Iran says the Strait of Hormuz is “open to all except its adversaries”, and any passage through the trajectory of this significant chokepoint should be coordinated with the Iranian military, reports AL Jazeera.

Sources say the number of ships transiting through the strait has slightly increased, but is still very low compared with pre-war times, reports Tohid Asadi from Bandar Abbas, a city on the strait.

Asadi has filed several exclusive reports from the strait area in the past few days.

• READ MORE: Drone hits UAE power plant; Israeli attacks on Lebanon continue
• Improvements in Pacific media freedom, but a shameful silence on Gaza ‘death trap’
• Other Gaza and war on Iran reports

He reports that Iran also said it was critically important for the US to lift the blockade on Iranian ships as a condition that could be taken into consideration when it comes to taking the strait into a normal situation.

Iran says it will soon reveal its plan to manage traffic ⁠through the strait, including the charging of tolls, while Trump has warned Tehran will have a “very bad time” if a peace deal is not reached soon.

On Saturday, Iran’s first vice president, Mohammad Reza Aref, said his country would no longer allow “enemy” military equipment to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

Tohid Asadi reporting from the Strait of Hormuz.              Video: Al Jazeera

insurance-based framework
The Lebanese-based satellite news service Al-Mayadeen reports that Iran is advancing an insurance-based framework to manage the strait, of H aiming to expand maritime oversight and generate post-war revenue while remaining within international law.

Iran’s Ministry of Economy is reportedly advancing a proposal to manage the Strait of Hormuz through an insurance-based framework aimed at enabling post-war oversight of the strategic waterway in accordance with international law, while also creating a new source of revenue for the country.

According to a document obtained by Fars News Agency, the initiative seeks to establish a mechanism through which “management of the Strait of Hormuz becomes possible via insurance,” in a way that would remain acceptable to foreign states under non-war conditions while still allowing Iran to exercise effective control over maritime activity in the strait.

Under the proposed framework, Iran would gain broader oversight capabilities, including expanded access to maritime data and the ability to distinguish between vessels from different countries transiting the waterway.

Since the onset of the US-Israeli war, Iranian officials have maintained that “security of the Strait of Hormuz lies with the armed forces of the Islamic Republic”.

Against that backdrop, the proposal argues that management of the strait should remain under Iranian authority due to the damage Tehran has sustained from the passage of hostile vessels through the corridor.

An Iranian government spokesperson, Fatemeh Mohajerani, has declared that the attacked “bridges and the Pasteur Institute are symbols of Iran’s scientific strength” in response to the latest US onslaught.

She added that they were “the product of a civilisation that spans thousands of years” and that “its depth is hard to grasp for those who speak the language of the ‘Stone Age.’”

“For a land that has lit the lamps of knowledge for centuries, these threats carry only one meaning: you can strike the infrastructure, but you will not touch the roots of a nation . . .

• READ MORE: Steel plants, bridge hit as US-Israel attacks expand — Iran vows retaliation
• Iran’s president urges global health bodies to act after US-Israeli strike on Pasteur Institute in Tehran
• Iranian president calls on American public to challenge US war motives
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

“Iran will rebuild and continue moving forward,” Mohajerani said.

This comes as the United States and Israel have escalated their attacks on civilian infrastructure in Iran, destroying a historical medical research facility, as well as a vital bridge connecting the capital to other regions in the country.

The illegal and unprovoked US-Israeli war of aggression on Iran has targeted and destroyed the Pasteur Institute of Iran, one of the country’s leading public health and research institutions, in a direct attack on civilian and scientific infrastructure in the country.

JUST IN:

US and Israel have targeted Iran’s B1 Bridge in Karaj again, the tallest bridge in the Middle East.

The renewed strike occurred while rescue and relief teams were assisting victims from the initial attack… See more pic.twitter.com/EojvvsPp9V

— Ayatollah Alireza Arafi (@Realarafi) April 2, 2026

In numbers — human cost of the war on Iran:

• Iran: 1937 killed; 24,800 wounded
• Lebanon: 1345 killed, including 125 children; more than 4040 wounded
• Israel: 28 killed (all but one were civilians), including 10 Israeli soldiers killed in Lebanon, 3223 injuries hospitalised
• US: 13 killed in combat and two of non-combat causes, more than 200 injured
• Occupied West Bank: Four people killed
• UAE: 12 killed, 169 injured
• Bahrain: 3 killed
• Saudi Arabia: 2 killed, 20 injured
• Kuwait: 6 killed
• Oman: 3 killed
• Qatar: 16 injured
• Jordan: 20 injured
• Syria: 4 killed
• Iraq: More than 107 killed

Several small Pacific countries regularly vote in support of Israel at the United Nations in spite of overwhelming opposition for the Zionist state in the Middle East over its genocide in Gaza.

Why?

In this AJ+ video short, senior presenter/producer Dena Takruri sets out to explain the Pacific backing for Tel Aviv, including from Fiji which is understood to be supplying peacekeepers for US President Donald Trump’s International Stabilisation Force (ISF) for Gaza due to be announced this week.

• WATCH: The AJ+ shorts video How Israel won the Pacific
• READ MORE: 600 Australians, 50 Kiwis fighting for Israeli military during Gaza genocide
• Indonesian protesters slam Prabowo over ‘peacekeeping’ troops for Gaza

Israel has been building religious and diplomatic connections with the Pacific Islands, as six nations voted with it on the Gaza ceasefire issue.

“Israel is left standing alone with the backing of the US . . . and the South Pacific,” says Takruri.

“As Israeli’s biggest financial and military backer, the US makes sense.

“But why is a region in the Global South, on nearly the complete opposite side of the globe, co-signing genocide and apartheid?

Evangelical identity
“To understand the Pacific Islands countries, you have to understand the region’s identity. And that’s mostly Christian, like 90 percent Christian.

“And that’s because European missionaries in the 19th century focused on proselytising tribal leaders. Once their chiefs were swayed, their tribes would go with them.”

Christians in the Pacific took a very literal reading of the Bible, a feature of evangelicism.

For example, in Fiji, which has just opened an embassy in Jerusalem, one in four people identify as evangelicals – Christian Zionists.

To take advantage of this, Israel has deployed a special identity-based diplomatic “mythmaking” task force presenting Jews in Israel as being “indigenous” people returning to their “homeland”.

This notion clashes with the reality that Zionists settled in Palestine and expelled 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba –  “the catastrophe” – at the founding of the state of Israel.

“It’s the latest example of the Global North using the Global South for its own gain,” concludes Takruri.

As New Zealand pro-Palestinian protesters prepared for demonstrations across the country today to mark the UN International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, they awoke to news of Israel attacking three countries in the Middle East — Palestine, Lebanon and Syria.

This is the 112th consecutive week that the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) has held protests over the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and Fijians for Palestine Solidarity Network has also held frequent rallies in defiance of Fiji police restrictions.

At least 13 Syrians have been killed and others wounded during an Israeli ground incursion and air strikes on the town of Beit Jinn, southwest of Syria’s capital Damascus.

• READ MORE: Israel strikes Palestine, Lebanon, Syria threatening stability
• Other Gaza reports

Palestine’s Foreign Ministry is demanding action from the international community to halt Israel’s “war crime” as it continues its large-scale military assault on the occupied West Bank.

Ibrahim Olabi, Syria’s representative to the UN, has condemned Israel’s latest attack on the southern town of Beit Jinn, saying it further exposes Israel’s disregard for international law and reflects its fear of a strengthening Syria.

The incident is “yet another indication to the world of which country in the region is the one abiding by international law and which isn’t,” Olabi told Al Jazeera.

It highlights “who really wants a peace deal, a security agreement — who wants to be able to get the region into stability — and who doesn’t,” he said.

Israel is acting out of anxiety over Syria’s trajectory and its growing “regional and international prominence” he said.

‘Israel is terrified’
“Israel is terrified by a strong and prosperous and stable Syria. We are heading in that direction no matter what.”

Olabi described Israel’s latest assault as a signal aimed not only at Syria, but also at its allies.

The attack indicated Israel was “running out of options”.

Since the declaration of a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip on October 10, Israel has violated the agreement many times with near-daily attacks, killing hundreds of people.

The Government Media Office in Gaza said Israel shot at civilians 142 times, raided residential areas beyond the “yellow line” 21 times, bombed and shelled Gaza 228 times, and demolished people’s property on 100 occasions.

Israeli forces have also detained 35 Palestinians in Gaza over the past month, and continue to block vital humanitarian aid and destroy homes and infrastructure across the Strip.

Last night, New Zealand photojournalist Cole Martin spoke of daily life in the occupied Palestine Territories as he experienced Israeli brutality during six months based in Bethlehem in an inspiring public kōrero at Saint Matthew-in-the-City Cathedral, Auckland, and offered a “what now?” prescription of hope for the future.

He is also speaking at today’s UN solidarity rally in Te Komititanga Square at 2pm and will give another kōrero at 7pm tonight at Cityside Baptist Church, 8 Mt Eden Road.

List of AoNZ’s peaceful, family-friendly events for Palestine for week 1⃣1⃣2⃣
(North to South): https://t.co/BcbWFD7cnD
(by time & date): https://t.co/mJDjQxkbHr pic.twitter.com/fvXcLNF8tG

— Bruce King (@CrowdvBank) November 27, 2025

AMY GOODMAN: Israel’s government has approved the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal, that includes a pause in Israeli attacks and the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons — 20 living hostages were freed today coinciding with President Trump’s visit to Israel and Egypt.

According to the deal, 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences and another 1700 people from Gaza detained in the last two years — and described as “forcibly disappeared” by the UN — would be released.

Hamas has demanded the release of prominent Palestinian political prisoner Marwan Barghouti, but his name was reportedly secretly removed from the prisoner exchange list by Israel.

• READ MORE: Hamas releases captives held in Gaza; Trump to address Israeli parliament
• Jubilation as Hamas releases first batch of Israeli captives under ceasefire deal

Meanwhile, the US is sending about 200 troops to Israel to monitor the ceasefire deal.

The Israeli military on Friday confirmed the ceasefire had come into effect as soldiers retreated from parts of Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians, including families that had been forced to the south, began their trek back to northern Gaza after news that Israeli forces were withdrawing.

Returning Gaza City residents made their way through mounds of rubble and destroyed neighborhoods, searching for any sign of their homes and belongings. Among them, Fidaa Haraz.

FIDAA HARAZ: [translated] I came since the morning, when they said there was a withdrawal, to find my home. I’m walking in the street, but I do not know where to go, due to the extent of the destruction.

I swear I don’t know where the crossroads is or where my home is. I know that my home was leveled, but where is it? Where is it? I cannot find it.

What is this? What do we do with our lives? Where should we live? Where should we stay? A house of multiple floors, but nothing was left?

AMY GOODMAN: Al Jazeera reports Israel’s army said it would allow 600 humanitarian aid trucks carrying food, medical supplies, fuel and other necessities daily into Gaza, through coordination with the United Nations and other international groups.

On Thursday, the exiled Hamas Gaza chief Khalil al-Hayya declared an end to the war.

KHALIL AL-HAYYA: [translated] Today, we announced that we have reached an agreement to end the war and aggression against our people and to begin implementing a permanent ceasefire, the withdrawal of the occupation forces, the entry of aid, the opening of the Rafah crossing in both directions and the exchange of prisoners.

AMY GOODMAN: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke today in Israel.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] Today, we mark one of the greatest achievements in the war of revival: the return of all of our hostages, the living and the dead as one. …

This way, we grapple Hamas. We grapple it all around, ahead of the next stages of the plan, in which Hamas is disarmed and Gaza is demilitarised.

If this can be achieved the easy way, very well. If not, it will be achieved the hard way.

AMY GOODMAN: In the United States, President Trump hailed his administration’s ceasefire plan during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday as concerns mount regarding potential US and foreign intervention in the rebuilding of Gaza.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Gaza is going to be slowly redone. You have tremendous wealth in that part of the world by certain countries, and just a small part of that, what they — what they make, will do wonders for — for Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by two guests. Diana Buttu, Palestinian human rights attorney and a former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). She has just recently written a piece for The Guardian. It is headlined “A ‘magic pill’ made Israeli violence invisible. We need to stop swallowing it.” And Amjad Iraqi is a senior Israel-Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group, joining us from London.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Diana Buttu, let’s begin with you. First, your response to the ceasefire-hostage deal that’s just been approved by the Israeli government and Hamas?

DIANA BUTTU: Well, first, Amy, it’s really quite repulsive that Palestinians have had to negotiate an end to their genocide. It should have been that the world put sanctions on Israel to stop the genocide, rather than forcing Palestinians to negotiate an end to it. At the same time, we’re also negotiating an end to the famine, a famine that Israel, again, created.

Who are we negotiating with? The very people who created that famine. And so, it’s really repugnant that this is the position that Palestinians have been forced to be in.

And so, while people here are elated, happy that the bombs have stopped, we’re also at the same time worried, because we’ve seen that the international community, time and again, has abandoned us.

Everybody is happy that the Israelis are going home, but nobody’s talking about the more than 11,000 Palestinians who are currently languishing in Israeli prisons, being starved, being tortured, being raped. Many of them are hostages picked up after October 2023, being held without charge, without trial, and nobody at all is talking about them.

So, while people are happy that the bombs have stopped, we know that Israel’s control has not at all stopped. And Israel has made it clear that it’s going to continue to control every morsel of food that comes into Gaza. It’s going to control every single construction item that comes into Gaza.

And it’s going to continue to maintain a military occupation over Gaza.

This is not a peace agreement. This is not an end to the occupation. And I think it’s so important for us that we keep our eyes on Gaza and start demanding that Israel be held to account, not only for the genocide, but for all of these decades of occupation that led to this in the first place.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the exchange of hostages, Israeli hostages, dead and alive, and Palestinian prisoners? According to the Hamas Gaza chief, I believe they’re saying all women and children, Palestinian women and children, picked up over these last two years — or is it beyond? — are going to be released. And then, of course, there are the well over 1000 prisoners who are going to be released.

