WeeklySA_AdminSILENCE: The targeted slaughter of their Palestinian colleagues still hasn’t shaken Western journalists from their cowardice…
By Schuyler Mitchell
On November 9, 2023, just over one month into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a group of United States-based journalists published an open letter.
“We stand with our colleagues in Gaza and herald their brave efforts at reporting in the midst of carnage and destruction,” the letter’s authors wrote. “We also hold Western newsrooms accountable for dehumanising rhetoric that has served to justify ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”
Signed by 1 200 journalists in the first week of its publication, the letter called on reporters to “use precise terms” and “tell the full truth without fear or favour” — in other words, to do exactly what reporters are supposed to do.
Instead, many Western newsrooms bristled at the demand for basic moral clarity and journalistic ethics. Coverage of employer backlash against the letter’s signatories quickly drowned out the contents of the letter itself.
Facing disciplinary action, staff at The Associated Press, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and other major media outlets requested their signatures be removed; the Los Angeles Times banned staff who signed the letter from covering Gaza for at least three months.
At the time of the letter’s publication, Israel’s four-week siege had killed at least 36 Palestinian journalists. As of August 11, 2025, that death toll has ballooned to more than 270 — and more journalists have been murdered in Gaza than in the US Civil War, both world wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan combined.
Still, the widespread (and sometimes targeted) slaughter of their Palestinian colleagues has been unable to shake Western journalists from their cowardice.
Twenty-two months into Israel’s dizzying, relentless assault on Gaza, it is easy to lose track of how much the goalposts have shifted. At the start of the genocide, Israel vehemently denied targeting journalists at all, despite ample evidence to the contrary.
This week, Israel admitted to assassinating Anas al-Sharif, a 28-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter widely celebrated as “the voice of Gaza.” A targeted Israeli airstrike killed al-Sharif and five Al Jazeera staff and freelance colleagues while they were sheltering at a tent for journalists outside Al-Shifa Hospital.
Hiding behind a mask of spurious objectivity, major outlets continue to shy away from words like “genocide” and “apartheid” while giving credence to the Israeli military’s oft-debunked talking points.
Israeli officials claim, without providing evidence, that al-Sharif was a Hamas leader and therefore a legitimate military target. (No explanation was offered for the deaths of the rest of the Al Jazeera crew.)
But Israel levies baseless accusations so often that credulously reporting such claims would be journalistic malpractice: If one were to believe the Israeli military’s accounting, throw a rock five feet into Gaza and you might hit a Hamas leader. The Jabalia refugee camp, destroyed by Israeli forces in late 2023?
Israel claims it is a “Hamas stronghold.” The Al-Tabaeen school-turned-shelter, massacred in August 2024? “Hamas headquarters.” The Al-Shifa Hospital, raided in November 2023, and again in November 2024? “Hamas command centre.” When the Israeli military gave 1.1 million Palestinians 24 hours to evacuate northern Gaza in October 2023, it said it was necessary to eradicate the Hamas members hiding in tunnels beneath Gaza City.
Then, when Israel attacked the southern Gazan city of Rafah, it claimed it would eliminate Hamas’s last remaining military battalions. Hamas does not operate in the occupied West Bank, but since October 7, 2023, the Israeli military and settlers have killed at least 964 Palestinians there. The Israeli military has also expelled residents from refugee camps in the territory, installed checkpoints and roadblocks, and destroyed civilian homes and infrastructure.
And even though Israel has already succeeded in killing Hamas’s key leaders — including Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh, as well as top Hezbollah officials like Ibrahim Aqil in Lebanon — the siege on Gaza continues.
In October 2023, Western media spent weeks debating whether a deadly explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City was caused by an Israeli airstrike or a misfired rocket launched by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The furore over the one hospital blast looks quaint in hindsight: In 2025, only 19 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals remain operational and 94 percent have been damaged or destroyed after Israeli attacks.
As a Western journalist, I am ashamed to see my media colleagues engage in war crime apologia. The Israeli military directly threatened al-Sharif’s life for over a year: In November 2023, he reported receiving multiple phone calls from army officers instructing him to cease coverage and leave northern Gaza; shortly after, al-Sharif’s 90-year-old father was killed in an Israeli airstrike on their family home.
This past October, Israel published a list of six Al Jazeera journalists, including al-Sharif, and accused them of having ties to militant groups. In July, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) called for al-Sharif’s protection, expressing concerns that the Israeli military’s public threats could be a precursor to the journalist’s assassination.
Despite the documented Israeli smear campaign, following al-Sharif’s assassination, Western news outlets have uncritically amplified Israel’s claims that Al Jazeera is a Hamas mouthpiece. A BBC presenter questioned whether al-Sharif was truly operating as an independent journalist, since Israel has banned international news outlets from entering Gaza.
The racist line of argument obfuscates the fact that it’s Israel’s responsibility not to suppress the press. And if Israel’s ban on international journalists de facto discredits all of Gaza’s remaining reporters — by necessity, Palestinians — how can the people of Gaza expect to have a voice?
Israel is able to legitimise its assault by proliferating propaganda to the West, and for nearly two years, Palestinian journalists have worked bravely and diligently to share the truth of what’s happening with the world. (Let us not forget, too, that in 2021, years before Hamas’s October 7 attack, Israel destroyed the Gaza building housing both The Associated Press and Al Jazeera offices.)
Israeli officials have been clear from the beginning that their military goals in the region are not limited to the return of the hostages taken on October 7, but the total expulsion of Hamas, and, for some members of the Israeli parliament, Israel’s takeover of Gaza.
