Is Israel deliberately murdering journalists in Gaza?

“Israel is deliberately murdering journalists in Gaza.”

War in a dense city is lethal to everyone in it, journalists included, and every such death is real. But “deliberately murdering the press” is a separate and unproven charge. Israel does not target journalists as such, and a number of those counted as slain “journalists” were, separately, confirmed armed operatives of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, named as their own fighters by those very groups. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), whose toll is the one most quoted, states that it removes from its count anyone “engaging in combat.” A real reporter killed by accident in a firefight is a tragedy; a Hamas fighter who also carried a press card is a combatant. Merging the two manufactures a massacre of the press the evidence does not support.

Where the claim comes from

The charge that Israel hunts reporters as such predates the Gaza war. Its anchor case is Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera correspondent killed by gunfire during an Israeli raid in Jenin on 11 May 2022, over a year before October 7. Palestinian officials called it a targeted assassination within hours. The US State Department’s own review, published later in 2022, concluded the fatal round was likely fired by an Israeli soldier but found “no reason to believe” the shooting was intentional, a finding that sits between “accident” and “murder” and that the Abu Akleh case as an anchor for the wider claim has never fully absorbed.

The claim’s current form grew out of the running toll CPJ began keeping after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack started the Gaza war. As the count climbed into the dozens and then further, CPJ itself said the war had become the deadliest period for journalists it had documented since it started tracking conflict deaths in 1992. Advocacy campaigns, UN officials, and outlets that lost their own staff, Al Jazeera foremost among them, took that raw number and supplied the word CPJ’s own count does not: deliberate.

The evidence, examined

The strongest version of the charge points to a real pattern. Dozens of people carrying press credentials or wearing vests marked “PRESS” have died in Israeli strikes in Gaza, several of them alongside family members in strikes on private homes, and the deaths have continued year over year rather than tapering off. To a reader who sees only the rising tally, a war that keeps killing the same profession in the same manner looks like more than accident.

Two documented facts complicate that reading. First, CPJ’s own stated methodology strips out anyone “engaging in combat,” which means the number a campaign quotes and the number CPJ actually stands behind are not the same list once that footnote is applied. Second, Hamas and Islamic Jihad supplied the clearest evidence against a clean “press, not fighters” reading themselves: both groups have publicly named a number of the Gazans killed and counted as journalists as their own combatants, in some cases eulogizing them in the same martyrdom announcements used for fighters killed in action, an admission the terror groups had no reason to volunteer if it were false. The Israel Defense Forces has separately accused at least one Gaza-based stringer credentialed to Al Jazeera of having personally taken part in holding Israeli hostages after October 7, a case reported in the Jerusalem Post. None of this erases the deaths of genuine reporters killed in crossfire or in strikes on buildings that turned out to hold no combatants. It does mean the headline number cannot be read as a body count of the press.

Who makes the charge, and where

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has been the most aggressive institutional voice, filing complaints with the International Criminal Court alleging Israel is committing war crimes against journalists as a class. UN special rapporteurs on freedom of expression have used comparable language in Human Rights Council statements. Because several of the outlets pressing the charge, Al Jazeera foremost, have lost their own correspondents in the war, the accusation carries an institutional as well as a moral stake for the organizations repeating it loudest. On social media, and in campus and union statements, the claim circulates almost entirely stripped of CPJ’s own combat exclusion, reduced to a single rising number with the word “deliberate” attached by the messenger rather than the source.

What remains open, and why it still isn’t the murder charge

The fairest objection left standing is that some individual strikes on journalists have no published IDF explanation, and that Israel has separately restricted foreign press access to Gaza for long stretches of the war, real complaints on their own.

Neither adds up to deliberate murder of the press. An unexplained strike in a war fought inside a dense city is a gap in public accounting, not evidence of intent, and it sits alongside the separately documented pattern of human shields in this war, Hamas using civilian sites, including some where journalists were present, as cover for command infrastructure, which explains some of these deaths without excusing any of them. Restricting foreign press entry is a press-freedom problem worth pressing in its own right, but it is a different claim from killing reporters on purpose, and treating the two as one charge only weakens the real one. What stays unresolved is a handful of individual cases lacking public detail, not a policy of hunting journalists, and the count the charge relies on already includes fighters CPJ itself would exclude.

CPJ audited its own list in 2026, and started deleting names

In June 2026 the Committee to Protect Journalists announced a review of its own database of journalists killed in this war. The trigger was not an Israeli complaint. It was that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad published obituaries for their own fighters, and some of the men in those obituaries were on CPJ’s list of dead journalists.

By the time the review was announced, CPJ had already removed 20 names, of which eight were removed because they were established to have been Hamas or PIJ combatants. CEO Jodie Ginsberg restated the standard: “CPJ has always been clear that we do not include anyone in our data sets if there is evidence that they were engaging in combat or inciting imminent violence.” CPJ also stated the constraint that makes the whole exercise hard, which is that in-person verification from outside Gaza has been impossible for the length of the war. Its documented figure at that point was 209 killed by Israel since 7 October 2023.

Two things follow. The organisation whose number the charge rests on removes names when the evidence arrives, which is what a serious monitor does. And the higher figures in circulation, the 250 and the 270 and the “more than 300,” come from bodies that do not run that check at all, including the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, whose membership includes people the factions themselves buried as fighters.

”More than any war in recorded history” is a claim about record-keeping

The viral version, repeated in Channel 5’s “Occupied Palestine” in August 2026 as “more reporters than any other army in any conflict in recorded history,” is built on two comparisons that do not hold.

CPJ’s own phrasing is “more journalists than any other government since CPJ began collecting data in 1992.” Thirty-four years is the record, not recorded history. The Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, the Iran-Iraq War and the Rwandan genocide are all outside the dataset.

The Brown University comparison to “both World Wars combined” compares unlike categories. The war correspondents of 1939 to 1945 were a small, credentialed, military-accredited group who moved with armies. The modern count includes journalists, media workers, freelancers, fixers, camera operators and social media reporters, in a strip of land 365 square kilometres wide where a large share of the deaths occurred in strikes on residential buildings rather than in the field. Almost nobody in 1943 could be counted as a media worker. Almost anybody in Gaza can be.

The honest sentence is that this is the deadliest war on record for people whom modern monitors classify as press, that the classification is doing enormous work, and that the monitor doing the classifying spent the summer of 2026 taking names off its own list.

A body count that includes fighters is not a press massacre

Press freedom matters, and the danger to genuine reporters in Gaza is real, which is exactly why the deliberate-murder claim is corrosive: it rests on a count that blends true journalists with armed fighters, and spends the moral weight of “killing the press” on cases that were nothing of the kind.