DIANA BUTTU: No, not quite. So, there are 250 who are political prisoners who are going to be released, and that list just came out about a little over an hour ago.

But there are also 1700 Palestinians, solely from Gaza, who are going to be released. And these were people — these are doctors, these are nurses, these are journalists and so on, who were — who Israel picked up after 7 October, 2023, and has been holding as hostages.

These are the people that are going to be released. There are still thousands more, Amy, that are from the West Bank, that we do not know what is going to happen to them.

And so, while the focus is just on the people in Gaza — and again, there is no path for freeing all of those thousands of Palestinians who are languishing in Israeli prisons, being starved, being tortured, being raped.

What’s going to happen to them? Who’s going to be focusing on them? I don’t think that it’s going to be this US administration.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to talk about the West Bank in a minute. More than a thousand Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank just over the last two years. But I first want to get Amjad Iraqi’s response to this deal that has now been signed off on.

I mean, watching the images of tens of thousands, this sea of humanity, of Palestinians going south to north, to see what they can find of their homes in places like Gaza City, not to mention who’s trapped in the rubble. We say something — well over 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, but we don’t know the real number. It could be hundreds of thousands?

AMJAD IRAQI: Indeed, Amy. And to kind of continue off of Diana’s points, this is a deal that really should have been made long, long time ago. We’ve known that the parameters of this truce have been on the table for well over a year, if not since the very beginning of the war, what they used to define as an all-for-all deal, the idea that Hamas would release all hostages in exchange for a permanent ceasefire.

And the reasons for the constant foiling of it are quite evident. And it’s important to recognise this not for the sake of just lamenting the lives, the many lives, that have been lost and the massive destruction that could have been averted, but it needs to really inform the next steps going forward.

The biggest takeaway of what’s happening right now is that in order for a ceasefire to be sustained, in order for Gaza to be saved from further military assault, you need massive political pressure.

And we’ve seen this really build up in the past weeks and months. You saw this, for example, from European governments, which, even through the symbolic recognition of Palestinian statehood, was very much venting their frustration with the Israeli conduct in the war, the fact that the EU was actually starting to contemplate more punitive measures against Israel, such as partial trade suspensions, potential sanctions against Israel.

We saw this building up over the past few weeks. Arab states have started to use much of their leverage, especially after Israel’s strike on Doha or on Hamas’s offices in Doha. We started seeing Gulf and other Arab and Muslim states come forward to President Trump at the UN saying that Israel aggression cannot continue like this.

And most crucially is, of course, President Trump himself and Washington finally saying that it needs to put its foot down to stop this war, which we’ve heard repeatedly from Trump himself.

But this is really the first time since the January ceasefire agreement where Trump has really insisted that this come to an end.

Now, this — now there’s much to be sort of debated about the Trump plan itself, but this aspect of the truce cannot continue, and certainly cannot save Palestinian lives, unless that pressure is maintained.

The concern now is that that pressure will recede or alleviate, because there’s now a deal that’s signed. But, actually, in order to enforce it, that pressure really needs to be maintained.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think was the turning point, Amjad? The bombing of Qatar?

Now, I mean, The New York Times had an exposé that Trump knew before, not just in the midst of the bombing, that Israel was bombing their ally to try to kill the Hamas leadership. But do you think that was the turning point?

AMJAD IRAQI: It certainly might have expedited, I think, a lot of factors that were already building up. As I said, pressure had been mounting against Israel for quite a while.

There was really outrage, not just at the continuance of the military assaults, but the policy of starvation, which was very evident on the ground, and Israel’s complete refusal to let in aid, its failed project with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

So, this had all been building, but I do think the strike on Doha really pushed Arab states to say that enough is enough. To see them really meet all together with President Trump and create a bit more of a united position to insist that this really couldn’t go on, I think, has really signalled that Israel really crossed a certain line geopolitically.

Now, of course, that line should have been recognised as being crossed well before because of the facts on the ground in Gaza, but I do think that this has helped to kind of push things over the edge a bit more assertively.

There are also speculations about Trump, of course, trying to have his name in for the Nobel Peace Prize, and potentially other factors. But I do think that the timing of this, again, regardless of what ended up pushing it over the line, it is unfortunate that it has really taken this long.

And it’s really up to global powers and foreign governments to recognise that in order to make sure that this stays, that they really need to keep that pressure up.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Amjad Iraqi, the core demand of the ceasefire is that Hamas disarm and end its rule. What security guarantees is Hamas seeking for its own members to lay down their arms and not face a wave of arrests or assassinations?

How is this going to work? And talk about who you see running Gaza.

AMJAD IRAQI: So, these things are still a bit unclear. So, throughout the ceasefire talks, Hamas has kept insisting about the idea of US guarantees that Israel will not end the war.

But there’s never really any clear, concrete way to prove this. And as we’ve seen before, like in the January ceasefire deal and in much of the ceasefire talks, even if President Trump expresses his desire to see an end to the war, oftentimes he would still hand the steering wheel to Prime Minister Netanyahu.

And if Netanyahu decided that he wanted to thwart the ceasefire talks, if he wanted to relaunch military assaults, and the Israeli military and the government would back it, then Trump and Washington would fall into line and amplify those calls, and even President Trump himself would sort of cheer on the military assaults.

And so, this factor has certainly weighed a lot on Hamas, but I do think there’s a culmination of pressure, the fact that Arab states have insisted on Hamas to try to show, at least signal, certain flexibility, even though many of its demands have been quite consistent throughout the war.

But the fact that I think Hamas is now feeling that there’s also a bit more pressure on Israel to actually ensure that they at least try to take the gamble that they will not return to war.

And in regards to decommissioning and disarmament, publicly Hamas has placed a red line around this right to bear arms. But historically, and even recently, they do say that they are willing to have conversations about decommissioning, as long as it’s tied to a political framework, especially one that’s tied to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Now, one can really debate how much this process is actually quite feasible, and obviously the Israeli government and much of the Israeli public is quite adamant in its opposition against Palestinian statehood, but Hamas may at least offer some space for those conversations to be had.

There are discussions about it potentially giving up what it might describe as its larger or more offensive weaponry, like rockets or anti-tank missiles. And there’s bigger questions around firearms.

But I think it’s important to put this question not as a black-and-white issue, as something that has to come first in the political process, as Israel is demanding, but one that requires trust building and confidence building in the rubric of a process of Palestinian self-determination.

This is important not just in the case of Palestine, but across many conflicts around the world where the question of decommissioning, about establishing one rule, one gun, one government for a society, requires that kind of process. So, it shouldn’t just be a policy of destroying and military assaults and so on. You do need to engage in these questions in good faith.

AMY GOODMAN: There are so many questions, Diana Buttu, in this first stage of the ceasefire-hostage deal, is really the only one that Netanyahu addressed in his speech.

You’re usually in Ramallah. You spend a lot of time in the West Bank. Where does this leave the Palestinian Authority? I don’t think the West Bank is talked about in this deal.

And what about the fact that we’re looking at pictures of Netanyahu surrounded by Steve Witkoff on one side and Jared Kushner, who has talked about — as we know — famously referred to Gaza as “very valuable” waterfront property?

DIANA BUTTU: Well, I think that this plan was really an Israeli plan, and it was repackaged and branded as a Trump plan. And you can see just in the text of it and the way that all of the guarantees were given to the Israelis, and none given to the Palestinians, it’s really an Israeli plan.

But beyond that, it’s important to keep in mind that when Trump was going around and talking about this plan, that he consulted with everybody but Palestinians. He didn’t talk to Mahmoud Abbas. He didn’t even let Mahmoud Abbas go to the UN to deliver his speech before the UN.

I’m pretty certain he didn’t speak to the UN representative, Palestine’s representative to the UN. And so, this is — once again, we’ve got a plan in which people are talking about Palestinians, but never talking to Palestinians. So, again, this is very much an Israeli plan repackaged as a Trump plan and branded as a Trump plan.

In terms of them looking at Gaza as being prime real estate, this is not at all different from the way that they’ve done it in the past, and this is not at all the way that Israel has looked at Palestine.

And this is because this is the way that colonisers look at land that isn’t theirs. They ignore the history of the place.

Gaza has an old history. It has some of the oldest churches, I think the second-oldest church in the world. It has some of the oldest mosques. It has an old civilization.

We want Gaza to be Gaza. We don’t want it to be Dubai or any other place. We want it to be Gaza. And so, the idea of somehow turning it into prime real estate, this is the mentality of somebody who’s coming from outside.

This is the way that colonisers think. This isn’t the way that the Indigenous think. And so, you can see in this plan that it’s not only the idea of the outside coming in, but they certainly didn’t consult Palestinians at all.

As for what’s going to happen to the Palestinian Authority, it’s clear that they don’t want the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip, and it’s clear that they do want to have a foreign authority in the Gaza Strip.

But once again, Amy, when is it that Palestinians get to decide our own future? Are we really going back to the era of colonialism, when other people get to decide our future? And that’s what this plan is really all about.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to be continuing to cover this story. President Trump is going to be there for the signing of the ceasefire in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt on Monday, and the hostages and prisoners are expected to be released on Monday or Tuesday.

Diana Buttu, I want to thank you for being with us, Palestinian human rights attorney, former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and Amjad Iraqi, Israel-Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

An Al Jazeera journalist who has documented Israel’s trail of atrocities for almost the past two years has condemned Western news agencies covering the war on Gaza as treating Palestinian reporters like “robots”.

“You see how Palestinian journalists are treated. There’s no protection when they are alive,” Hind Khoudary told Al Jazeera from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.

“And after they are killed, no one even mentions them.”

• READ MORE: Other Israeli attacks on journalists reports

She said today was a “very, very angry morning” after five journalists were killed yesterday among at least 21 people, including medical workers, at al-Nasser Medical Centre in Khan Younis in a “double tap” strike by the Israeli military.

The slain news professionals have been named as Hossam al-Masri, a freelance photographer for the Reuters news agency; Mariam Abu Daqqa, freelance journalist for The Independent and the Associated Press (AP); Moaz Abu Taha, correspondent for the American broadcasting network NBC; Mohamad Salama, press photographer for Al Jazeera; and Ahmed Abu Aziz, freelance journalist working for Middle East Eye and the Tunisian radio station Diwan FM, who died later from his injuries.

“Palestinian journalists do not know how to mourn their five colleagues and there’s a wave of anger at the international news agencies.

“Many news outlets [that the killed journalists worked for] did not even mention their contributors. The Reuters news agency did not mention in their headline their cameraman who had been working for them for months.

“In their article, they simply described him as a Reuters ‘contractor’.

‘Not mentioned’
As for Moaz Abu Taha [another journalist killed in the Nasser medical centre attack], not a single news organisation that he was working for said he was working for them,” she said.

“Palestinian journalists have been risking their lives for 23 months now, and after they are killed, they are not even mentioned in headlines.

“In the end, they are mentioned as ‘contractors’, as ‘freelancers’ – while, when they were alive, they were working 24/7 to produce, fix and document for these news outlets.

“This is how most Palestinian journalists feel — that we’re just being used as robots to report on what’s going on because there are no foreign journalists.

“We get killed and then everyone forgets about us.”

Gaza’s silenced voices.     Video: Al Jazeera

RSF ‘fiercely condemns’ killings
The Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) “fiercely condemned” the latest killings, saying they came after the murder of Khaled al-Madhoun on Saturday, August 23.

This was a toll of six journalists killed in two days. It follows the killing of six other journalists two weeks ago on August 10.

According to RSF information, all were deliberately targeted. RSF again called for an emergency UN Security Council meeting to “end this massacre of journalists”.

Thibaut Bruttin, director-general of RSF, said: How far will the Israeli armed forces go in their gradual effort to eliminate information coming from Gaza? How long will they continue to defy international humanitarian law?

“The protection of journalists is guaranteed by international law, yet more than 200 of them have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza over the past two years.

“Ten years after the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2222, which protects journalists in times of conflict, the Israeli army is flouting its application.

“RSF calls for an emergency UN Security Council meeting to ensure this resolution is finally respected, and that concrete measures are taken to end impunity for crimes against journalists, protect Palestinian journalists, and open access to the Gaza Strip to all reporters.”

‘Suicide drone’
According to Al Jazeera, the first strike on the live broadcast post that killed Hossam al-Masri was carried out using a loitering munition — also known as a “suicide drone” — typically equipped with a camera and an explosive charge.

A Reuters article also confirmed the death of its contractor, Hussam al-Masri.

The second strike 8 minutes later targeted the hospital yet again after rescue teams and journalists had arrived.

The Al-Nasser complex is a well-known gathering place for displaced journalists in Gaza who, since October 2023, have been living in tents around the hospital to access information on injured and deceased patients, as well as available facilities.

Targeted Murder. This is what israeli nazis do.. pic.twitter.com/RL8mc1YCMW

— Ali (@MerruX) August 25, 2025

A media studies analyst has condemned the latest deadly attack by Israel on journalists in Gaza and challenged Western media over the carnage, asking “where is the outrage” and international solidarity?

Five journalists were reported to have been assassinated among 21 people killed in the air strike on the al-Nasser Medical Centre in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis.

The others killed were first responders and medical staff, said the Gaza Health Ministry.

• READ MORE: Al Jazeera’s Salama among four Gaza journalists killed in Israeli attack
• Rallies across NZ honour Gaza Strip journalists, condemn own news media
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

Dr Mohamad Elmasry, media studies professor at Qatar’s Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, told Al Jazeera in an interview he was “at a loss for words” over the latest attack.

Earlier this month, four Al Jazeera journalists and two other media people were among seven killed on August 10 in what the Israeli military admitted was a targeted attack.

“Israel has been at war with journalism and journalists from the very beginning of the war,” Elmasry told Al Jazeera. “They’re not hiding it. They’re very open about this.

“But the question that I have is, where are the international journalists?

‘Where is Western media?’
“Where is The New York Times? Where is CNN? Where are the major mainstream Western news outlets?

“Because when Charlie Hebdo [a French satirical magazine based in Paris] journalists were killed in 2015, that caused global outrage for months.

