More than 250 media outlets in over 70 countries staged a front-page protest Monday highlighting what they said was the deaths of scores of journalists in Israel’s war against the Hamas terror group in the Gaza Strip, the Reporters Without Borders media freedom group said.
“At the rate journalists are being killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, there will soon be no-one left to keep you informed,” the group’s general director Thibaut Bruttin said in a statement.
The protest was taken up on the website front pages of publications including Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera, British news site The Independent, French newspapers La Croix and L’Humanite and Germany’s TAZ and Frankfurter Rundschau, according to Reporters Without Borders.
Some 220 journalists have been killed amid Israel’s campaign in Gaza, according to RWB data. Israel has said that many of them were actively engaged in terror activities and using journalism as a cover.
The ongoing war started when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, of whom 48 are still held by terror groups in Gaza, with 20 believed to be alive.
The protest was staged a week after five journalists — some working for Al Jazeera, Associated Press and Reuters — were killed in Israeli strikes on the Nasser Hospital in the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
Israel said the strikes on the Nasser hospital killings targeted a Hamas camera, but expressed “regret” for what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a “tragic mishap.” The attack drew international condemnation; even US President Donald Trump, a key Israeli ally, said he was “not happy.”
Earlier in August, six journalists were killed in another Israeli airstrike outside of Shifa hospital in Gaza City; Israel accused one of the journalists killed in the attack of leading a Hamas squad charged with launching rockets at Israel, and pointed as evidence to documents, released last October, that the military said it seized in Gaza detailing the Al Jazeera reporter’s role in the terror group.
Media participating in Monday’s action “demand an end to impunity for Israeli crimes against Gaza’s reporters, the emergency evacuation of reporters seeking to leave the Strip and that foreign press be granted independent access,” the RWB said in a statement.
RWB said it has filed four complaints at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes it said the Israeli army committed against journalists in Gaza over the past 22 months.
The Foreign Ministry slammed the Reporters Without Borders initiative as an example of anti-Israel bias.
“When 150 media outlets choose in a synchronized manner to stop reporting news, to throw values of the press and plurality of opinions into the trash, and instead publish a uniform, pre-scripted political manifesto against Israel – that tells you how great the bias against Israel is in the global media,” the ministry said.
“The reports we see in the global media regarding Gaza do not tell the real story there. They tell the campaign of lies that Hamas spreads. This is not journalism. This is politics,” it added.
While Israel has repeatedly chastised international media for relying on information coming out of Hamas-controlled Gaza, it has barred journalists from entering the Strip since the start of the war, except on occasional, tightly controlled trips with the military.