Discrediting Palestinian Journalists

When Israel killed Middle East Eye journalists Mohamed Salama and Ahmed Abu Aziz at Nasser Hospital — along with Reuters photojournalist Hussam al-Masri and freelancers Moaz Abu Taha and Mariam Dagga, who had done work for the Associated Press — Western news agencies whose own reporters were killed in the attack repeated Israel’s claim that it had targeted a “Hamas camera,” thus casually associating the five slain journalists with Hamas.

This strike took place in late August 2025, more than a year and ten months into the genocide. By then, it was evident that Israel was methodologically targeting journalists, having already killed more than two hundred media workers, often along with their families.

The neologism “Hamas camera” was undoubtedly formulated by Israel, and yet scores of media outlets repeated it without pausing to ask what a “Hamas camera” — as opposed to a Nikon or Canon — might be. The mere repetition of the phrase helped to legitimize Israel’s deliberate attack on the journalists, carried out at a hospital complex where medical staff and patients were also killed. It is highly unlikely that major Western media outlets would have aped Israel’s legitimizing narratives had white European journalists been killed on the rooftop of Nasser Hospital.

As author Chris Hedges points out, such narratives “discredit the voices of the victims and exonerate the killers,” reinforcing the impunity that enables the continued targeting of Palestinian journalists.

The accusation that Palestinian journalists are ideologically motivated and cannot be objective comes from media outlets that circulated insidious reports about beheaded babies and infants cooked in ovens. It comes from outlets that repeated lies about the existence of a command center under al-Shifa Hospital, alongside the false accusation that Palestinian journalists directed Hamas rocket units from hospital rooftops.

Indeed, dehumanizing Palestinians helps to normalize not only genocide but also the incitement to commit genocide that Israeli journalists have spewed from day one.

Already on October 7, 2023, Shimon Riklin from Channel 14 wrote that “Gaza has to be wiped off the face of the earth” and later rhetorically asked, “Why exactly do we have an atomic bomb?”

A few days later, Naveh Dromi, who also worked for Channel 14 and is now an anchor on i24 News, rhetorically quipped on the television program The Patriots, “There are no innocents,” adding that Palestinians “brought the Nakba on themselves” in 1948 and “now they will have a second, real Nakba, to finish [former Israeli prime minister David] Ben-Gurion’s work.”

Roy Sharon, a correspondent for Channel 11, explicitly justified the prospect of “a million bodies,” noting on social media:

I spoke about a million bodies not as a goal. I said that if, in order to finally eliminate the military capabilities of Hamas, including [Yahya] Sinwar and [Mohammed] Deif, we need a million bodies, then let there be a million bodies.

Arnon Segal, who writes for the newspaper Makor Rishon, was not at all apologetic, publishing a map where he explained: “This is how we will return to Gaza: the full plan for destroying the enemy, liberating the Gaza Strip, and establishing Jewish cities there.”

In an interview for Walla, longtime journalist and presenter Yaron London repeated his earlier statements that “Gaza must be flattened, even at the cost of harming innocents,” adding:

If you cannot distinguish between the population and the authorities because the authorities deliberately hide in hospitals or monasteries, then you have no choice and must be much less ‘vegetarian.’ . . . In my view, we were very ‘vegetarian.’ . . . The punishment for Hamas’s provocations should have been much more severe. Unfortunately, that punishment must also fall on the population.

Some Israeli journalists directly incited against their counterparts in Gaza. Hagai Segal, the former editor in chief of Makor Rishon, wrote:

All journalists in Gaza are Hamas operatives or supporters, fabricators of blood libels. . . . Perhaps there are a few people in Gaza wearing PRESS vests who, in their hearts, somewhat disapprove of Hamas, but even they are not deserving of the journalists’ association’s protection.

And i24 Arab affairs analyst Zvi Yehezkeli said,“If Israel has decided to eliminate the journalists, better late than never.”

Such statements could amount to direct and public incitement to commit genocide, an act punishable under Article Three of the 1951 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In a similar vein, Article Twenty-Five of the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court provides that a person who “directly and publicly incites others to commit genocide” bears individual criminal responsibility.

Holding Israeli Media Accountable

There are precedents for holding Israeli journalists and other media outlets accountable for incitement. In the Nuremberg trials, German publicist Julius Streicher was found guilty in 1946 for inciting the extermination of Jews in his newspaper Der Stürmer. Similarly, in 2003, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted three media leaders for direct and public incitement to commit genocide. Speaking to the defendants, the chief justice explained that “without a firearm, machete or any physical weapon, you caused the death of thousands of innocent civilians,” while emphasizing that their broadcasts and publications could not be protected under the right to freedom of expression.

Despite Israel’s attempt to cast Palestinian journalists as inciters to violence, the great and tragic irony, as the Rwanda case highlights, is that a not-insignificant number of Israeli journalists are guilty of precisely this crime.

It is therefore time for every signatory to the Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention to ensure that all journalists and media managers who have used the rhetoric of incitement are held accountable — by arresting them when they travel abroad and prosecuting them in national courts, which have universal jurisdiction. What we have seen instead are numerous media outlets undermining the credibility of those who bear witness to Israel’s crimes — while at times facilitating the transformation of journalism into a vehicle that aids and abets genocide and crimes against humanity.