“It was a major story in every single Western news outlet. And I applauded journalists for coming to the aid of their colleagues. But now, where is the outrage?”

The Gaza Media Office said the death toll of Palestinian journalists in Gaza had risen to 246 and identified latest casualties as:

Hossam al-Masri – photojournalist with Reuters news agency
Mohammed Salama – photojournalist with Al Jazeera
Mariam Abu Daqqa – journalist with several media outlets including The Independent Arabic and US news agency Associated Press
Moaz Abu Taha – journalist with NBC network
Ahmed Abu Aziz – freelance journalist working for Middle East Eye

In a statement when announcing that the death toll from the al-Nasser hospital attack had risen to 20, the Gaza Health Ministry said:

“The [Israeli] occupation forces’ targeting of the hospital today and the killing of medical personnel, journalists, and civil defence personnel is a continuation of the systematic destruction of the health system and the continuation of genocide.

“It is a message of defiance to the entire world and to all values of humanity and justice.”

‘Killed in line of duty’
The UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, posted on X after the Israeli strikes killed the journalists and members of Gaza’s civil defence:

“Rescuers killed in line of duty. Scenes like this unfold every moment in Gaza, often unseen, largely undocumented,” she wrote.

“I beg states: how much more must be witnessed before you act to stop this carnage?

“Break the blockade. Impose an arms embargo. Impose sanctions.”

Her remarks came after she shared a video appearing to show a second Israeli air strike during a live broadcast on Al-Ghad TV — just minutes after the first attack on al-Nasser hospital.

Albanese later gave an interview, renewing her call for sanctions on Israel.

BREAKINGRescuers killed in line of duty.
Scenes like this unfold every moment in Gaza, often unseen, largely undocumented. I beg STATES: how much more must be witnessed before you act to stop this carnage?
Break the blockade
Impose an Arms Embargo
Impose Sanctions. https://t.co/FgMvIyYem0

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) August 25, 2025

One of Al Jazeera’s reporters described working with hospitals as a base.

Deprived of electricity, internet
Hind Khoudary, reporting from Deir el-Balah in Gaza, said: “I’m one of the Palestinian journalists reporting from hospitals.

“We are in a two-year war where we have been deprived of electricity and internet, so Palestinian journalists are using these services at hospitals to continue reporting.

“We are also following news of wounded Palestinians, funerals, and malnutrition cases, as these are always transferred to hospitals.

“That is why Palestinian journalists are making hospitals their base and end up being attacked.”

The Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned the Israeli military’s “disgraceful tactic” to cover up war crimes in the wake of the killing of six journalists in Gaza on Sunday.

It has called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to stop the massacre of journalists, RSF said in a statement.

“RSF strongly condemns the killing of six media professionals by the Israeli army, once again carried out under the guise of terrorism charges against a journalist,” said RSF’s  director-general Thibaut Bruttin.

“One of the most famous journalists in the Gaza Strip, Anas al-Sharif, was among those killed.

“The Israeli army has killed more than 200 journalists since the start of the war. This massacre and Israel’s media blackout strategy, designed to conceal the crimes committed by its army for more than 21 months in the besieged and starving Palestinian enclave, must be stopped immediately.

“The international community can no longer turn a blind eye and must react and put an end to this impunity.

“RSF calls on the UN Security Council to meet urgently on the basis of Resolution 2222 of 2015 on the protection of journalists in times of armed conflict in order to stop this carnage.”

Targeted strike on tent
The Israeli army killed Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif in a targeted strike on a tent housing a group of journalists near al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza.

The strike, claimed by Israeli authorities, also killed five other media professionals, including four working or having worked for Al Jazeera — correspondent Mohammed Qraiqea, video reporter Ibrahim al-Thaher, Mohamed Nofal, assistant cameraman and driver that day, and Moamen Aliwa, a freelance journalist who worked with Al Jazeera — as well as another freelance journalist, Mohammed al-Khaldi, creator of a YouTube news channel.

The attack also wounded freelance reporters Mohammed Sobh, Mohammed Qita, and Ahmed al-Harazine.

This attack, claimed by the Israeli army, replicates a tactic previously used against Al Jazeera journalists. On 31 July 2024, the Israeli army killed reporters Ismail al-Ghoul and Rami al-Rifi in a targeted strike, following a smear campaign against the former, who, like Anas al-Sharif, was accused of “terrorist affiliation”.

Hamza al-Dahdouh, Mustafa Thuraya and Hossam Shabat, who also worked for the Qatari media outlet, are among the victims of this method denounced by RSF.

As early as October 2024, RSF warned of an imminent attack on Anas al-Sharif following accusations by the Israeli army.

The international community, led by the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, ignored these warnings.

Under Resolution 2222 of 2015 on the protection of journalists in armed conflict, the UN Security Council has a duty to convene urgently in response to this latest extrajudicial killing by the Israeli army.

Since October 2023, RSF has filed four complaints with the International Criminal Court (ICC) requesting investigations into what it describes as war crimes committed by the Israeli army against journalists in Gaza.

The New Zealand-based Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

I never knew Anas al-Sharif personally. But somehow he seemed to be part of our whānau.

We watched so many of his reports from Gaza that it just appeared he would be always around keeping us up-to-date on the horrifying events in the besieged enclave.

Although he actually worked for Al Jazeera Arabic, the 28-year-old was probably the best known Palestinian journalist in the Strip and many of his stories were translated into English.

• READ MORE: Tributes, condemnation pour in for slain Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza
• ‘A very dark morning’: Pain and grief as funerals held for Al Jazeera staff killed by Israel in Gaza
• Another Gaza injustice. Israel targets Anas in Al Jazeera media crew of 5
• Silencing the messenger: Israel kills journalists, while the West merely censors them
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

It is yet another despicable act by the Israeli military to assassinate him and four of his colleagues on the eve of launching their new mass crime to seize and demolish Gaza City with a population of about one million as part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pledge to occupy the whole of Gaza.

In many ways the bravery of al-Sharif — he had warned several times that he was being targeted — was the embodiment of the Palestinian courage under fire when UNESCO awarded the 2024 World Press Freedom Award collectively to the Gazan journalists.

But it wasn’t enough just to “murder” him and his colleagues — as the Al Jazeera channel proclaimed in red banner television headlines — Israel attempted unsuccessfully to try to smear him in death as a “Hamas platoon leader” without a shred of evidence.

The drone attack late on Sunday night hit a journalists’ work tent near the main gate of Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital, killing seven people. Among those killed beside al-Sharif were fellow Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh and camera operators Ibrahim Zaher, Moamen Aliwa and Mohammed Noufal.

Call for UNSC emergency session
Al Jazeera later said a sixth journalist, freelancer Mohammad al-Khaldi, was also killed in the strike. Reporters Without Borders said three more journalists had been wounded and called for a UN Security Council emergency session to discuss journalist safety.

Al Jazeera condemns the assassination of its journalists by Israeli occupation forces

Al Jazeera Media Network condemns in the strongest terms the targeted assassination of its correspondents Anas Al Sharif and Mohammed Qraiqea, along with photographers Ibrahim Al Thaher, and… pic.twitter.com/0otP6IYIgC

— Al Jazeera PR (@AlJazeera) August 10, 2025

In a statement, the Qatar-based Al Jazeera Media Network condemned in “the strongest terms” the killing of its media staff in “yet another blatant and premeditated attack on press freedom”, noting that the Israeli occupation force had “admitted to their crimes”.

“This attack comes amid the catastrophic consequences of the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza, which has seen the relentless slaughter of civilians, forced starvation, and the obliteration of entire communities,” Al Jazeera said.

“Anas and his colleagues were among the last remaining voices from within Gaza, providing the world with unfiltered, on-the-ground coverage of the devastating realities endured by its people.”

Five Al Jazeera journalists killed in Gaza by Israel’s “psychopathic liar” — Marwan Bishara Video: Al Jazeera

Ironically, the killings came hours after Netanyahu told media he had decided to “allow” some foreign journalists into the Gaza Strip.

“In fact, we have decided, and I’ve ordered, directed the military, to bring in foreign journalists, more foreign journalists,” Netanyahu told a news conference in Jerusalem.

Israeli authorities have in the past barred any foreign media from entering the Gaza Strip, while it has been deliberately targeting and killing local Palestinian journalists.

Other attacks on Al Jazeera
The deadly strike on Anas al-Sharif and his four colleagues is not the first attack on Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza since the start of Israel’s current war on the Palestinian territory in October 2023

Israeli forces have previously killed five Al Jazeera journalists: Samer Abudaqa, Ismael al-Ghoul, Ahmed al-Louh, Hossam Shabat and Hamza Dahdouh, son of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael Dahdouh, as well as many of the family members of Al Jazeera journalists.

The Israeli military has been systematically killing journalists, photographers and local media workers in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war in an attempt to silence their reports.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has verified the killing of at least 186 journalists since October 7, 2023. At least 90 journalists have been imprisoned by Israel.

But some media freedom groups put the casualty figure even higher. The Government Media Office in Gaza, for example, reports that 242 journalists have been killed.

The Israeli military have frequently accused journalists of being “terrorists” without evidence.

According to Muhammad Shehada, a writer and analyst from Gaza, Anas al-Sharif was a “loved by everyone, by his entire community”.

‘Enormous influence’
“He’s held enormous influence there, and that’s precisely why Israel murdered him.

Shehada told Al Jazeera he had “looked into the allegations” that Israel produced, trying to smear him as a Hamas militant, adding that “the allegations were completely contradictory.” He added:

“There’s zero evidence that al-Sharif took part in any hostilities, in any armed actions, aided or abetted any kind of these hostilities. None at all. His entire daily routine was standing in front of a camera from morning to evening.”

Reporting from Amman, Jordan, because Israel banned Al Jazeera from reporting from inside Israeli territory and the occupied West Bank, Hoda Abdel-Hamid said: “When you read the statement issued by the Israeli army, which was well prepared before all this happened, it’s almost as if it is bragging about it.”

It had been alleged by Israel that Anas al-Sharif was a member of the military wing of Hamas, and the army claimed that it had found documents in Gaza that proved their point.

“It includes some links to content that anyone could have printed,” she said. “This has been going on for a few weeks, ever since Anas started reporting on the starvation in Gaza, and he had such a huge impact on the Arab world.

“Immediately after, a spokesman for the Israeli army in Arabic… posted a video on social media, accusing al-Sharif of being a Hamas member and threatening him.”

‘Knew he was at serious risk’
Abdel-Hamid said she had been going through his X feed.

“He knew his life was at serious risk, and he repeatedly wrote that he was just a journalist, and he wanted his message to be spread widely, because he thought that was a way to protect him.”

Posted on his X account in case he was killed was his “last will” and final message. He wrote in part:

“I entrust you with Palestine — the jewel in the crown of the Muslim world, the heartbeat of every free person in this world. I entrust you with its people, with its wronged and innocent children who never had the time to dream or live in safety and peace.

“Their pure bodies were crushed under thousands of tons of Israeli bombs and missiles, torn apart and scattered across the walls.

“I urge you not to let chains silence you, nor borders restrain you. Be bridges toward the liberation of the land and its people, until the sun of dignity and freedom rises over our stolen homeland . . . “

This is my will and my final message. If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice. First, peace be upon you and Allah’s mercy and blessings.

Allah knows I gave every effort and all my strength to be a support and a voice for my…

— أنس الشريف Anas Al-Sharif (@AnasAlSharif0) August 10, 2025

Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), said that last October Israel had accused al-Sharif and “a number of other journalists of being terrorists without providing any credible proof”.

“We warned back then that this felt to us like a precursor to justify assassination, and, of course, last month… we saw again, a repeated smear campaign”, she told Al Jazeera.

“This is not solely about Anas al-Sharif, this is part of a pattern that we have seen from Israel… going back decades, in which it kills journalists.”

Accusations repeated
Al-Sharif had warned last month about the starvation facing journalists — “and we saw then the accusations repeated.

“Of course, now we are seeing a new offensive, plans for a new offensive, in Gaza, the kind of thing that Anas has been reporting on for the best part of three years.”

The medical director of al-Shifa Hospital said that Israel had killed the journalists to prevent coverage of atrocities it intended to carry out in its Gaza City seizure.

“The [Israeli] occupation is preparing for a major massacre in Gaza, but this time without sound or image,” Dr Mohammed Abu Salmiya told Turkiye’s Anadolu news agency.

“It wants to kill and displace the largest number of Palestinians in Gaza City but this time in the absence of the voice of Anas, Mohamed, Al Jazeera and all satellite channels.”

‘Fabrications don’t wash’
Al Jazeera’s senior analyst Marwan Bishara warned that “Israel’s lies” about al-Sharif endangered journalists everywhere, saying that the “best response to the killing of our colleagues is by continuing to do what we do”.

“I want to correct one thing [about Western media reports], and I need our viewers and readers around the world to pay attention:

“It doesn’t matter whether what Israel said about al-Sharif is correct or not.

“It’s an absolute fabrication. It’s wrong. But it doesn’t matter.

“Because if every American journalist who served in Iraq and Afghanistan would have been killed because there’s a suspicion that they worked for the CIA; if every French and British journalist would be killed because they work for the MI5 or something like that, then I think there will be no Western journalists working in the Middle East.

“It’s not OK to kill a journalist in a tent of journalists because you accuse him of something.

“If you accuse him of something, you take him to court, you make a complaint, you follow certain procedures, with the network, with the [International Federation of Journalists], and so on and so forth.

“You don’t kill a journalist who has been doing their job for months on, day in, day out, night and day, and claim later that they work for Hamas.

“That doesn’t wash.

“It’s wrong, it’s a lie, it’s a fabrication as usual, but this psychopathic liar should not get away with killing a journalist and simply attaching an accusation to it.

“It doesn’t wash, because otherwise, every single Western journalist covering a war that a Western government is involved in is going to be a target.

“Why?

“Because Israel has done it.”

In January 2024, three months into the war, I wrote an article for Declassified Australia about “Silencing the messenger” when I made the point that while “Israel killed journalists, the West merely censored them”.

