Israel is murdering Palestinian journalists in Gaza. Where is the outrage?

[Donkees]

Chris McGreal
Wed 10 Jan 2024

In 2003, an Israeli soldier shot dead the British documentary cameraman James Miller in Gaza. An inquest in the UK returned a verdict of unlawful killing. Israel declined to prosecute the soldier responsible but it did pay £1.5m in compensation, which Miller’s family said was “probably the closest we’ll get to an admission of guilt on the part of the Israelis”. Miller’s killing looked to be part of a pattern of ill-disciplined Israeli soldiers shooting whoever they felt like – not only journalists but UN officials and aid workers as well as Palestinian children. The army was usually quick to try to cover up the killings but it did not appear they were coordinated.

Gaza looks very different today. As the CPJ and the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders say, the scale and nature of the deaths of journalists and their families suggests there is more going on than a few ill-disciplined soldiers taking pot shots at reporters, even taking into account the deaths of thousands of other Palestinians, including more than 8,000 children.

Certainly the message from some Israeli leaders is that journalists are fair game. Israeli politicians were quick to call for the “elimination” of a number of Palestinian journalists working for foreign news organisations who were falsely accused by a pro-Israel pressure group in the US of being “embedded with Hamas” on 7 October. Benny Gantz, a member of the Israeli war cabinet, said they should be hunted down as terrorists, reflecting a widely held suspicion among Israeli officials that Palestinian journalists are an appendage of Hamas.

Miller’s family got a payout because he was British. Dead western journalists create more waves, which is presumably one of the reasons Israel has locked the foreign press out of Gaza during the present war. International news organisations now rely on those same Palestinian reporters targeted by Israel. They provide many of the pictures the rest of the world sees of the horror in Gaza.

It is therefore troubling that while western newspapers and television stations have reported the rising numbers of deaths of journalists in Gaza, many news organisations appear unwilling to directly address the pattern of killing that, as the CPJ’s evidence appears to show, provides strong evidence of a war crime. It would surely be different if American or European reporters were the ones dying.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/10/israel-murdering-palestinian-journalists-in-gaza