The Betrayal of Journalism in Gaza

When terrorists are allowed to masquerade as journalists, they endanger the actual professionals and make a mockery of their critical work

“The first sound of trouble was the screams of two little old ladies who slashed themselves on the razor coils topping the walls of the United Nations compound, desperate to enter.”

With those jarring words, Marie Colvin, the Times of London’s longtime war correspondent, opened her dispatch from East Timor on September 12, 1999.

Less than two weeks earlier, East Timorese had voted overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia, triggering a campaign of mass violence by Indonesian-backed militias. More than 1,500 civilians — mostly women and children — crowded into a UN compound in the territory’s capital, Dili, seeking protection from the rampaging gunmen just outside.

While most foreign correspondents fled, Colvin and two colleagues entered the compound and refused to leave. For days, she reported the siege in harrowing detail, drawing global attention to the increasingly precarious situation on the ground. In the end, after mounting international pressure, the UN evacuated all 1,500 civilians to safety.

Colvin is widely credited with saving their lives.

“We will always remember her willingness to sacrifice her own life to protect those 1,500 Timorese,” said Timor-Leste’s prime minister, Kay Rala Xanana Gusmão, after Colvin was killed by Syrian forces while covering the siege of Homs in 2012. “Her reporting in both newsprint and global television helped to avert a tragic massacre. This act of courage and solidarity has never been forgotten.”

“I just couldn’t leave,” Colvin later told fellow journalist Denise Leith. “In a way it was a hard decision, because you had to think, I could die here. But equally I just didn’t feel I could live with myself if I left. It was morally wrong, the idea that we would walk out, say goodbye, and all those people knew they were going to be killed. It was not a decision I could have made the other way.”

I found myself thinking about Colvin’s act of heroism this past week, amidst the wave of outrage over the killing of four Al Jazeera employees in Gaza City on Sunday.

Throughout the current war, the deaths of individuals identified as journalists — including some employed by major international outlets — have been portrayed as evidence of Israeli efforts to crush freedom of the press and suppress the flow of information from Gaza. Journalists’ associations, news organizations, and human rights groups have lambasted Israel, demanding that Palestinian journalists be protected and that those responsible for their deaths be held accountable for what they call war crimes.

The truth, however, is somewhat more complicated.

Marie Colvin’s actions — like those of journalists who helped save lives in other warzones, from Bosnia to Iraq to Ukraine — are taught to journalism students as a shining example of adherence to journalistic ethics. Of the four sections of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, one is titled “Minimize Harm.” “Balance the public’s need for information against potential harm,” the text reads. “Show compassion for those who may be affected by news coverage.” Implicit is the obligation to consider the impact of journalists’ work on their subjects and to intervene when direct harm — in Colvin’s case, mass murder — may be imminent.

Throughout this war, though, numerous individuals identified as journalists in Gaza have not only failed to intervene when harm was imminent — they have actively participated in inciting, perpetrating, amplifying, and celebrating that harm.

On the morning of October 7, 2023, as thousands of Hamas terrorists poured into Israeli communities, carrying out unspeakable atrocities, many broadcast their actions to the world via GoPro cameras and mobile devices. Their efforts were supplemented by those of a number of Gaza-based Palestinian photographers — including several employed by mainstream media outlets — who somehow found their way into southern Israel in the first waves of the attack and documented much of the carnage.

Several weeks later, the media watchdog HonestReporting published a report asking how these individuals came to be present in the Gaza-Israel border area that morning and what they were doing inside Israeli territory. “Is it conceivable to assume that ‘journalists’ just happened to appear early in the morning at the border without prior coordination with the terrorists?” the group asked. “Or were they part of the plan?”

The individuals’ employers responded with deep indignation, rejecting the notion that they had prior knowledge of the attack and arguing that they were merely doing their jobs and were able to rush to the scene because of Gaza’s relatively small size.

In time, though, a more disturbing picture materialized.