I wrote that it was time for journalists to take a moral stand for truth and justice, and although I expected a strong response, the feedback was merely tepid. It was as if Western journalists did not comprehend the enormity of the Gaza crisis facing the world.

It is shameful that New Zealand journalists and media groups have not come out in the past 22 months with strong denunciations of Israel’s war on both journalists and truth – and the genocide against Palestinians.

Another truth-teller targeted and killed in Gaza. I wish the journalists — some of whom I taught to master the skills of journalism, would look at this travesty and call it what it is: a genocide.

I wish they would remember that journalists have a code of ethics, I wish they would remember to serve the people and not despotic governments.

Good journalists are truth seekers and truth tellers.

• READ MORE: Anas al-Sharif among five Al Jazeera journalists killed by Israel in Gaza
• Israel kills five Al Jazeera staff in Gaza, including Anas al-Sharif
• Silencing the messenger: Israel kills journalists, while the West merely censors them
• CPJ condemns Israeli killing of Gaza journalist Anas al-Sharif and video crew of four
• BREAKING: Journalist Anas-Al-Sharif ascended to martyrdom
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

Like this man, Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif, targeted, murdered for revealing the truth that tens of thousands of children, women, and men are regarded as the enemy by a country that wants to take their land and expand.

His Al Jazeera crew of five were wiped out yesterday.

In 1982, I asked an Israeli what he thought of the (then) invasion into Lebanon. He replled that if the government in Tel Aviv had its way and some Israelis were not against invasion, the army would have invaded Turkey. Look at what has happened now.

Massacre after massacre
Far more Palestinians were killed in the year leading up to October 7, 2023, than Israelis killed on that day. Palestinians have faced massacre after massacre ever since the Nakba in 1948.

They experience apartheid, they experience exile, they are not allowed to call Palestine their homeland, but it is their homeland.

Britain swooped into that country and appropriated a religious myth that dated back thousands of years, but being anti anti-semitism means ensuring that people are comfortable in their own land, it does not mean booting one people out to make a home for yourself.

Settler colonisation continues to perpetuate the worst injustice. It just dealt another blow. Starving children and a good man, a truth teller, killed in cold blood.

Saige England is an Aotearoa New Zealand journalist, author, and poet, member of the Palestinian Solidarity Network of Aotearoa (PSNA), and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This commentary was first published on England’s social media.

LIVE: Al Jazeera Arabic reporter Anas Al Sharif was killed in an Israeli strike on a tent in Gaza City. https://t.co/f5TlGRMjIH

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) August 10, 2025

The International Press Institute (IPI) has joined calls for urgent action to halt the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza as global news organisations warn that their journalists there are experiencing starvation.

Israel must immediately allow life-saving food aid to reach journalists and other civilians in Gaza, IPI said in a statement today.

“The international community must also put effective pressure on Israel to allow all journalists to enter and exit the territory and to document the ongoing catastrophe,”it said.

• READ MORE: BBC, AFP and other news outlets warn journalists in Gaza at risk of starvation
• ‘We are dying’: Palestinians slam world’s inaction as hunger ravages Gaza
• Al Jazeera condemns Israeli incitement against Gaza reporter Anas al-Sharif
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

In an unprecedented joint statement this week, the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, BBC News, and Reuters — four of the world’s leading news agencies — said their journalists on the ground “are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families”.

The news outlets added: “Journalists endure many deprivations and hardships in warzones. We are deeply alarmed that the threat of starvation is now one of them.”

Separately, Al Jazeera Media Network said in a statement that journalists on the ground “now find themselves fighting for their own survival” due to mass starvation.

Harrowing accounts
AFP and Al Jazeera journalists shared harrowing accounts of conditions on the ground.

One AFP photographer was quoted as saying, “I no longer have the strength to work for the media. My body is thin and I can’t work anymore.”

Al Jazeera Arabic’s Gaza correspondent said he was “drowning in hunger”.

In an interview with NPR, AFP global news director Phil Chetwynd said that the news agency had been working to evacuate its remaining contributors from Gaza, which requires Israeli permission.

The dramatic warnings come as more than 100 international humanitarian organisations said that mass starvation in Gaza was now threatening the lives of humanitarian aid workers themselves, while the civilian death toll continues to rise.

Gaza under siege — a journalist reports on daily survival   Video: Al Jazeera

Meanwhile, Israel continues to refuse to allow international reporters into Gaza to report and cover the war and humanitarian situation independently, obstructing the free flow of news and limiting coverage of the humanitarian crisis.

The ongoing conflict has taken a devastating toll on journalists and media outlets in Gaza.

Highest media death toll
Since October 2023, at least 186 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza — Al Jazeera puts the figure as at least 230 — the West Bank, Israel, and Lebanon, according to monitoring by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

This is the largest number of journalists to be killed in any armed conflict in this span of time.

Independent investigations such as those conducted by Forbidden Stories have found more than a dozen cases in which journalists were intentionally targeted and killed by the Israeli military — which constitutes a war crime under international law.

IPI has made repeated calls, in conjunction with its partners, urging the international community to take immediate measures to protect journalists and allow unimpeded access to the strip from international media.

Today, IPI has strongly and urgently reiterated these calls, as humanitarian conditions in Gaza rapidly deteriorate and as journalists and other civilians face man-made starvation.

The international community must use all diplomatic means at its disposal to pressure Israel to ensure the safe flow of food aid to journalists and other civilians, said IPI in a statement.

“The response by the international community in this critical moment could be the difference between life and death. There is no more time to lose,” IPI said.

RSF warnings over Gaza
In Paris, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) reports that for nearly two years it has warned about the precarious conditions faced by journalists in Gaza — which are deteriorating day by day.

Over the past 20 months in Gaza, more than 200 journalists have been killed by the Israeli army, including at least 46 slain while doing their job,” RSF said today in a statement.

“In addition to bombs, forced displacement, and dire humanitarian conditions, Gaza’s journalists, who are the only ones able to document what is happening in the besieged and closed-off enclave, can no longer find food,” the statement said.

“In response to this catastrophe, RSF reiterates its call to open up Gaza to foreign journalists and lift the blockade, in a joint appeal with over 200 media outlets and organisations from around the world.”

Jamie Wiseman is a journalist of the Vienna-based International Press Institute.

The conflict between Israel and Iran over the past 12 days has redefined the regional chessboard. Here is a look at their key takeaways:

Israel:
Pulled in the US: Israel successfully drew the United States into a direct military confrontation with Iran, setting a significant precedent for future direct (not just indirect) intervention.

Boosted political capital: This move generated substantial political leverage, allowing Israel to frame US intervention as a major strategic success.

• READ MORE: Israel orders attack on Iran after claiming Tehran violated ceasefire
• Israel’s attack on Iran — the violent new world being born is going to horrify you — Jonathan Cook
• Other Middle East crisis reports

Iran:
Forged a new deterrence: Iran has firmly established a new equation of deterrence, emerging as a powerful regional force capable of directly challenging Israel, the US, and their Western allies.

Demonstrated independence: Crucially, Iran achieved this without relying on its traditional regional allies, showcasing its self-reliance and strategic depth.

Defeated regime change efforts: This confrontation effectively thwarted any perceived Israeli strategy aimed at regime change, solidifying the current Iranian government’s position.

Achieved national unity: In the face of external pressure, Iran saw a notable surge in domestic unity, bridging the gap between reformers and conservatives in a new social and political contract.

Asserted direct regional role: Iran has definitively cemented its status as a direct and undeniable player in the ongoing regional struggle against Israeli hegemony.

Sent a global message: It delivered a strong message to non-Western global powers like China and Russia, proving itself a reliable regional force capable of challenging and reshaping the existing balance of power.

Exposed regional dynamics: The events sharply exposed Arab and Muslim countries that openly or tacitly support the US-Israeli regional project of dominance, highlighting underlying regional alignments.

Dr Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, London). He has a PhD in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter (2015) and was a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara. This commentary is republished from his Facebook page.

In the final strike before the ceasefire, Iranian missiles caused extensive destruction, killing and injuring several Israelis in the city of Beersheba. pic.twitter.com/b25fHPw2yD

— The Palestine Chronicle (@PalestineChron) June 24, 2025

The madness has begun.

We should have suspected something when the cloud strike shut down occurred.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to continue war so that he is never held to account.

• READ MORE: Israel media reports of multiple assassinations in Iran strike
• What happened to the Madleen Gaza boat activists detained by Israel?
• Other Israeli attacks on Iran reports

This madness is the last straw.

NZ must immediately expel the Israeli Ambassador for this unprovoked attack on Iran.

As moral and ethical people, we must turn away from Israel’s new war crime, they have started a war, we must as righteous people condemn Israel and their enabler America.

This is the beginning of madness.

We cannot be a party to it.

Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Amman, Jordan, said the Israeli army radio was reporting that in addition to the air strikes, Israel’s external intelligence service Mossad had carried out some sabotage activities and attacks inside Iran.

“There are also several reports and leaks in the Israeli media talking not only about the assassination of the top chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard but rather a very large number of senior military commanders in addition to prominent academics and nuclear scientists,” she said.

“This is a very large-scale attack, not just on military installations, but also on the people who could potentially be making decisions about what Iran can do next, how Iran can respond to this attack that continues as we speak.”

How global power struggles are impacting in local communities, culture and sovereignty in Kanaky, New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands and Samoa.

In episode one, The Battlefield, broadcast today, tensions between the United States and China over the Pacific escalate, affecting the lives of Pacific Islanders.

Key figures like former Malaita Premier Daniel Suidani and tour guide Maria Loweyo reveal how global power struggles impact on local communities, culture and sovereignty in the Solomon Islands and Samoa.

• WATCH: The first episode of this new series

The episode intertwines these personal stories with the broader geopolitical dynamics, setting the stage for a deeper exploration of the Pacific’s role in global diplomacy.

Fight for the Pacific, a four-part series by Tuki Laumea and Cleo Fraser, showcases the Pacific’s critical transformation into a battleground of global power.

This series captures the high-stakes rivalry between the US and China as they vie for dominance in a region pivotal to global stability.

The series frames the Pacific not just as a battleground for superpowers but also as a region with its own unique challenges and aspirations.

Republished from Al Jazeera.

In 1979, Sam Neill appeared in an Australian comedy movie about hacks on a Sydney newspaper.

The Journalist was billed as “a saucy, sexy, funny look at a man with a nose for scandal and a weakness for women”.

That would probably not fly these days — but as a rule, movies about Australian journalists are no laughing matter.

• READ MORE: Other reports on Peter Greste’s The First Casualty
• Listen to RNZ Mediawatch

Back in 1982, a young Mel Gibson starred as a foreign correspondent who was dropped into Jakarta during revolutionary chaos in The Year of Living Dangerously. The 1967 events the movie depicted were real enough, but Mel Gibson’s correspondent Guy Hamilton was made up for what was essentially a romantic drama.

There was no romance and a lot more real life 25 years later in Balibo, another movie with Australian journalists in harm’s way during Indonesian upheaval.

Anthony La Paglia had won awards for his performance as Roger East, a journalist killed in what was then East Timor — now Timor-Leste — in December 1975. East was killed while investigating the fate of five other journalists — including New Zealander Guy Cunningham — who was killed during the Indonesian invasion two months earlier.

The Correspondent has a happier ending but is still a tough watch — especially for its subject.

Met in London newsrooms
I first met Peter Greste in newsrooms in London about 30 years ago. He had worked for Reuters, CNN, and the BBC — going on to become a BBC correspondent in Afghanistan.

He later reported from Belgrade, Santiago, and then Nairobi, from where he appeared regularly on RNZ’s Nine to Noon as an African news correspondent. Greste later joined the English-language network of the Doha-based Al Jazeera and became a worldwide story himself while filling in as the correspondent in Cairo.

The Correspondent                 Video: Trailer

Greste and two Egyptian colleagues, Baher Mohamed and Mohamed Fahmy, were arrested in late 2013 on trumped-up charges of aiding and abetting the Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation labeled “terrorist” by the new Egyptian regime of the time.

Six months later he was sentenced to seven years in jail for “falsifying news” and smearing the reputation of Egypt itself. Mohamed was sentenced to 10 years.

Media organisations launched an international campaign for their freedom with the slogan “Journalism is not a crime”. Peter’s own family became familiar faces in the media while working hard for his release too.

Peter Greste was deported to Australia in February 2015. The deal stated he would serve the rest of his sentence there, but the Australian government did not enforce that. Instead, Greste became a professor of media and journalism, currently at Macquarie University in Sydney.

Movie consultant
Among other things, he has also been a consultant on The Correspondent — now in cinemas around New Zealand — with Richard Roxborough cast as Greste himself.

Greste told The Sydney Morning Herald he had to watch it “through his fingers” at first.

“I eventually came to realise it’s not me that’s up there on the screen. It’s the product of a whole bunch of creatives. And the result is … more like a painting rather than a photograph,” Greste told Mediawatch.

“Over the years I’ve written about it, I’ve spoken about it countless times. I’ve built a career on it. But I wasn’t really anticipating the emotional impact of seeing the craziness of my arrest, the confusion of that period, the claustrophobia of the cell, the sheer frustration of the crazy trial and the really discombobulating moment of my release.

“But there is another very difficult story about what happened to a colleague of mine in Somalia, which I haven’t spoken about publicly. Seeing that on screen was actually pretty gut-wrenching.”

In 2005, his BBC colleague Kate Peyton was shot alongside him on their first day in on assignment in Somalia. She died soon after.

“That was probably the toughest day of my entire life far over and above anything I went through in Egypt. But I am glad that they put it in [The Correspondent]. It underlines … the way in which journalism is under attack. What happened to us in Egypt wasn’t a random, isolated incident — but part of a much longer pattern we’re seeing continue to this day.”

‘Owed his life’
Greste says he “owes his life” to fellow prisoner Alaa Abd El-Fattah — an Egyptian activist who is also in the film.

