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Tag: palestinian journalist

  • Record number of journalists killed in 2025, two-thirds by Israel, claims CPJ report

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    The Committee to Protect Journalists’ annual report described 86 journalist deaths at the hands of Israel, figures that the IDF has since denounced.

    A record 129 journalists and media workers were killed in the course of their work in 2025, two-thirds of them by Israel, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) detailed in its annual report on Wednesday.

    It was the second consecutive year-on-record for press deaths, according to the CPJ, an NY-based nonprofit organization whose aim is to promote press freedom worldwide.

    The report also claimed that the IDF has committed more targeted killings of journalists than any other government’s military since the CPJ began its documentation in 1992.

    The IDF strongly rejected the claims, stating that it “does not intentionally harm journalists or their family members.”

    “The report is based on general allegations, data of unknown origin, and predetermined conclusions, without considering the complexity of combat or the IDF’s efforts to mitigate harm to non-combatants,” it said.

    Mourners carry the body of Palestinian journalist and employee of the Egyptian Committee killed in an Israeli airstrike on Wednesday, during there funeral in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, January 22, 2026. (credit: Ramadan Abed/Reuters)

    The CPJ reported 86 journalist deaths caused by Israel in 2025, with 55 of them having been Palestinians in Gaza and the rest in a Houthi media center in Yemen, which the IDF described as a propaganda arm of the terror group.

    At least 104 of the 129 journalists died in connection with conflicts, according to the report.

    Apart from Gaza and Yemen, the deadliest countries for journalists include Sudan, where nine were killed, and Mexico, where six died. Four Ukrainian journalists were killed by Russian forces compared to 15 in 2022, and three died in the Philippines, the report said.

    Terrorists pose as journalists, IDF claims

    Among the killed journalists included in the report are Hussam al-Masri, a contractor for Reuters killed in an attack on Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, and Hossam Shabat, a sniper from Hamas’s Beit Hanoun Battalion posing as an Al Jazeera journalist.

    The IDF claimed that, alongside the Shin Bet, the military was able to expose Shabat’s ties to Hamas and the al-Qassam Brigades, the terror group’s military wing, by revealing internal Hamas documents proving his participation in military training in 2019.

    In August 2025, the IDF confirmed the death of Anas al-Sharif, a Hamas terrorist who also worked as an Al Jazeera correspondent inside the Gaza Strip.

    Al-Sharif, who was identified by the military as a member of Hamas since 2013, was killed near Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. He was found responsible for aiding the terror organization’s rocket attacks.

    According to a study conducted late last year, 60% of individuals who identified as journalists and were killed during the war in Gaza were members of or affiliated with terrorist organizations, primarily Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, contradicting claims made by Hamas and various non-governmental organizations.

    The research was conducted by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, and examined 266 media workers reported killed between October 7, 2023, and November 30, 2025.

    Shlomo Mofaz, the center’s director, said that “the issue of Hamas’s propaganda is a high priority, and it uses a lot of media outlets abroad to talk about it.”

    “The narrative of harming journalists is like the number of deaths – when you check the facts and figures, it’s not like that. About 60% is definitely a very high figure,” he said.

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  • ‘Fields of rubble’: Israel, destroying Gaza City, kills 78 across enclave

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    Israel has stepped up its destruction of Gaza City as it plans to seize Gaza’s largest urban centre and forcibly displace around one million Palestinians to concentration zones in the south, as it killed at least 78 people across the besieged enclave since dawn, including 32 desperately seeking food.

    On Sunday, in Gaza City, the Palestinian Civil Defence reported a fire in tents near al-Quds Hospital after Israeli shelling. At least five people were killed and three wounded when a residential apartment was hit near the Remal neighbourhood.

    Ismail al-Thawabta, director of Gaza’s Government Media Office, said the Israeli army is also using “explosive robots” in residential areas and forcibly displacing Palestinians in Gaza City.

    In a statement on X on Sunday, al-Thawabta said the army has detonated more than 80 such devices in civilian neighbourhoods over the past three weeks, calling it a “scorched-earth policy” that has destroyed homes and endangered lives.

    He said more than one million Palestinians in Gaza City and the north of the enclave “refuse to submit to the policy of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing” despite the destruction and starvation caused by the Israeli assault.

    Footage posted on Instagram by Palestinian journalist Faiz Osama and verified by Al Jazeera showed the moments that followed an Israeli aerial attack on the Sabra neighbourhood, in the southern part of Gaza City.

