On Friday, December 15, Tel Aviv Tribune journalists Samer Abudaqa and Wael Dahdouh were reporting from Farhana School in Khan Younis when Israel struck from the air.
Dahdouh was hit by shrapnel in the arm, but was able to apply pressure to the wound and escape to a nearby hospital for help.
But Abudaqa could not move. Rescue teams tried to reach him, but were unable to do so due to Israeli bombardment. During more than five hours of agony, as he lay bleeding, campaigns were launched on the Internet and in traditional media to save his life.
“I made this appeal on air,” Jonathan Dagher, the head of the Middle East desk of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), told Tel Aviv Tribune from RSF’s offices in Paris. “On Tel Aviv Tribune, I said: ‘We call on the Israeli authorities to allow Samer to receive first aid.'”
Despite repeated calls, medical help was unable to reach Abudaqa, who died of his injuries that day.
“A trend”…to kill journalists
Abudaqa is one of at least 130 journalists and media workers, according to RSF’s count, killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7, 2023.
Other media rights groups put different figures, based on their own criteria, while the government’s Media Office in Gaza puts the number of journalists and media workers killed at 173.
Journalism has thus become one of the most dangerous professions in an already perilous situation.
The International Federation of Journalists said the death rate of media workers in Gaza is over 10 percent.
Seventy-five percent of all journalists killed worldwide in 2023 were killed between October 7 and the end of last year.
In December 2023, just two months into the war, the Committee to Protect Journalists declared the Gaza war zone the “most dangerous ever” for journalists.
Nearly 11 months later, Israel continues to kill journalists in Gaza.
“If there are no journalists, there is no one who can independently verify this information and communicate it to the world,” Dagher said. “The Israeli military then becomes the source of the information.”
Some reporters from Gaza have been able to leave, but “most of them are trapped and those who have been able to leave cannot come back,” Dagher said.
“There is a trend,” Dagher said. “We are 10 months in and we are not at five or six journalists killed, which would have been a tragedy. We are at (more than) 130 journalists killed.”
Among the more than 130 media professionals and journalists killed, according to RSF, 31 credible cases exist and there is sufficient information to confirm that the journalists were directly targeted because of their profession.
With the death rate of journalists so high, researchers following the issue told Tel Aviv Tribune they have come to believe that Israel is intentionally killing journalists and media workers, in addition to destroying Gaza’s media infrastructure.
One of these people was the co-founder of the media outlet Ain Media.
In October 2023, he contacted Forensic Architecture, a research group investigating state violence and human rights violations, to investigate the disappearances of a number of his colleagues.
Tel Aviv Tribune asked to speak to the Ain Media co-founder, but a program manager at Forensic Architecture responded that he had been “killed in an Israeli airstrike several months ago at his home in a targeted attack.”
Assassination in life and death
The Israeli military has repeatedly killed journalists, later claiming they were armed fighters or “terrorists.” But these claims are rarely substantiated, according to experts and independent investigations.
On July 31, 2024, Israel killed Ismail al-Ghoul in an attack.
Al-Ghoul worked for Tel Aviv Tribune during much of the war. In March 2024, he was arrested and questioned at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. Tel Aviv Tribune said the accusations were baseless.
The day after his assassination by Israel, an Israeli military spokesman claimed that al-Ghoul was a member of Hamas’ military wing, providing since-disputed documents that al-Ghoul had been appointed to an elite unit of the group in 2007.
“In 2007, Ismail al-Ghoul was 10 years old,” said Mohammed Othman, a correspondent for the Skeyes Center for Media and Cultural Freedom in Gaza.
“There are devices that monitor faces, eye prints and facial prints, and they (the Israeli army) know who is affiliated with a military faction and who is a civilian,” Othman said.
“He was released after 12 hours (of interrogation at al-Shifa hospital). Is it possible that he was accused of belonging to the Hamas movement and that he had a military number and was released?”
There is also the case of Hamza Dahdouh, the son of Wael Dahdouh, and his colleague Mustafa Thuraya, killed by a drone strike on January 7, 2024.
Israeli authorities said Dahdouh and Thuraya were members of Gaza-based “terrorist organizations” and were actively involved in attacks against Israeli military forces.
They claimed that Dahdouh was an officer in the Jerusalem Brigades of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and that Thuraya was fighting for Hamas, pointing to the drone that the journalists used as evidence. But a Washington Post investigation showed that the drone was used for journalistic work.
“The drone was simply filming children and people pulling (other) people out of the rubble,” Dagher said, citing the Washington Post investigation.
“There was nothing military about it and it was purely journalistic work.”
Journalists are not the only targets of Israeli attacks. Media offices are also targeted.
At the start of the Israeli offensive against Gaza, a number of high-rise buildings were destroyed in Gaza City, where most media outlets are based.
“When they target specific towers, they destroy more than 80 or 100 media institutions because of the concentration,” Othman said.
Like everyone else in Gaza, journalists have been forced to flee areas attacked by Israel. Several media outlets have completely ceased operations.
“There were about 15 or 16 radio stations in the Gaza Strip, all of which have stopped,” Othman said.
“The goal is silence”
Since October 7, international media have been banned from entering Gaza. Palestinian journalists have gone to great lengths to document the war in the Gaza Strip, often at the cost of their lives or those of their loved ones.
“Israel has a pattern of targeting Palestinian journalists for the past 10 months and banning any other media organization or journalist from entering Gaza, except in those rare cases where journalists are embedded (within the Israeli military),” Mohamad Bazzi, director of the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University, told Tel Aviv Tribune.
According to RSF’s Dagher, many journalists are now afraid to turn on a camera “because you know it makes you a target.”
Targeting journalists and assassinating their officials, destroying media outlets, banning foreign media and preventing Palestinian journalists who have left the country from returning home all point to a pattern for the Israeli military, according to experts and sources interviewed by Tel Aviv Tribune.
“The targeting and restrictions on all media in Gaza, and then these targeted integrations (with the Israeli military) show this multi-faceted campaign to establish a media blackout to restrict coverage and spread criticism of what the Israeli military is doing,” Dagher said.
“The goal is to impose their version of events rather than the truth. The goal is silence. The goal is disinformation.”
