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Jews killing people who document their crimes?
Really?
I haven’t been this shocked since I found out women are a bunch of whores!
As Israel’s offensive in Gaza has become the deadliest conflict for journalists in recent history, its military has repeatedly said it is not deliberately targeting the media.
“There is no policy of targeting media personnel,” a senior official said, attributing the record number of journalists killed to the scale and intensity of a bombardment in which so many of Gaza’s civilians have died.
However, an investigation by the Guardian suggests that amid a loosening of the Israel Defense Force’s interpretation of the laws of war after the deadly Hamas-led attacks on 7 October, some within the IDF appear to have viewed journalists working in Gaza for outlets controlled by or affiliated with Hamas to be legitimate military targets.
The investigation is part of the Gaza project, a collaboration led by the Paris-based non-profit Forbidden Stories, which has analysed the deaths of journalists in Gaza since Israel began its offensive.
The US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) records at least 103 Palestinian journalists and media workers killed in the war in Gaza. Other lists suggest that number is higher.
Since foreign media are blocked by Israel from entering Gaza, the work of documenting the war on the ground has fallen to Palestinian journalists in the territory, many of whom have continued to work despite grave risks to their safety.
In a war in which Israel has dropped tens of thousands of bombs on a densely populated territory, it is perhaps inevitable that so many journalists have been killed. Among the dead are also doctors, teachers, civil servants, aid workers, paramedics and poets.
That so many Palestinian journalists and media workers – working for a wide range of local and international outlets – have been killed, injured or detained by Israeli forces has raised concerns among press freedom organisations that the IDF has deliberately sought to silence critical reporting.
Among those listed by the CPJ as having been killed in Gaza since 7 October, approximately 30% worked for media outlets affiliated with or closely tied to Hamas.
Working with Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), a Jordan-based non-profit, the Guardian identified at least 23 individuals killed since 7 October who worked for the largest Hamas-run outlet in Gaza, al-Aqsa media network.
Considered to be the Hamas movement’s official channel, al-Aqsa employed hundreds of people and operated a widely watched TV channel and numerous radio stations until the war curtailed its output. The outlet appears to have had the highest number of journalists killed during the current war.
Asked about the al-Aqsa network casualties, a senior IDF spokesperson told reporters in the Gaza project consortium that there was “no difference” between working for the media outlet and belonging to Hamas’s armed wing, a sweeping statement legal experts described as alarming.
“It’s a shocking statement,” Adil Haque, a law professor at Rutgers University in the US said, describing the position as showing “a complete misunderstanding or just a wilful disregard for international law”.
Under the laws of war, a journalist can lose their civilian status if they engage in planning, preparing or carrying out combat operations. Simply working for an organisation such as al-Aqsa does not make someone a legitimate target to be killed.
“Reporting the news is not direct participation in hostilities,” Janina Dill, a professor at the University of Oxford and expert in the laws of war, said. “Even if they reported the news in a biased way, even if they did propaganda for Hamas, even if Israel fundamentally disagrees with how they report the news. That is not enough.”
Multiple Israeli sources said there had been a permissive approach to targeting across the IDF in a war aimed at the “total destruction of Hamas”.
A person with knowledge of legal advice given to IDF commanders said journalists working for Hamas-affiliated media were seen to exist within a “grey zone” and there was a “problematic” view among some in the IDF that “whenever there’s someone getting a salary ultimately from Hamas” they were considered to be a legitimate target.
“Hamas invests a lot of resources in its propaganda teams. They often won’t do an activity if they don’t have a photographer. They must document everything,” a military intelligence officer said. “So some will tell you: ‘Look, a Hamasnik is Hamasnik.’”
In an interview with Radio France, one of the Guardian’s partners in the Gaza project, the senior IDF spokesperson and reservist Col Olivier Rafowicz said there was “no difference between the political and the military wing of Hamas”.
“Al-Aqsa belongs to the Hamas war organisation and the people who work for it are active members of the war organisation of Hamas,” he said.
Numerous legal experts said this was a troubling position. While there may be particular individuals who engaged in both journalism and combat activities, they said, the suggestion that everyone working for a media organisation was a militant failed to distinguish between combatants and civilians.
“This is the most fundamental idea in international humanitarian law,” said Haque, the Rutgers law professor. “It is shocking to hear that a member of the IDF would openly and publicly reveal either their ignorance or their disregard for this fundamental principle.”
They kill aid workers for the same reason: they do not want people interfering with their massacre.
They believe they have a right to kill all these people, and it’s nobody’s business.
It’s not even the business of the American taxpayers who pay for it all.
No other country has ever behaved like this and no country would be allowed to behave like this.
Israel is worse than Rwanda.
“One of the lessons we learnt was that you cant place any reliance on Israeli accounts of events…”
Thomas Hurndall, a British photo journalist, was trying to help some children when he was murdered by an IDF sniper in 2003. His dad was on Sky in Novpic.twitter.com/3SFoj92d4g
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) June 13, 2024