“There’s a bit of artistic licence in the way it was portrayed but . . .  he is easily one of the most intelligent, astute and charismatic humanitarians I’ve ever come across. He was one of the main pro-democracy activists who was behind the Arab Spring revolution in 2011 — a true democrat.

“He also inspired me to write the letters that we smuggled out of prison that described our arrest not as an attack on … what we’d actually come to represent. And that was press freedom.

“That helped frame the campaign that ultimately got me out. So, for both psychological and political reasons, I feel like I owe him my life.

“There was nothing in our reporting that confirmed the allegations against us. So I started to drag up all sorts of demons from the past. I started thinking maybe this is the universe punishing me for sins of the past. I was obviously digging up that particular moment as one of the most extreme and tragic moments. It took a long time for me to get past it.

“He’d been in prison a lot because of his activism, so he understood the psychology of it. He also understood the politics of it in ways that I could never do as a newcomer.”

“Unfortunately, he is still there. He should have been released on September 29th last year. His mother launched a hunger strike in London . . . so I actually joined her on hunger strike earlier this year to try and add pressure.

“If this movie also draws a bit of attention to his case, then I think that’s an important element.”

Another wrinkle
Another wrinkle in the story was the situation of his two Egyptian Al Jazeera colleagues.

Greste was essentially a stranger to them, having only arrived in Egypt shortly before their arrest.

The film shows Greste clashing with Fahmy, who later sued Al Jazeera. Fahmy felt the international pressure to free Greste was making their situation worse by pushing the Egyptian regime into a corner.

“To call it a confrontation is probably a bit of an understatement. We had some really serious arguments and sometimes they got very, very heated. But I want audiences to really understand Fahmy’s worldview in this film.

“He and I had very different understandings of what was going … and how those differences played out.

“I’ve got a hell of a lot of respect for him. He is like a brother to me. That doesn’t mean we always agreed with each other and doesn’t mean we always got on with each other like any siblings, I suppose.”

His colleagues were eventually released on bail shortly after Greste’s deportation in 2015.

Fahmy renounced his Egyptian citizenship and was later deported to Canada, while Mohamed was released on bail and eventually pardoned.

Retrial — all ‘reconvicted’
“After I was released there was a retrial … and we were all reconvicted. They were finally released and pardoned, but the pardon didn’t extend to me.

“I can’t go back because I’m still a convicted ‘terrorist’ and I still have an outstanding prison sentence to serve, which is a little bit weird. Any country that has an extradition treaty with Egypt is a problem. There are a fairly significant number of those across the Middle East and Africa.”

Greste told Mediawatch his conviction was even flagged in transit in Auckland en route from New York to Sydney. He was told he failed a character test.

“I was able to resolve it. I had some friends in Canberra and were able to sort it out, but I was told in no uncertain terms I’m not allowed into New Zealand without getting a visa because of that criminal record.

“If I’m traveling to any country I have to say … I was convicted on terrorism offences. Generally speaking, I can explain it, but it often takes a lot of bureaucratic process to do that.”

Greste’s first account of his time in jail — The First Casualty — was published in 2017. Most of the book was about media freedom around the world, lamenting that the numbers of journalists jailed and killed increased after his release.

Something that Greste also now ponders a lot in his current job as a professor of media and journalism.

Ten years on from that, it is worse again. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says at least 124 journalists and media workers were killed last year, nearly two-thirds of them Palestinians killed by Israel in its war in Gaza.

The book has now been updated and republished as The Correspondent.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Global press freedom organisations have condemned the killing of two journalists in Gaza this week, who died in separate targeted airstrikes by the Israeli armed forces.

And protesters in Aotearoa New Zealand dedicated their week 77 rally and march in the heart of Auckland on Palestine Land Day to their memory, declaring “Journalism is not a crime”.

Hossam Shabat, a 23-year-old correspondent for the Al Jazeera Mubasher channel, was killed by an Israeli airstrike on his car in the eastern part of Beit Lahiya, media reports said.

• READ MORE: ‘Tell the world the truth,’ father tells dead son as Israel kills two journalists
• Whitewashing genocide — Steven Cowan
• Silencing the messenger: Israel kills journalists, while the West merely censors them — David Robie
• ‘Catastrophic’: Journalists say ethnic cleansing taking place in a news void in northern Gaza
• Other Gaza journalist reports

Video, reportedly from minutes after the airstrike, shows people gathering around the shattered and smoking car and pulling a body out of the wreckage.

Mohammed Mansour, a correspondent for Palestine Today television was killed earlier on Monday, reportedly along with his wife and son, in an Israeli airstrike on his home in south Khan Younis.

In Auckland today, Shabat’s aunt Ahlam Abuharbid, Beit Hanoun, Gaza, who migrated to New Zealand with her family in 1986, said her nephew “dreamed of becoming a journalist and to tell the world the truth.

“But war doesn’t wait for dreams. He was only 23, and when the war began he left classes to give a voice to those who had none.”

Global media condemnation
In the hours after the deaths, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Palestinian press freedom organisations released statements condemning the attacks.

“CPJ is appalled that we are once again seeing Palestinians weeping over the bodies of dead journalists in Gaza,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ’s programme director.

“This nightmare in Gaza has to end. The international community must act fast to ensure that journalists are kept safe and hold Israel to account for the deaths of Hossam Shabat and Mohammed Mansour.

“Journalists are civilians and it is illegal to attack them in a war zone.”

In a statement, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) confirmed it had targeted and killed Shabat and Mansour and labelled them as “terrorists” — without any evidence to back their claim.

The IDF also said that it had struck Hamas and Islamic Jihad resistance fighters in Khan Younis, where Mohammed Mansour was killed.

In October 2024, the IDF had accused Shabat and five other Palestinian journalists working for Al Jazeera in Gaza of being members of the militant arm of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Israeli claims denied
Al Jazeera and Shabat denied Israel’s claims, with Shabat stating in an interview with the CPJ that “we are civilians … Our only crime is that we convey the image and the truth.”

In its statement condemning the deaths of Shabat and Mansour, the CPJ again called on Israel to “stop making unsubstantiated allegations to justify its killing and mistreatment of members of the press”.

The CPJ estimates that more than 170 journalists have been killed in Gaza since the war began in October 2023, making it the deadliest period for journalists since the organisation began gathering data in 1992.

Al Jazeera Published their FINAL Interview with Journalist Hossam Shabat

He spoke about the challenges of working while being targeted pic.twitter.com/tgcs3BE1z8

— Ryan Rozbiani (@RyanRozbiani) March 28, 2025

However, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate says it believes the number is higher and, with the deaths of Shabat and Mansour, 208 journalists and other members of the press have been killed over the course of the conflict.

Under international law, journalists are protected civilians who must not be targeted by warring parties.

Israel has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in its genocide in the blockaded enclave since October 7, 2023.

Vigil for Gazan journalists.     Video: Aslam Qureshi

The Israeli carnage has reduced most of the Gaza to ruins and displaced almost the entire 2.3 million population, while causing a massive shortage of basic necessities.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants last November for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for its war on the enclave.

Global media freedom groups have condemned the Israeli occupation forces for assassinating two more Palestinian journalists covering the Gaza genocide, taking the media death toll in the besieged enclave to at least 208 since the war started.

Journalist and contributor to the Qatari-based Al Jazeera Mubasher, Hossam Shabat, is the latest to have been killed.

Witnesses said Hossam’s vehicle was hit in the eastern part of Beit Lahiya. Several pedestrians were also wounded, reports Al Jazeera.

• READ MORE: CPJ denounces Israel’s killing of 2 more Gaza journalists in return to war
• Other Gaza media freedom reports

in a statement, Al Jazeera condemned the killings, saying Hossam had joined the network’s journalists and correspondents killed during the ongoing war on Gaza, including Samer Abudaqa, Hamza Al-Dahdouh, Ismail Al-Ghoul, and Ahmed Al-Louh.

Al Jazeera affirmed its commitment to pursue all legal measures to “prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes against journalists”.

The network also said it stood in “unwavering solidarity with all journalists in Gaza and reaffirms its commitment to achieving justice” by prosecuting the killers of more than 200 journalists in Gaza since October 2023.

The network extended its condolences to Hossam’s family, and called on all human rights and media organisations to condemn the Israeli occupation’s systematic killing of journalists.

Hossam was the second journalist killed in Gaza yesterday.

House targeted
Earlier, the Israeli military killed Mohammad Mansour, a correspondent for the Beirut-based Palestine Today television, in an attack targeting a house in Khan Younis, southern Gaza.

Al Jazeera condemns Israel’s killing of journalist Hossam Shabat in Gaza https://t.co/iJ6lscVahm

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) March 25, 2025

A fellow journalist circulated a video clip of Mansour’s father bidding farewell to his son with heartbreaking words, putting a microphone in his son’s hand and urging the voice that once conveyed the truth to a deaf world.

“Stand up and speak, tell the world, you are the one who tells the truth, for the image alone is not enough,” the father said through tears.

Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), condemned the killings, describing them as war crimes.

The CPJ called for an independent international investigation into whether they were deliberately targeted.

“CPJ is appalled that we are once again seeing Palestinians weeping over the bodies of dead journalists in Gaza,” said CPJ’s programme director Carlos Martinez de la Serna in New York.

‘Nightmare has to end’
“This nightmare in Gaza has to end. The international community must act fast to ensure that journalists are kept safe and hold Israel to account for the deaths of Hossam Shabat and Mohammed Mansour, whose killings may have been targeted.”

Israel resumed airstrikes on Gaza on March 18, ending a ceasefire that began on January 19.

The occupation forces continued bombarding Gaza for an eighth consecutive day, killing at least 23 people in predawn attacks including seven children.

A UN official, Olga Cherevko, said Israel’s unhindered attacks on Gaza were a “bloody stain on our collective consciousness”, noting “our calls for this madness to stop have gone unheeded” by the world.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said 792 people had been killed and 1663 injured in the week since Israel resumed its war on the Strip.

The total death toll since the war started on October 7, 2023, has risen to 50,144, while 113,704 people have been injured, it said.

West Bank ‘news desert’
Meanwhile, the Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said the repression of reporters in the West Bank and East Jerusalem had intensified in recent months despite the recent ceasefire in Gaza before it collapsed.

In the eastern Palestinian territories, Israeli armed forces have shot at journalists, arrested them and restricted their movement.

The Palestinian Authority (PA), which governs the West Bank and East Jerusalem, has detained Al Jazeera journalists.

RSF warned of a growing crackdown, which was transforming the region into a “news desert”.

One of the co-directors of the Palestinian Oscar-winning film No Other Land, Hamdan Ballal, has been detained by Israeli forces. It happened after he was attacked by a mob of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank.

He was in an ambulance receiving treatment when the doors were opened and he was abducted by the Israeli military. Colleagues say he has “disappeared”.

A number of American activists were also attacked, and video on social media showed them fleeing the settler violence.

Seven weeks into the Gaza ceasefire deal, Israel has openly resumed its war crimes in Gaza — blocking humanitarian aid — with the tacit support of the international mainstream media, reports Al Jazeera’s media watchdog programme The Listening Post.

“Seventeen months into the Israeli genocide in Gaza we have reached another critical stage — Israel has resumed its blockade of humanitarian aid and has threatened to cut of the supply of water and power to desperate Palestinians,” says presenter and programme founder Richard Gizbert.

“All because Hamas has refused to change the deal the two sides signed seven weeks ago and free more Israeli captives.

• WATCH MORE: Other Gaza programmes at The Listening Post
• Other Gaza genocide reports

“The headlines now coming out of the international media would have you believe that Hamas and not the Netanyahu government had demanded these changes to the ceasefire agreement.

“Israeli officials somehow insist there is enough food in Gaza and you will not see many Israeli news outlets reporting on the undeniable evidence of malnutrition.”

Presented by Richard Gizbert

Lead contributors:
Daniel Levy – President, US/Middle East Project
Saree Makdisi – Professor of English and comparative literature, UCLA
Samira Mohyeddin – Founder, On the Line Media
Mouin Rabbani – Co-editor, Jadaliyya

On our radar:

The LA Times’ new AI “bias meter” — which offers a counterpoint to the paper’s opinion pieces, has stirred controversy. Tariq Nafi explores its role in a changing media landscape that’s cosying up to Donald Trump.

Are the ADL’s anti-Semitism stats credible?
The Anti-Defamation League is one of the most influential and well-funded NGOs in the US — and it’s getting more media attention than ever.

The Listening Post’s Meenakshi Ravi reports on the organisation, its high-profile CEO, and its troubling stance: Conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

Featuring:
Omar Baddar – Political and media analyst
Eva Borgwardt – National spokesperson, If Not Now
Emmaia Gelman – Director, The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism

This programme was first broadcast on 8 March 2025 and can be watched on YouTube. 

‘Hell plan’ – Israel’s scheme for Gaza.   Video: AJ The Listening Post

With international media’s attention on the Israeli and Palestinian captives exchange,  Israel’s military and settlers have been forcibly displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, says Al Jazeera’s Listening Post media programme.

The European Union has condemned Israel’s military operation in West Bank, attacking and killing refugees, and destroying refugee camps while the Western media has been barely reporting this.

It has also criticised the violence by settlers in illegal West Bank villages.

• READ MORE: Israel touts US plan to extend truce for half of remaining captives in Gaza
• Other AJ Listening Post reports

Israel’s military operation in the occupied territory has been ongoing for more than 40 days and has resulted in dozens of casualties, the displacement of about 40,000 Palestinians from their homes, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure.

The EU has expressed its “grave concern” about Israel’s continuing military operation in the occupied West Bank in a statement.

“The EU calls on Israel, in addressing its security concerns in the occupied West Bank, to comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law by ensuring the protection of all civilians in military operations and allow the safe return of displaced persons to their homes,” the statement read.

“At the same time, extremist settler violence continues throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Israel ‘has duty to protect’
“The EU recalls that Israel, as the occupying power, has the duty to protect civilians and to hold perpetrators accountable.”