    In the footage, as plumes of smoke rise to the sky, a child can be seen screaming with a wound to the leg. A man also lays on the ground with what appears to be a head injury.

    The video also shows the destruction left by the strike after residential buildings were flattened by the explosion.

    Israel’s forces have carried out sustained bombardment on Gaza City since early August as part of a deepening push to seize the area in the latest phase of its nearly two-year genocidal war.

    On Friday, the Israeli military said it had begun the “initial stages” of its offensive, declaring the area a “combat zone”.

    ‘Fields of rubble’

    Reporting from Gaza City on Sunday, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud said intensifying Israeli attacks have been turning parts of Gaza City, once teeming and crowded with residential buildings, into “fields of rubble”.

    “There is non-stop heavy artillery targeting the Zeitoun area and Jabalia, where we are seeing the systematic demolition of homes. There is hardly any fighting going on, but heavy artillery and bulldozers are moving from one street to the other, destroying all of these residential clusters,” he said.

    “The majority of people in those areas do not have the luxury to pack up and leave because there is no safety anywhere.”

    Another Palestinian journalist was also killed on Sunday. A source at al-Shifa Hospital told Al Jazeera that Islam Abed was killed in an Israeli attack on Gaza City and that she worked for Al-Quds Al-Youm TV channel.

    The Government Media Office said the “number of martyred journalists has risen to 247″ since the war began. Other tallies have put the number of journalists and media workers killed at more than 270.

    On Monday, five journalists – one of whom worked for Al Jazeera – were among at least 21 people killed in an Israeli attack on Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis.

    ‘Life is difficult, so we will stay in our home’

    Many residents in Gaza City are opting to stay put despite Israel declaring it a “combat zone”.

    It was Gaza’s most populous city before the war began, home to about 700,000 people. Then hundreds of thousands fled under Israel’s forced evacuation threats before many returned, joined by thousands of other displaced from the south, during a January-to-March ceasefire, which Israel broke.

    Fedaa Hamad, who was displaced from Beit Hanoon, said she has “no plans to leave” Gaza City this time despite Israel’s latest warning.

    “We are tired from the first displacement. Where are we going to go? Is there a place in the south? We cannot find it,” she said.

    Akram Mzini, a resident of Gaza City, said he would not leave “because displacement is very difficult”.

    “We were displaced to the south before, and displacement in the south is not simple and it is costly,” he said. “Life is difficult, so we will stay in our home, and whatever God wants will happen.”

    Elsewhere in Gaza on Sunday, an Israeli attack on the centre of Deir el-Balah killed at least four people, Al Jazeera Arabic reported.

    Earlier, medical sources said an Israeli bombardment killed at least one person and wounded several in the city, located in the central part of the Gaza Strip.

    Israeli forces have killed at least 78 Palestinians across Gaza since dawn, including 32 aid seekers, according to medical sources.

    Since the war began, Israel has killed at least 63,459 people and wounded 160,256. A total of 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks, and about 200 were taken captive.

    On Sunday, Israeli army chief Eyal Zamir held a situation assessment meeting with his top commanders, saying the military must “initiate” more attacks to surprise and reach its targets anywhere.

    Many more reserve soldiers will assemble this week “in preparation for the continued intensification of the fighting against Hamas in Gaza City”, Zamir was quoted as saying by the military.

    Meanwhile, the armed wing of Hamas said its fighters successfully attacked two invading Israeli military vehicles in Gaza City on Saturday.

    The Qassam Brigades said a Merkava tank of the Israeli army was hit with a Yassin-105 shell, while a D9 military bulldozer was targeted with an explosive device on a street southwest of the Zeitoun neighbourhood of the besieged area.

    As global condemnation against the situation grows, in the largest attempt to break the Israeli blockade of the Palestinian territory by sea, the Global Sumud Flotilla left the Spanish port city of Barcelona on Sunday.

    The flotilla’s launch comes after the United Nations-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) declared a state of famine in Gaza this month.

    The Global Sumud Flotilla, which describes itself as an independent group not linked to any government or political party, did not say how many ships would set sail or the exact time of departure, but Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg spoke of “dozens” of vessels.

    Sumud means “perseverance” in Arabic.

    Two previous attempts by activists to deliver aid by ship to Gaza were blocked by Israel.

    Mohamad Elmasry of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies told Al Jazeera that while the flotilla was “an important act of symbolic resistance … ultimately, they will be intercepted”.