Hassan Eslaiah — a photographer who worked for CNN, the Associated Press, and Reuters, amongst others — had uploaded a video apparently taken from the back of a motorcycle barreling from Gaza into Israel on October 7. At one point, a hand clutching a hand grenade appears in the frame; it is unclear if the hand is Eslaiah’s or someone else’s. His tweets from that day referred to the Hamas attack as “beautiful,” called the perpetrators “warriors,” and mocked Israelis — whom he called “settlers” — for hiding in a dumpster.

Researchers soon discovered a selfie by Eslaiah — uploaded to his own Twitter account in 2020 — in which Hamas military commander and October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar can be seen kissing him on the cheek. It later emerged that another watchdog, CAMERA, had informed AP of Eslaiah’s Hamas ties back in 2018, prompting several newsroom staffers to question his reliability; the agency nevertheless continued to employ him.

Two other photographers, Ashraf Amra and Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa — whose photographs have been published by AP, Reuters, and other outlets — held an Instagram Live broadcast after returning to Gaza, displaying gruesome footage of the atrocities in southern Israel as they grinned and laughed. “We were there two hours ago, since the beginning,” Abu Mostafa says in the video, contradicting a Reuters spokesperson’s claim that the agency’s photographers were only active “two hours after Hamas fired rockets across southern Israel and more than 45 minutes after Israel said gunmen had crossed the border.”

As Israelis were being massacred in their homes, the two encouraged Gazans to participate in the carnage. “Whoever can go — go,” Abu Mostafa told his viewers, appearing almost giddy. “It is a one-time event that will not happen again.” “Really, it will not repeat itself,” Amra chimed in. (He, too, was found to have received a kiss from a Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, who had previously presented him with an award.)

But while Eslaiah, Amra, and Abu Mostafa may have been among the first individuals identified as journalists to cross ethical lines in this war, they were far from the last.

Of particular note are individuals affiliated with Hamas’s many propaganda arms, as well as with the media branches of other terrorist groups. While the Committee to Protect Journalists says that more than 190 journalists have been killed in the current war, that list includes dozens of individuals (according to at least one count from last year, close to half of the overall number) who served as propaganda operatives for Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups, each of which has its own television channels, radio stations, newspapers, and information websites — all of which are fully integrated into the group’s terror activities. These individuals walk around in flak jackets marked ‘press’, but they are employees of the terrorist groups and are guided not by the public’s right to know but rather by their groups’ operational needs, providing mission support by participating in recruitment, incitement, signaling, deception, intelligence gathering, reconnaissance, and other activities.

The notion that members of terrorist groups’ propaganda units could somehow be regarded as journalists is both utterly preposterous and at odds with CPJ’s own standards with regard to the public affairs functionaries of other military forces.

A decade and a half ago, I performed my military service as an international media spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, a member of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit. Though I rarely carried a gun, I was a soldier in every respect, and had I been killed during my service, CPJ would have paid no heed.

I know this because a member of the unit was indeed killed in action several years earlier. Sergeant Lior-Shlomo Ziv, a military photographer, was twenty years old when he was killed while documenting IDF counterterror activity in Rafah in April 2003. While CPJ lists 42 journalists as having been killed that year, Ziv’s name is nowhere to be found. Three years later, in December 2006, 34-year-old U.S. Marine Corps Major Megan McClung was killed in Iraq, becoming the first female graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy to be killed in action. A public affairs officer, she was accompanying journalists from Newsweek in Ramadi when her Humvee was blown up by an IED. Though CPJ lists 57 journalists as having been killed in 2006, McClung is not among them.

While it might seem obvious that uniformed military personnel would not be considered journalists, CPJ seems all too willing to grant ununiformed terrorist operatives who perform equivalent military functions for their respective militant groups that very title, artificially inflating the number of journalists killed and undermining the contributions of actual media professionals who make the ultimate sacrifice in the line of duty.