The bloc also condemned Israel’s policy of expanding settlements in the West Bank, and urged that demolitions “including of EU and EU member states-funded structures, must stop”.

“As we enter the holy month of Ramadan, we call on all parties to exercise restraint to allow for peaceful celebrations,” the EU said.

Meanwhile, Israeli journalists are parroting military talking points of security operations.

Israel invades the West Bank.  Video: AJ: The Listening Post

Contributors:
Abdaljawad Omar – Assistant professor, Birzeit University
Jehad Abusalim – Co-editor, Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire
Ori Goldberg – Academic and political commentator
Samira Mohyeddin – Founder, On the Line Media

On the Listening Post radar:
This week, the return of the Bibas family bodies dominated Israeli media coverage.

Tariq Nafi reports on how their deaths have been used for “hasbara” — propaganda — after the family accused Netanyahu’s government of exploiting their grief for political purposes.

The Kenyan ‘manosphere’
Populated by loudmouths, shock artists and unapologetic chauvinists, the Kenyan “manosphere” is promoting an influential — and at times dangerous — take on modern masculinity.

Featuring:
Audrey Mugeni – Co-founder, Femicide Count Kenya
Awino Okech – Professor of feminist and security studies, SOAS
Onyango Otieno – Mental health coach and writer

It generally ends badly.  An old tyrant embarks on an ill-considered project that involves redrawing maps.

They are heedless to wise counsel and indifferent to indigenous interests or experience.  Before they fail, are killed, deposed or otherwise disposed of, these vicious old men can cause immense harm.

To see Trump through this lens, let’s look at a group of men who tested their cartographic skills and failed:  King Lear and, of course, Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte, and latterly, George W Bush and Saddam Hussein.

• READ MORE: Cartography of genocide: Why Netanyahu erased Palestine from the map
• Netanyahu’s ‘new Middle East’ has arrived — but it’s not what he envisioned
• Other war on Palestine reports

I even throw in a Pope.  But let’s start first with Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump himself.

Benjamin Netanyahu and a map of a ‘New Middle East’ — without Palestine
In September 2023, a month before the Hamas attack on Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to an almost-empty UN General Assembly.  Few wanted to share the same air as the man.

In his speech, he presented a map of a “New Middle East” — one that contained a Greater Israel but no Palestine.

In a piece in The Jordan Times titled: “Cartography of genocide”, Ramzy Baroud explained why Netanyahu erased Palestine from the map figuratively.  Hamas leaders also understood the message all too well.

“Generally, there was a consensus in the political bureau: We have to move, we have to take action. If we don’t do it, Palestine will be forgotten — totally deleted from the international map,” Dr Bassem Naim, a leading Hamas official said in the outstanding Al Jazeera documentary October 7.

Hearing Trump and Netanyahu last week, the Hamas assessment was clear-eyed and prescient.

Donald Trump
In defiance of UN resolutions and international law, he recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, recognised the Syrian Golan Heights as part of Israel, and now wants to turn Gaza into a US real estate development, reconquer Panama, turn Canada into the 51st State of the USA, rename the Gulf of Mexico and seize Greenland, if necessary by force.

And it’s only February.  The US spent blood, treasure and decades building the Rules-Based International Order.  Biden and Trump have left it in tatters.

Trump is a fitting avatar for the American state: morally corrupt, narcissistic, burning down all the temples to international law, and generally causing chaos as he flames his way into ignominy.

The past week — where “Bonkers is the New Normal” — reminded me of a famous Onion headline: “FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States”.

The Iranians made a brilliant counter-offer to the US plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza and create a US statelet next to Israel — send the Israelis to Greenland! Unlike the genocidal US and Israeli leadership, the Iranians were kidding.

Point taken, though.

King Lear: ‘Meantime we will express our darker purpose. Give me the map there.’

Lear makes the list because of Shakespeare’s understanding of tyrants and those who oppose them.

Kent: My life I never held but as a pawn to wage against thy enemies.

Lear: Out of my sight!

Kent and all those who sought to steer the King towards a more prudent course were treated as enemies and traitors. I think of Ambassador Chas Freeman, John Mearsheimer, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, George Beebe and all the other wiser heads who have been pushed to the periphery in much the same way.

Trump, like Lear, surrounds himself with a college of schemers, deviants and psychopaths.

Napoleon Bonaparte
I was fortunate to study “France on the Eve of Revolution” with the great French historian Antoine Casanova.  His fellow Corsican caused a fair bit of mayhem with his intention to redraw the map of Europe.

British statesman William Pitt the Younger reeled in horror as Napoleon got to work, “Roll up that map; it will not be wanted these 10 years,” he presciently said.

Bonaparte was an important historical figure who left a mixed and contested legacy.

Before effective resistance could be organised, he abolished the Holy Roman Empire (good job), created the Confederation of the Rhine, invaded Russia and, albeit sometimes for the better, torched many of the traditional power structures.

Millions died in his wars.

We appear to be back to all that: a leader who tears up all rule books.  Trump endorses the US-Israeli right of conquest, sanctions the International Criminal Court (ICC) for trying to hold Israel and the US to the same standard as others, and hands out the highest offices to his family and confidantes.

Hitler
“Lebensraum” (Living space) was the Nazi concept that propelled the German war machine to seize new territories, redraw maps.  As they marched, the soldiers often sang “Deutschland über alles” (Germany above all), their ultra-nationalist anthem that expressed a desire to create a Greater Germany — to Make Germany Great Again.

All sounds a bit similar to this discussion of Trump and Netanyahu, doesn’t it?  Again: whose side should we be on?

Saddam Hussein and George W Bush
When it comes to doomed bids to remake the Middle East by launching illegal wars, these are two buttocks of the same bum.  Now we have the Trump-Netanyahu pair.

Will countries like Australia, New Zealand and the UK really sign up for the current US-Israeli land grab?  Will they all continue to yawn and look away as massive crimes against humanity are committed?   I fear so, and in so doing, they rob their side of all legitimacy.

Pope Alexander VI
There is a smack of the Borgias about the Trumps. They share values — libertinism and nepotism, to name two — and both, through cunning rather than aptitude, managed to achieve great power.

Pope Alexander VI, born Rodrigo Borgia, father to Lucretia and Cesare, was Pope in 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

UN President Donald Trump’s idea of mass expulsion of Palestinians in Gaza to Jordan and Egypt has been dismissed by analysts as unacceptable “ethnic cleansing” and rejected by the governments of both neigbouring countries.

Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani, a nonresident research fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs and commentator specialising in Palestinian affairs and the Arab-Israeli conflict, said the US and Israel would “fail” over such a plan.

President Trump’s suggestion had been to “clean out” Gaza and move 1.5 million Palestinians to Jordan and Egypt.

• READ MORE: Trump suggests his plan for Gaza Strip is to ‘clean out the whole thing’
• ‘Day of victory’: Excitement as displaced Palestinians return to north Gaza
• Other Gaza reports

“Even if [President Trump] applies pressure on Jordan and Egypt, I think their leaderships will recognise the price of going along with Trump is going to be much greater than the price of resisting him — in terms of the survival of their leaderships for participating in something like this,” Rabbani told Al Jazeera, referring to Trump’s plan as “ethnic cleansing”.

The rebuttals to the Trump idea came as Gaza experienced an historic day with jubilant scenes as tens of thousands of Palestinians crossed the so-called Netzarim Corridor to return home in the north showing their determination to survive under the 15-month onslaught by Israel’s military.

Al Jazeera journalist Tamer al-Misshal said it was a “significant and historic moment” for the Palestinians.

“It’s the first time since 1948 those who have been forced out of their homes and land managed to get back — despite the destruction and despite the genocide,” he said.

He quoted one Palestinian man who returned as saying he would erect a tent on his destroyed home, “which is much better than being forcibly displaced from Gaza”.

Al-Misshal noted Hamas recently said 18 more Israeli captives were alive and would be returned each Saturday in exchange for Palestinian prisoners over the next few weeks.

He said the next main step was to get the Rafah land crossing opened so aid could flow and thousands of badly wounded Palestinians could get medical treatment abroad.

‘Blanket refusal’

Analyst Mouin Rabbani told Al Jazeera about the Trump displacement idea: “This isn’t going to happen because Israel is not going to succeed in ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip after a war, after having failed to do so during a war.”

When former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken went on a tour of Arab states to promote this idea late last year, he had been met with a “blanket refusal”, Rabbani added.

Meanwhile, in Tel Aviv Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was feeling the heat from his coalition partners over the ceasefire deal who view the Israeli leader as succumbing to US demands, the analyst said.

“I think there’s a kind of a mix of personal, political and ideological factors at play,” Rabbani said.

“But ultimately, I think the key relationship to look at here is not that between Netanyahu and his coalition partners, or between Israelis and Palestinians, but between Washington and Israel — because Washington is the one calling the shots, and Israel has no choice but to comply.”

A senior Hamas official, Basem Naim, has described the “return” day as “the most important day in the current history of this conflict”.

He said that Israel was “for the first time” obliged to allow Palestinians to return to their houses after being forced “by the resistance”, in a similar way that it was “forced to release” Palestinian prisoners.

‘Very symbolic day’ in conflict
“This is, I think, a very symbolic day,” he said. “This is a very important day in how to approach this conflict with the Israelis, which language they understand.”

Naim also reaffirmed Hamas’s commitment to the ceasefire agreement and said the group was “ready to do the maximum to give this deal a chance to succeed”.

He also accused Netanyahu and the Israeli government of playing “dirty games” in a bid to “sabotage the deal”.

Jordanian officials have rejected President Trump’s “clean out” Gaza suggestion with
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi saying that all talk about an alternative homeland for the Palestinians was rejected and “we will not accept it”.

He said any attempt to displace Palestinians from their land would not bring security to the region.

The Jordanian House of Representatives said: “The absurdity and denial of Palestinian rights will keep the region on a simmering and boiling plate.”

Jordan would not be an alternative homeland for displacement attempts against “the patient Palestinian people”.

In Cairo, the Foreign Ministry reaffirmed in a statement Egypt’s “continued support for the steadfastness of the Palestinian people on their land.”

It “rejected any infringement on those inalienable rights, whether by settlement or annexation of land, or by the depopulation of that land of its people through displacement, encouraged transfer or the uprooting of Palestinians from their land, whether temporarily or long-term.”

With a ceasefire in force in Gaza for a week, the Israeli army and settlers have intensified their attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, reports Al Jazeera’s media watchdog programme The Listening Post.

Amid the exchange of captives, images showing legions of Hamas reinforcements puncture the narratives in Israeli media.

Presenter Richard Gizbert, a Canadian broadcaster and creator of The Listening Post series, pays tribute to Palestinian journalists and critiques the failure of Western journalists to support their colleagues under fire in Gaza.

• READ MORE: Other Gaza media freedom reports

“None of which bodes well for the Palestinians who have survived Israel’s vengeful war on Gaza, including journalists, some of whom symbolically shed their helmets and flak jackets when the ceasefire was announced — only to put them back on when Israel’s attacks resumed,” Gizbert says.

“More than 200 of their colleagues have been killed, many of them targeted, a number that dwarfs the journalistic casualty figures in any other conflict in modern history.

“And there has been a noticeable lack of outcry on that from Western media outlets, a large scale failure to show solidarity.

“Of all the crimes committed against journalists during this war, the one-side pro-Israeli narratives coming out of capitals like Washington, London and Berlin, this one should stick.

‘Against the odds’
“If journalists cannot even bring themselves to defend their own, what is the point?”

Senior Palestine analyst Tahani Mustafa of the Crisis Group says: “Palestinian journalists have been indispensable, despite all the odds against them of the Israeli onslaught, or the lack of integrity of the Western media, the complete silence over the fact that their fellow journalists on the ground in Gaza are being targeted . . . ”

“This just feels like a pause in the killing machine.”

Executive director of Sarah Leah Whitson of Dawn says: “If I was working in Gaza as a journalist, I would not remove my helmet or my flak jacket. I have no doubt that  Israeli military forces in Gaza will continue to gun down journalists.”

Associate professor Dalal Iriqat of the Arab American University Palestine says: “Their target is not really Hamas but the Palestinian people, the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian rights.

“That’s why they have been targeting media, they have been targeting anybody who tells the truth.”

Contributors:
Dalal Iriqat – Associate professor, Arab American University Palestine
Daniel Levy – President, US/Middle East Project
Tahani Mustafa – Senior Palestine analyst, Crisis Group
Sarah Leah Whitson – Executive director, DAWN

The Listening Post programme of 25 January 2025.   Video: Al Jazeera

The Al Jazeera Network has condemned the arrest of its occupied West Bank correspondent by Palestinian security services as a bid by the Israeli occupation to “block media coverage” of the military attack on Jenin.

Israeli soldiers have killed at least 12 Palestinians in the three-day military assault that has rendered the refugee camp “nearly uninhabitable” and forced displacement of more than 2000 people. Qatar’s Foreign Ministry said the Jenin operation was a “flagrant violation of international humanitarian law and human rights”.

Al Jazeera said in a broadcast statement that the arrest of its occupied West Bank correspondent Muhammad al-Atrash by the Palestinian Authority (PA) could only be explained as “an attempt to block the media coverage of the occupation’s attack in Jenin”.

• READ MORE: International media’s reluctance to show solidarity with Palestinian journalists could backfire
• Bulldozer or Butcher: Netanyahu follows in Sharon footsteps from Jenin to Jabalia: Marwan Bishara
• Killing of five Gaza journalists by Israel strike highlights weak NZ media response
• Other media freedom reports in occupied Palestine

We’re following with concern the arrest of journalist Mohammed Al-Atrash by the Palestinian security forces in connection with his work at Al Jazeera and call for his immediate release./1 pic.twitter.com/M2ZcEoWqJl

— Al-Haq الحق (@alhaq_org) January 23, 2025

“The arbitrary actions of the Palestinian Authority are unfortunately identical to the occupation’s targeting of the Al Jazeera Network,” it said.

“We value the positions and voices that stand in solidarity and defend colleague Muhammad al-Atrash and the freedom of the press.”

