Part of the so-called Gaza Project, an effort by the France-based Forbidden Stories NGO to analyze the killing of journalists in Gaza by Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the investigation determined that at least 103 journalists have died in the Gaza Strip since October 7. Roughly 30 percent of them worked for media outlets affiliated with Hamas.
At least 23 of the dead journalists worked for Al-Aqsa, which is considered to be the largest Hamas-linked media outlet. According to Israel, Hamas-linked journalists are the equivalent of Hamas militants, so their lives must be ended.
A senior Israeli army spokesman commented that there is "no difference" between working for a Hamas-linked media outlet and being a member of the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas.
"It's a shocking statement ... a complete misunderstanding or just a willful disregard for international law," said Adil Haque, a professor of law at Rutgers University in New Jersey, about Israel's callous disregard for human life.
(Related: Did you know that Western media sources are claiming without evidence that Hezbollah is "storing missiles and explosives at Lebanon's main airport" in order to justify Israel's apparently planned bombing of Beirut primary international transit hub?)
Israel has been bombing Al-Aqsa offices since long before October 7
Israel's aggression against opposition journalists is not something new since October 7. It has been going on since at least 2019 when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed an order designating the network as a terrorist organization.
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Whenever Israel decides it does not like something and wants it destroyed, it simply brands its targets as "terrorists." When women, children and other innocents end up dying in large numbers, Israel simply uses the "human shield" excuse to disregard their lives as well.
By painting Al-Aqsa with the broad brush of terrorism, Netanyahu created "a blank check," to quote legal experts who looked into the declaration, for IDF militants to indiscriminately murder journalists affiliated with the network.
At the start of the current Israeli genocide in Gaza back on October 7, Al-Aqsa's offices were evacuated almost immediately because it was recognized that Israel would surely target the facility for bombings.
One Israeli source admitted to investigators that there has been "a permissive approach to targeting across" the Army when it comes to who is permissible to shoot or bomb as an "enemy."
Another source who is privy to the legal advice given to IDF militants concerning who is a legitimate target during wartime also said that journalists affiliated with Hamas exist within a "grey zone" due to a "problematic view" within the Israeli military that "whenever there's someone getting a salary ultimately from Hamas," they become a legitimate target.
The U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) learned that more than 75 percent of all journalists who died in 2023 as a whole were killed by the Israeli military in Gaza. No other country behaves as savagely against its opposition than Israel, in other words.
It turns out that many of the journalists who were murdered by Israel in 2023 did not even have anything to do with Hamas. One of them, Hamza Dahdouh, the son of Al Jazeera bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, was bombed to death in an IDF airstrike on January 7.
Dahdouh died alongside fellow journalist Mustafa Thuraya as the two were reporting on the damage caused by IDF militants on a residential area between the southern Gaza cities of Khan Yunis and Rafah.
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