Finally, there have been several individuals who operated as journalists for reputable news organizations while moonlighting as full-fledged combat operatives for terrorist groups. Unlike the previous group, these were no mere propagandists, but rather key members of rocket launching squads, snipers, and commanders of combat battalions.

Anas Al-Sharif, whose death last week triggered the current wave of international opprobrium, was such an individual. While both CNN and the BBC have confirmed that he previously served as a Hamas propaganda operative, he went on to join Al Jazeera, becoming a recognizable face to millions in the Arab world as he broadcast from Gaza throughout the current war.

In October 2024, the IDF released a ream of personnel files, salary records, and other documents captured in Gaza proving that six Al Jazeera employees were active Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror operatives. Al-Sharif was identified as the commander of a Hamas rocket launching squad and a member of the group’s Nukhba Force — the elite unit that spearheaded the October 7 attack — and was shown to be on Hamas’s payroll. Al Jazeera angrily rejected the charges, claiming that they were being used as a pretext to target its journalists, and continued employing Al-Sharif and the others.

After Al-Sharif and his colleagues were killed in an Israeli airstrike, CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg declared the killings to have been unlawful. “International law is very clear on this point that the only individuals who are legitimate targets during a war are active combatants,” she told the BBC. “Having worked as a media advisor for Hamas, or indeed for Hamas currently, does not make you an active combatant,” she added. Her comments were later echoed by Foreign Press Association President Ian Williams, who told CNN’s Bianna Golodryga that he “[doesn’t] care if Al-Sharif was in Hamas or not,” saying that “Hamas is a political organization” and “we don’t kill journalists for being Republicans or Democrats or, in Britain, Labour Party.”

But that comparison is plainly ridiculous and it is simply untrue that only “active combatants” can be targeted in wartime. Under international humanitarian law, an individual who performs a continuous combat function (CCF) is viewed as having lost his or her civilian status and is indeed considered a legitimate military target. In point of fact, that standard has been applied in numerous conflicts — from the Kosovo War to the Iraq War to the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine — to justify the targeting of propaganda officials and functionaries whose activities contributed directly to war efforts. Even a “media advisor” for Hamas — or a propaganda operative for one of its media outlets, like the individuals discussed above — could indeed be targeted if he or she had a CCF, meaning he or she was fully integrated into the terrorist group and was continuously engaged in hostilities.

Yet according to the evidence produced by Israel, Al-Sharif was no mere “media advisor” — he was an actual combatant on behalf of a recognized terrorist group, having commanded a rocket squad and served as a member of Hamas’s commando force. There is no question, then, that he was a legitimate military target.

Which begs the question: Why are media organizations and journalists’ associations defending terrorists?

While it is only natural for there to be a certain circling of wagons at wartime, and while we would expect these groups to stand up for the rights of actual journalists facing various threats in the line of duty, that cannot explain why, time after time, both media outlets and journalists’ groups have turned a blind eye to the gross misdeeds of the individuals they have chosen to protect.

Journalists certainly deserve protection and Israel’s approach to the international media throughout this war — including its ill-considered and continuously detrimental decision not to permit foreign journalists to enter Gaza freely — has been imperfect at best. But by accepting the outlandish notion that terrorists who exploit journalistic cover to engage in hostilities deserve the same protections as actual journalists, these groups betray both their profession and the very individuals they are meant to represent, endangering them and making a mockery of their work. Rather than dismissing or ridiculing honest critiques by media watchdogs, these groups would do well to take evidence of wrongdoing seriously and consider whether the individuals in question are indeed deserving of protection — or of the title “journalist” at all.

Not every journalist can be expected to uphold the ethical standard set by Marie Colvin and others, who sacrificed their lives to protect their subjects, but surely those who go to the other extreme — who exploit their self-identification as journalists to cause, rather than prevent, harm — are worthy of our condemnation and our scorn, not our defense.