The network said the journalist was brought before a court in Hebron after being arrested yesterday while covering the events in Jenin “simply for doing his professional duty as a journalist”.

“We confirm that these practices will not hinder our ongoing professional coverage of the facts unfolding in the West Bank,” Al Jazeera’s statement added.

The Israeli occupation has been targeting Al Jazeera for months in an attempt to gag its reporting.

Calling for al-Atrash’s immediate release, the al-Haq organisation (Protecting and Promoting Human Rights & the Rule of Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory) said in a statement: “Freedom of opinion and expression cannot be guaranteed without ensuring freedom of the press.”

Rage over AJ ban
Earlier this month journalists expressed outrage and confusion about the PA’s decision to shut down the Al Jazeera office in the occupied West Bank after the Israeli government had earlier banned the Al Jazeera broadcasting network’s operation within Israel.

“Shutting down a major outlet like Al Jazeera is a crime against journalism,” said freelance journalist Ikhlas al-Qarnawi.

Also earlier this month, award-winning Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab criticised the Israeli government for targeting journalists and attempting to “cover up” the assassination of five Palestinian journalists last month.

He said a December 26 press statement by the Israeli army attempted to “justify a war crime”.

“It unabashedly admitted that the military incinerated five Palestinian journalists in a clearly marked press vehicle outside al-Awda Hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp, central Gaza Strip,” Kuttab said in an op-ed article.

Many Western publications had quoted the Israeli army statement as if it was an objective position and “not propaganda whitewashing a war crime”, he wrote.

“They failed to clarify to their audiences that attacking journalists, including journalists who may be accused of promoting ‘propaganda’, is a war crime — all journalists are protected under international humanitarian law, regardless of whether armies like their reporting or not.”

Israel not only refuses to recognise any Palestinian media worker as being protected, but it also bars foreign journalists from entering Gaza.

“It has been truly disturbing that the international media has done little to protest this ban,” wrote Kuttab.

“Except for one petition signed by 60 media outlets over the summer, the international media has not followed up consistently on such demands over 15 months.”

Five Palestinian journalists have been killed in a new Israeli strike near a hospital in central Gaza after four reporters were killed last week, reports Al Jazeera citing authorities and media in the besieged enclave.

The journalists from the Al-Quds Today channel were covering events near al-Awda Hospital, located in the Nuseirat refugee camp, when their broadcast van was hit by an Israeli air strike.

Footage from the scene circulating on social media shows a vehicle engulfed in flames.

• READ MORE: Israel kills five journalists in Gaza as babies freeze to death
• Other Gaza media reports

The video of the white-coloured van shows the word “press” in large red lettering across the back of the vehicle.

The dead journalists have been named as Fadi Hassouna, Ibrahim al-Sheikh Ali, Mohammed al-Ladah, Faisal Abu al-Qumsan and Ayman al-Jadi.

Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif reports that Ayman al-Jadi had been waiting for his wife in front of the hospital while she was in labour to give birth to their first child.

Civil defence teams retrieved the bodies of the victims and extinguished a fire at the scene, the Quds News Network said.

Israel claims ‘targeted’ attack
Israel’s military confirmed the strike.

It claimed it had carried out a “targeted” attack against a vehicle carrying members of Islamic Jihad and that it would continue to take action against “terrorist organisations” in Gaza.

It provided no evidence to support its claim.

BREAKING: 5 journalists were just killed by Israel.

An Israeli strike targeted the PRESS vehicle belonging to “Al-Quds Today” channel while the journalists were sleeping inside the vehicle in front of Al-Awda Hospital in Al-Nuseirat, Central Gaza. Their bodies were charred.… pic.twitter.com/B1u1eXIn3j

— Suppressed News. (@SuppressedNws) December 26, 2024

“Prior to the attack, many steps were taken to reduce the chance of harming civilians, including the use of precision weapons, aerial observations, and additional intelligence information,” the military said in a post on X.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) earlier this month condemned Israel’s killing of four Palestinian journalists in the space of a week, calling on the international community to hold the country accountable for its attacks against the media.

The Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) also condemned the killing of the journalists last week as a “continuation of the war crimes committed by Israel”.

“On December 14 and 15, the Israeli army murdered three media professionals in northern Gaza and the central Gaza Strip,” RSF said in a statement.

“Some of the few remaining reporters in the northern region, subjected to a ground invasion by Israeli forces, were recently forced to evacuate their homes.”

RSF named three of the killed journalists as Al-Jazeera cameraman Ahmad al-Louh, a 39-year-old media worker who was was filming a report on the Palestinian Civil Defence in the Nuseirat camp when he was killed on December 15 by an air strike; Mohammed Balousha, a reporter for the Emirati channel Al-Mashhad who was mortally wounded by a targeted drone strike while reporting in the Sheikh Radwan district in northern Gaza, and correspondent Mohammed Jaber al-Qarinawi, 30, who was killed along with his wife and their three children by an isolated air strike — “a sign that his home had probably been targeted”.

‘Stark reminder’ on media attacks, says RSF
RSF’s director of campaigns Rebecca Vincent said: “These latest killings are a stark reminder of the ongoing assault by Israeli forces against media professionals in northern Gaza, where the handful of journalists remaining are now at risk of disappearing altogether.

“In parallel to ongoing attacks on media in central Gaza where displaced persons are now seeking refuge, this is a clear continuation of the Israeli authorities’ attempts to control the narrative on its war through any means possible.

“We repeat in the strongest possible terms that targeting journalists is a war crime, and these atrocious attacks must stop. It is time for concrete action by other states — in particular Israel’s allies — to urge the Israeli government to immediately comply with international law.”

Ninety-six percent of Gaza’s journalists have been forcibly evacuated from their homes, and 92 percent have lost essential reporting equipment, according to data from RSF’s local NGO partner, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ).

At least 141 journalists have been killed in Israel’s war in Gaza since October 7, 2023, according to the CPJ.

However, other monitoring agencies put the death toll higher — the Gaza-based Government Media Office has documented 201 killings of journalists by Israel.

Israel has continued a genocidal war on Gaza that has killed more than 45,000 people, most of them women and children, since a cross-border attack by the Palestinian group Hamas on 7 October 2023.

An Israeli air strike has killed Palestinian photojournalist Ahmed Al-Louh and five Palestinian Civil Defence workers in central Gaza’s Nuseirat camp as Tel Aviv announces that it will double illegal settlements in the Golan Heights.

Al-Louh, who worked as a cameraman for Al Jazeera alongside other media outlets, was killed yesterday in the strike on the Civil Defence post in the central Gaza camp, according to medics and local journalists.

The attack occurred as Israeli military strikes across the Gaza Strip killed at least 28 Palestinians on Sunday, medics said. Allouh is the third journalist killed in Gaza in the last 24 hours.

• READ MORE: Israeli forces bomb another UN-run school in Gaza, kill 20 Palestinians
• Global watchdog condemns Fiji for ‘blocking’ protest marches over Gaza genocide
• Other Gaza and Syria reports

Meanwhile, the Israeli government has approved a plan to increase the number of settlers in the illegally occupied Golan Heights, days after seizing more Syrian territory following the ousting of Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad, reports Al Jazeera.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the government had “unanimously approved” the “demographic development” of the occupied territory, which would seek to double the Israeli population there.

This new settlement plan is only for the portion of the Golan Heights that Israel has occupied since 1967. In 1981, Israel’s parliamentary Knesset moved to impose Israeli law over the territory, in an effective annexation.

Al Jazeera Arabic reports that journalist Al-louh was working while he was killed, wearing a “press” vest and helmet. He was taken to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Gaza’s city of Deir el-Balah.

Al Jazeera condemns ‘heinous crime’
Al Jazeera Media Network condemned Al-Louh’s killing, and called on human rights and media organisations “to condemn the Israeli Occupation’s systematic killing of journalists in cold blood, the evasion of responsibilities under international humanitarian law, and to bring the perpetrators of this heinous crime to justice”.

Israeli strike kills Al Jazeera journalist.        Video: CNN News

“We urge relevant international legal institutions to take practical and urgent measures to hold the Israeli authorities and all those who are responsible accountable for their heinous crimes and to adopt mechanisms to put an end to the targeting and killing of journalists,” the network added.

Al-Louh had been covering Israel’s war on Gaza when it first began in October 2023, embedded with the Gaza Strip’s Palestinian Civil Defence teams, Al Jazeera reporter Hind Khoudary said.

Gaza’s media office said the head of the civil emergency service in Nuseirat, Nedal Abu Hjayyer, was also killed in Sunday’s attack.

“The civil emergency headquarters in Nuseirat camp was hit during the crews’ presence. They work around the clock to serve the people,” said Zaki Emadeldeen from the civil emergency service to reporters at the hospital.

“The civil emergency service is a humanitarian service and not political. They work in war and peace times for the service of the people,” he said, adding that the place was hit directly by an Israeli air strike.

The Israeli military said they were looking into the attack.

Journalists ‘paying highest price’
“Since the war in Gaza started, journalists have been paying the highest price — their lives – for their reporting. Without protection, equipment, international presence, communications, or food and water, they are still doing their crucial jobs to tell the world the truth,” said Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) programme director Carlos Martinez de la Serna in New York.

“Every time a journalist is killed, injured, arrested, or forced to go to exile, we lose fragments of the truth. Those responsible for these casualties face dual trials: one under international law and another before history’s unforgiving gaze.”

Several other Palestinian journalists were killed this past week, with 195 killed in Gaza since Israel’s war began, Khoudary said.

Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud said earlier on Sunday that Palestinian journalist Mohammed Jabr al-Qrinawi was killed along with his wife and children in an Israeli air attack that targeted their home in Bureij refugee camp, in central Gaza, late on Saturday.

Earlier on Saturday, Al Mashhad Media said its journalist Mohammed Balousha was killed in an Israeli attack in Gaza.

Several AJ journalists killed
Several Al Jazeera journalists have been killed since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, including Ismail al-Ghoul, Rami al-Rifi, Samer Abudaqa and Hamza Dahdouh.

Also on Sunday, an air strike hit people protecting aid trucks west of Gaza City. Medics said several were killed or wounded but exact figures were not yet available.

Residents also said at least 11 people were killed in three separate Israeli air strikes in Gaza City. Nine were killed in the towns of Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoon and Jabalia camp when clusters of houses were bombed or set ablaze, and two were killed by drone fire in Rafah.

Earlier on Sunday, at least 15 Palestinians were killed after Israeli forces stormed Khalil Oweida School in Beit Hanoon, sources told Al Jazeera.

Several other Israeli attacks earlier on Sunday killed Palestinians near Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza; and in Shujayea, in Khan Younis.

According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, at least 44,976 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since October 7, 2023.

Pacific Media Watch, Al Jazeera and news agencies.

SPECIAL REPORT: By Joe Hendren

Since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon I can’t help but think of a friend I met in Beirut.

He worked at the Regis Hotel, where I stayed in February 2015.

At one point, he offered to make me a Syrian dish popular in his hometown of Aleppo. I have long remembered his kindness; I only wish I remembered his name.

• READ MORE: US vetoes Gaza ceasefire resolution — Hezbollah set for ‘long war’
• How was a UN aid convoy robbed near Israeli military positions?
• Other Gaza, Lebanon reports

At the time, his home city was being destroyed. A flashpoint of the Syrian Civil War, the Battle of Aleppo lasted four long years. He didn’t mention this of course.

I was lucky to visit Lebanon when I did. So much has happened since then.

Economic crisis and a tragic port explosion
Mass protests took over Lebanese streets in October 2019 in response to government plans to tax WhatsApp calls. The scope of the protests soon widened, as Lebanese people voiced their frustrations with ongoing economic turmoil and corruption.

A few months later, the covid-19 pandemic arrived, deepening the economic crisis and claiming 10,000 lives.

On 4 August 2020, the centre of Beirut was rocked by one of the largest non nuclear explosions in history when a large amount of ammonium nitrate stored at the Port of Beirut detonated. The explosion killed 218 people and left an estimated 300,000 homeless. The government of Hassin Diab resigned but continued in a “caretaker” capacity.

Tens of thousands of protesters returned to the streets demanding accountability and the downfall of Lebanon’s political ruling class. While some protesters threw stones and other projectiles, an Al Jazeera investigation found that security forces violated international standards on the use of force. The political elite were protected.

In 2021, The World Bank summarised the situation:

“The Lebanon financial and economic crisis is likely to rank in the top 10, possibly top three, most severe crises episodes globally since the mid-nineteenth century. This is a conclusion of the Spring 2021 Lebanon Economic Monitor (LEM) in which the Lebanon crisis is contrasted with the most severe global crises episodes as observed by Reinhart and Rogoff (2014) over the 1857–2013 period.

“In fact, Lebanon’s GDP plummeted from close to US$ 55 billion in 2018 to an estimated US$ 33 billion in 2020, with US$ GDP/capita falling by around 40 percent. Such a brutal and rapid contraction is usually associated with conflicts or wars.”

The Lebanon Poverty and Equity Assessment, produced by the World Bank in 2024, found the share of individuals in Lebanon living under the poverty line more than tripled, rising from 12 percent to 44 percent. The depth and severity of poverty also increased over the decade between 2012 and 2022.

To make matters worse, the port explosion destroyed Lebanon’s strategic wheat reserves at a time when the war in Ukraine drove significant increases in global food prices. Annual food inflation in Lebanon skyrocketed from 7.67 percent in January 2019 to a whopping 483.15 percent for the year ending in January 2022. While food inflation has since declined, it remains high, sitting just below 20 percent for the year ending September 2024. The World Bank said:

“The sharp deterioration of the Lebanese pound, which lost 98 percent of its pre-crisis value by December 2023, propelled inflation to new heights. With imports constituting about 60 percent of the consumption basket (World Bank, 2022), the plunging currency led to triple-digit inflation which rose steeply from an annual average of 3 percent between 2011 and 2018, to 85 percent in 2019, 155 percent in 2020, and 221 percent in 2023 . . .