“Erase Gaza. Nothing else will satisfy us,” said Israeli Knesset Deputy Speaker Nissim Vaturi on October 9, 2023. Now, nearly two years later, Israel’s security cabinet has approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal for the occupation of Gaza City, claiming it is the only way to defeat Hamas. It is notable that, ahead of the planned offensive, Israel wiped out al-Sharif along with Al Jazeera’s entire Gaza City crew.
“It is no coincidence that the smears against al-Sharif — who has reported night and day for Al Jazeera since the start of the war — surfaced every time he reported on a major development in the war,” CPJ’s Regional Director Sara Qudah said in a statement.
“Israel is murdering the messengers.”
Since the journalists’ open letter was first published in November 2023, it has only become more painfully obvious that Israel is engaging in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Western outlets should have been clear-eyed about this from the beginning. There is no pleasure, however, in this type of vindication. I feel only a deep admiration for the Palestinian journalists who continue to share their message with the world in the face of horrific violence and destruction.
After an Israeli airstrike killed Al Jazeera correspondent Ismail al-Ghoul in July 2024, Palestinian journalists, including al-Sharif, were filmed throwing their press flak jackets to the ground. Now that al-Sharif has been killed, too, I find myself returning to his words from that time.
“This press vest is the vest the global and local institutions preach about. This vest did not protect our colleague Ismail. Nor did it protect any of my colleagues,” said al-Sharif.
“What did Ismail do? What did he do? Broadcast the image? Broadcast the suffering of people? Sorry Ismail, we will continue sharing the message after you.” – Truthout
* Schuyler Mitchell is a writer, editor and fact-checker from North Carolina, currently based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in The Intercept, The Baffler, Labor Notes, Los Angeles Magazine etc
Report: ‘Israeli military has unit that exists to justify targeting journalists’
OPERATION: The unit aims to give the military leeway “so countries like America wouldn’t stop supplying weapons,” one source said…
By Sharon Zhang
The Israeli military operates a special unit known as the “Legitimization Cell” that exists to create propaganda justifying the military’s targeting of civilian infrastructure and civilians, particularly journalists, in order to ensure that Israel maintains its legitimacy on the world stage, an investigation finds.
According to a +972 Magazine and Local Call investigation published Thursday, the Legitimization Cell is a public relations unit that is tasked with finding a narrative to create cover for some of the most highly criticized actions by Israel’s military.
“If the global media is talking about Israel killing innocent journalists, then immediately there’s a push to find one journalist who might not be so innocent — as if that somehow makes killing the other 20 acceptable,” an Israeli intelligence source told journalist Yuval Abraham.
“The idea was to [allow the military to] operate without pressure, so countries like America wouldn’t stop supplying weapons,” another Israeli source said.
Observers have seen this pattern play out numerous times, including in the recent assassination of famous Gaza journalist Anas Al-Sharif, who Israel killed along with five other Al Jazeera journalists earlier this week. Israel has long smeared Al-Sharif as a member of Hamas — claims that he always denied and for which Israel has not provided any evidence that can be independently verified.
Israel does this regularly. Last year, after killing Al Jazeera journalist Ismail al-Ghoul, Israeli officials claimed that he was given a Hamas military ranking in 2007 — when al-Ghoul was only 10 years old.
“[T]hree intelligence sources said the army treated the media as an extension of the battlefield, allowing it to declassify sensitive intelligence for public release,” said the investigation.
+972 and Local Call report that the Legitimization Cell is responsible for narratives like its denial of responsibility for the strike on Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City in October 2023 — a high-profile strike that killed hundreds of Palestinians.
The bombing gained widespread media attention as one of Israel’s first strikes on Gaza’s health care system that it has now destroyed, with Al-Ahli put out of service by Israeli attacks.
A flood of disinformation sourced from the military — much of which was later debunked by numerous investigations — followed the attack. The day after, the Legitimization Unit put out a recording of a phone call that it claimed was between two Hamas operatives saying that the hospital was struck by a misfired Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket.
But this claim was roundly debunked by analysts and multiple news outlets. And the phone call, too, was fake — a Palestinian human rights activist told +972 and Local Call that it was actually a benign phone call between him and his civilian friend that had been intercepted by the military. Israel keeps a huge database of Palestinians’ phone calls as part of its vast surveillance network.
In response to the report, the Israeli military outright admitted that Israeli military intelligence maintains “research teams” that have the goal of “discredit[ing]” journalists reporting from Gaza who are supposedly “Hamas members.”
But, despite supposedly being responsible for finding journalists’ ties to Hamas, the “research teams do not play a role in the selection of individual targets to be attacked,” the report finds — meaning that they are looking for justification after the fact.
“There was this phrase, ‘That’s good for legitimacy,’” one source told +972 and Local Call. “The goal was simply to find as much material as possible to serve hasbara efforts.” Sources recalled a case where the Legitimization Unit falsely represented a journalist as a member of Hamas’s military wing, saying that the propaganda research cell was “eager” and “excited” about the narrative. “In the end, they realiSed he really was a journalist,” and he wasn’t targeted, one source claimed.
Israel has long had a robust propaganda operation — so robust, in fact, that Israel has exported some of its intelligence and surveillance technologies.
Members of one of its well-known intelligence units, Unit 8200, are trained in Israel but go on to work across numerous sectors, including as journalists in the U.S. at outlets key to shaping American opinion. – Truthout
