate mediators of unbiased reporting is that it belittles the professionalism and courage of hundreds of Palestinian journalists, many of whom have given their lives covering Israel's assault on Gaza. The irony, of course, is that once foreign reporters are allowed into Gaza, most of them will rely heavily on Palestinian journalists, translators and other 'fixers' who often do the brunt of work for western correspondents.
That's one secret of foreign coverage in much of the legacy western media: it's built on the unseen, and largely uncredited, work of local journalists and fixers. With no foreign reporters allowed into Gaza, Palestinian journalists like Anas al-Sharif have been able to tell their own people's story directly to the world. And Israel is methodically killing them for it, while many of their western colleagues and international journalistic institutions remain shamefully silent.
Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a journalism professor at New York University. He is the former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday