In the post-2016 period, reporters and the job of a free press seem to have vaulted in importance in the eyes of the US establishment. Tributes to the power of journalism were suddenly everywhere. Donald Trump’s verbal attacks on journalists press were regularly cast as posing a Hitler-like threat to press freedoms. It even had geopolitical reverberations: when the Saudi crown prince’s assassination of journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi triggered such outrage, it broke open probably the largest fissure in the decades-long US-Saudi relationship. Now, the Israeli government is killing not just journalists but their families, sometimes in deliberately targeted strikes, and all that sentiment seems to have melted away.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), as of this past weekend, the Israeli government’s nearly four-week-long indiscriminate bombing campaign on Gaza has killed thirty-six journalists and other media workers, thirty-one of whom were Palestinian. A further eight are injured, and three are missing.

The twenty-day period following October 7 was the deadliest period the CPJ has on record for reporters covering a conflict, having started keeping track in 1992. For Reporters Without Borders (RSF), it’s the deadliest conflict for reporters since the start of the twenty-first century, outdoing the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Ukraine, with Israeli forces killing more journalists in a matter of weeks than they had slain over the entire period from 2000 to last year.