    “This is not going to solve the famine,” he said. “What’s going to solve the famine, ultimately, is governments doing their job to stop genocide and deliberate starvation programmes.”

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  • Israeli strikes on Gaza hospital kill 20 people, including 5 journalists

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    BEIRUT — Two Israeli strikes on a hospital in southern Gaza on Monday killed at least 20 people, including five journalists, four healthcare workers and a civil defense worker, according to Palestinian health authorities, the World Health Organization and video taken from the hospital.

    Coming two weeks after Israeli strikes killed six journalists in the enclave, the attacks add to a tally that has seen Gaza become the deadliest conflict ever recorded for media workers and healthcare personnel, advocacy groups say.

    The strikes targeted the top floor of the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, with the first attack coming some time after 10 a.m. Roughly 10 minutes later, as a live broadcast from a local news channel zoomed in on civil defense workers sifting through the wreckage with journalists filming nearby, the second missile hit.

    “The civil defense is gone! They [Israel] killed the people!” shouts a journalist from Al-Ghad TV as the scene is engulfed in smoke and rubble.

    Other video taken inside the medical complex depicts a dust-covered man dragging himself on the floor away from the blast, while a bloodied cameraman is escorted to a nursing station. Hadil Abu Zaid, a British doctor with the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians visiting the intensive care unit, in a statement described the scene as “unbearable,” with “trails of blood” across the floor.

    The Gaza Health Ministry condemned the attacks, characterizing them as “a continuation of the systematic destruction of the health system and the continuation of genocide.”

    In a statement on X, World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said 50 other people were injured in the attacks, including “critically ill patients who were already receiving care.” He said the hospital’s main building, which houses the emergency department, inpatient ward and surgical unit, was struck.

    “While people in #Gaza are being starved, their already limited access to healthcare is being further crippled by repeated attacks,” he wrote. “We cannot say it loudly enough: STOP attacks on health care. Ceasefire now!”

    Activists in Gaza said journalists often congregated on the upper floor of the hospital and the emergency staircase outside so as to get a phone signal. Five journalists were killed in the attack, Gaza health authorities and the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said.

    The latter identified the slain media workers as Mariam Abu Dagga, a visual journalist who freelanced for the Associated Press; Hussam al-Masri, a contractor cameraman with Reuters; Moaz Abu Taha, a freelancer who also worked on occasion with Reuters; Ahmed Abu Aziz, who reported for Middle East Eye; and Al Jazeera cameraman Mohammad Salama.

    Another contract photographer with Reuters, Hatem Khaled, was also injured, the news agency said.

    The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate denounced the journalists’ killing, saying in a statement that “without a doubt [Israel] is waging war on free media.”

    The Israeli military confirmed in a statement that it carried out the strike and that it “regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals and does not target journalists as such,” and that it would conduct an “initial inquiry.”

    Later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement describing the attack as a “tragic mishap.”

    “The military authorities are conducting a thorough investigation,” he said.

    “Our war is with Hamas terrorists.”

    Rights groups accused Israel of conducting a so-called double-tap strike, where a second strike follows several minutes after the first. During that pause, rescue workers and medical personnel will assemble. A July investigation by the Israeli news outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call found that double-tap strikes had been adopted by the Israeli military as standard procedure when operating in Gaza.

    Monday’s strikes come amid growing international criticism of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, which over the last 22 months has led to the deaths of hundreds of healthcare personnel and media workers, and carried out routine attacks on healthcare facilities and infrastructure.

    Israel insists that Hamas militants are hiding inside or near healthcare facilities, or that the group’s cadres disguise themselves as medical personnel, civil defense crews and journalists. It has rarely provided evidence proving those accusations.

    In June, a group of civil society organizations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders and others said more than 1,500 health workers and 460 aid workers have been killed since Oct. 7, 2023, after Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people and kidnapping about 250 others, most of them civilians. Health authorities in Gaza put the Palestinian death toll at nearly 63,000, the majority of them civilians.

    Israel has barred international journalists from entering Gaza, except on tightly controlled tours with its military. Meanwhile, it routinely vilifies local reporters as Hamas apologists or operatives. The Committee to Protect Journalists said in a tally published before Monday’s attacks that at least 192 journalists have been killed in Gaza since the war began. Health authorities in Gaza put the toll at 244.

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    Nabih Bulos

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