“Faced with falling foreign exchange reserves, the government withdrew subsidies on medication, fuel, and wheat further fuelling rising costs of healthcare and transport (Figure 1.2). Rapid inflation acted effectively as a highly regressive tax, striking hardest at the poor and those with fixed, lira-denominated incomes.” 

The ongoing crisis of the Lebanese economy has amplified the power of Hezbollah, a paramilitary group formed in 1982 in response to Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon.

“Hezbollah is famous for entrenching its power in an elaborate social infrastructure of Islamic welfare. The social grip of those structures and services is increased by the ongoing crisis of the Lebanese economy. When the medical service fails, desperate families turn to the Hezbollah-run health service,” says Adam Tooze

As banks imposed capital controls, many Lebanese lost confidence in the financial system. The financial arm of Hezbollah, the al-Quad al-Hassan Association (AQAH), experienced a significant increase in clients, despite being subject to US Treasury sanctions since 2007.

The US accuses Hezbollah of using AQAH as a front to manage its financial activities. When a 28-year-old engineer, Hassan Shoumar, was locked out of his dollar accounts in late 2019, he redirected his money into his account at AQAH: “What I care about is that when I want my money, I can get it.”

While Hezbollah portrays itself as “the resistance”, as a member of the governing coalition in Lebanon, it also forms an influential part of the political elite. Adam Tooze gives an example of how the political elite is still looking after itself:

“[T]he Lebanese Parliament in a grotesque act of self-dealing in January 2024 passed a budget that promised to close the budget deficit of 12.8 of GDP by raising regressive value-added tax while decreasing the progressive taxes levied on capital gains, real estate and investments.

“For lack of reforms, the IMF [International Monetary Fund] is refusing to disburse any of the $3bn package that are allocated to Lebanon.”

While the protest movement called for a “technocratic” government in Lebanon, the experiences of Greece and other countries facing financial difficulties suggest such governments can pose their own risks, especially when they involve unelected “experts” in prominent positions.

One example is the political reaction to the counterproductive austerity programme imposed on Greece by the European Commission, European Central Bank and IMF in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. This demonstrates how the demands of international investors can conflict with the needs of the local population.

Lebanon carries more than its fair share of refugees
Lebanon currently hosts the largest number of refugees per capita in the world, despite its scarce resources. This began as an overflow from the Syrian conflict in 2011, with nearly 1.2 million ‘displaced’ Syrians in Lebanon registered with UNHCR by May 2015.

When I visited Lebanon in 2015, I tried to grasp the scale of the refugee issue. In terms of population, Lebanon is comparable to New Zealand, with both countries having just over 5 million people.

I imagined what New Zealand would be like if it attempted to host a million refugees in addition to its general population. Yet in terms of land area Lebanon is only 10,400 square kilometres — about the size of New Zealand’s Marlborough region at the top of the South Island.

Now, imagine accommodating a population of over 5 million in such a small space, with more than a fifth of them being refugees.

While it was encouraging to see New Zealand increase its refugee quota to 1500 places in July 2020, we could afford to do much more in the current situation. This includes creating additional visa pathways for those fleeing Gaza and Lebanon.

#BREAKING
United States VETOES Security Council draft resolution that would have demanded an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, and the release of all hostages

RESULT
In Favor: 14
Against: 1 (US)
Abstain: 0 pic.twitter.com/BpUj5xhJHE

— UN News (@UN_News_Centre) November 20, 2024

On top of all that – Israeli attacks and illegal booby traps
Since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the ongoing Israeli invasion of Gaza, Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged fire across Lebanon’s southern border.

Israel makes much of the threat of rocket attacks on Israel from Hezbollah. However, data from US based non-profit organisation Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) shows Israel carried out 81 percent of the 10,214 attacks between between the two parties from October 7, 2023, and September 20, 2024.

These attacks resulted in 752 deaths in Lebanon, including 50 children. In contrast, Hezbollah’s attacks, largely centred on military targets, killed at least 33 Israelis.

Hezbollah continues to offer an immediate ceasefire, so long as a ceasefire also applies to Gaza, but Israel has refused these terms.

While the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) disputed these figures as an “oversimplification”, the IDF do not appear to dispute the reported number of Lebanese casualties. Hezbollah continues to offer an immediate ceasefire, so long as a ceasefire also applies to Gaza, but Israel has refused these terms.

In a further escalation, thousands of handheld pagers and walkie-talkies used in both civilian and military contexts in Lebanon and Syria suddenly exploded on September 17 and 18.

Israel attempted to deny responsibility, with Israeli President Isaac Herzog claiming he “rejects out of hand any connection” to the attack. However, 12 defence and intelligence officials, briefed on the attack, anonymously confirmed to The New York Times that Israel was behind the operation.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later boasted during a cabinet meeting that he had personally approved the pager attack. The New York Times described the aftermath:

“Powered by just a few ounces of an explosive compound concealed within the devices, the blasts sent grown men flying off motorcycles and slamming into walls, according to witnesses and video footage. People out shopping fell to the ground, writhing in agony, smoke snaking from their pockets.”

The exploding devices killed 42 people and injured more than 3500, with many victims losing one or both of their hands or eyes. At least four of the dead were children.

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikatri called the explosions “a serious violation of Lebanese sovereignty and a crime by all standards”.

While around eight Hezbollah fighters were among the dead, most of those killed worked in administration roles and did not take part in hostilities. Under international humanitarian law targeting non-combatants is illegal.

Additionally, the UN Protocol on Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices also prohibits the use of “booby-traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects which are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material”. Israel is a signatory to this UN Protocol.

Israel’s decision to turn ordinary consumer devices into illegal booby traps could backfire. While Israel frequently stresses the importance of its technology sector to its economy, who is going to buy technology associated with Israel now that the IDF have demonstrated its ability to indiscriminately weaponise consumer devices at any time?

International industry buyers will source elsewhere. Such a “silent boycott” could give greater momentum to the call from Palestinian civil society for boycotts, divestments and economic sanctions against Israel.

The booby trap pagers are also likely to affect the decisions of foreign airlines to service Israel on the grounds of safety. Since the war began in October 2023, the number of foreign airlines calling on Ben Gurion Airport in Israel has fallen significantly. Consequently, the cost of a round-trip ticket from the United States to Tel Aviv has risen sharply, from approximately $900 to $2500.

Israel targets civilian infrastructure in Lebanon
Israel has also targeted civilian organisations linked to Hezbollah, such emergency services, hospitals and medical centres operated by the Islamic Health Society (IHS). Israel claims Hezbollah is “using the IHS as a cover for terrorist activities”. This apparently includes digging people out of buildings, as search and rescue teams have also been targeted and killed.

Israel accuses the microloan charity AQAH of funding “Hezbollah’s terror activities”, including purchasing weapons and making payments to Hezbollah fighters. On October 20, Israel attacked 30 branches of AQAH across Lebanon, drawing condemnation from both Amnesty International and the United Nations.

Ben Saul, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-terrorism maintains AQAH is not a lawful military target: “International humanitarian law does not permit attacks on the economic or financial infrastructure of an adversary, even if they indirectly sustain its military activities.”

On top of all that — an Israeli invasion
In 1982, Israel attempted to use war to alter the political situation in Lebanon, with counterproductive results, including the creation of Hezbollah. In 2006, Hezbollah used the hilly terrain of southern Lebanon to beat Israel to a stalemate. Israel risks similar counterproductive outcomes again, at the cost of many more lives.

Yet on 1 October 2024, Israel launched a ground invasion of Lebanon, alongside strikes on Beirut, Sidon and border villages. The IDF confirmed the action on Twitter/X, promising a “limited, localised and targeted” operation against “Hezbollah terrorist targets” in southern Lebanon. One US official noted that Israel had framed its 1982 invasion as a limited incursion, which eventually turned into an 18-year occupation.

Israeli strikes have since expanded all over the country. According to figures provided by the Lebanese Ministry of Public Heath on November 13, Israel is responsible for the deaths of at least 3365 people in Lebanon, including 216 children and 192 health workers. More than 14,000 people have been wounded, and more than one million have been displaced from their homes.

Since September 30, 47 Israeli troops have been killed in combat in Southern Lebanon. Around 45 civilians in northern Israel have died due to rocket fire from Lebanon.

So, on top of an economic crisis, runaway inflation, unaffordable food, increasing poverty, the port explosion and covid-19, the Lebanese people now face a war that shows little signs of stopping.

Analysts suggest there is little chance of a ceasefire while Israel retains its “maximalist” demands, which include a full surrender of Hezbollah and allowing Israel to continue to attack targets in southern Lebanon.

A senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, Mohanad Hage Ali, believes Israel is feigning diplomacy to push the blame on Hezbollah. The best chance may come alongside a ceasefire in Gaza, but Israel shows little signs of negotiating meaningfully on that front either.

On September 26, the Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah BouHabib summarised the mood of the country in the wake of the pager attack:

“[N]obody expected the war to be taken in that direction. We Lebanese—we’ve had enough war. We’ve had fifteen years of war. . . .We’d like to live without war—happily, as a tourist country, a beautiful country, good food—and we are not able to do it. And so there is a lot of depression, especially with the latest escalation.”

In Aotearoa New Zealand, the Māori phrase “Kia kaha” means “stand strong”. If I could send a message from halfway across the world, it would be: “Kia kaha Lebanon. I look forward to the day I can visit you again, and munch on a yummy Za’atar man’ousheh while admiring the view from the beautiful Corniche Beirut.”

Joe Hendren holds a PhD in international business from the University of Auckland. He has more than 20 years of experience as a researcher, including work in the New Zealand Parliament, for trade unions and on various research projects. This is his first article for Asia Pacific Report. His blog can be found at http://joehendren.substack.com

The International Press Institute (IPI) has strongly condemned the Israeli government’s recent decision to revoke the press passes of Al Jazeera journalists, months after the global news outlet was banned in the country.

“The Israeli government’s decision to revoke Al Jazeera press passes highlights a broader and deeply alarming pattern of harassment of journalists and attacks on press freedom in Israel and the region,” IPI interim executive director Scott Griffen said.

The Israeli government announced it will be revoking all press passes previously issued to Al Jazeera journalists.

• READ MORE: Hezbollah blames Israel after Lebanon pager blasts killed at least 9 and wounded 2750 across Lebanon and Syria
• UN General Assembly debates end to Israeli occupation of Palestine
• Beyond Gaza: The terror in the West Bank

Nitzan Chen, director of Israel’s Government Press Office (GPO), announced the decision via X on Thursday, accusing Al Jazeera of spreading “false content” and “incitement against Israelis”.

Use of press office cards in the course of the journalists’ work could in itself “jeopardise state security at this time”, claimed Chen.

The journalists affected by the decision would be given a hearing before their passes are officially revoked.

While the GPO press card is not mandatory, without it a journalist in Israel will not be able to access Parliament, Israeli government ministries, or military infrastructure.

Only Israeli recognised pass
It is also the only card recognised at Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank.

Griffen said the move was indicative of a “systematic effort” by Israeli authorities to “expand its control over media reporting about Israel, including reporting on and from Gaza”.

He added: “We strongly urge Israel to respect freedom of the press and access to information, which are fundamental human rights that all democracies must respect and protect.”

In May, Israel’s cabinet unanimously voted to shut down Al Jazeera in the country, immediately ordering the closure of its offices and a ban on the company’s broadcasts.

At the time, Al Jazeera described it as a “criminal act” and warned that Israel’s suppression of the free press “stands in contravention of international and humanitarian law”.

GPO Director Nitzan Chen: “Al Jazeera disseminates false content, which includes incitement against Israelis and Jews and constitutes a threat to IDF soldiers. Use of GPO cards in the course of the journalists’ work could in itself jeopardize state security at this time”.
(2/3)

— Gov’t Press Office (@GPOIsrael) September 12, 2024

Al Jazeera is widely regarded as the most balanced global news network covering the war on Gaza in contrast to many Western news services perceived as biased in favour of Israel.

Media freedom petition rejected
A petition for military authorities to allow foreign journalists to report inside Gaza was rejected by the Israeli Supreme Court in January 2024.

IPI and other media watchdogs have repeatedly called on Israel to allow international media access to Gaza and ensure the safety of journalists.

At least 173 Palestinian journalists are reported to have been killed in Israel’s war on Gaza with the latest killing of reporter Abdullah Shakshak, who was shot by an Israeli military quadcopter in Rafah in southern Gaza.

UN General Assembly debates end to Israeli occupation of Palestine.    Video: Al Jazeera

Deadly pager attack
Meanwhile, the deadly en masse explosion of pagers in Lebanon and Syria killing 11 and wounding almost 3000 people that has widely been attributed to Israel raises questions about what the end game may be, amid rising tensions in the region, say analysts.

Mairav Zonszein, a senior Israeli analyst at the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera that the attack was something that Israel had had in the works for several months and risked losing if Hezbollah became suspicious.

This concern may have led the Israeli army to trigger the blasts, but Israel’s strategy overall remains unclear.

“Where is Israel going to go from here? This question still hasn’t been answered,” Zonszein said.

“Without a ceasefire in Gaza, it’s unclear how Israel plans to de-escalate, or if Netanyahu is in fact trying to spark a broader war,” the analyst added, noting that more Israeli troops were now stationed in the West Bank and along the northern border than in the Gaza Strip.

In a historic moment, Palestine, newly promoted to observer status at the UN General Assembly (UNGA), has submitted a draft resolution at the body demanding an end to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories.

Building on a recent International Court of Justice ruling, the resolution calls for Israel to withdraw its troops, halt settlement expansion, and return land taken since 1967 within 12 months.

While the US opposes the resolution, it has no veto power in the UNGA, and the body has previously supported Palestinian recognition.

The resolution, which will be voted on by UNGA members today, is not legally binding, but reflects global opinion as leaders gather for high-level UN meetings next week.

A month before the anniversary of the death of photojournalist Issam Abdallah — killed by an Israeli strike while reporting in southern Lebanon — Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and 10 organisations have sent a letter to the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel.

The letter supports a request made by Abdallah’s family in July for an investigation into the crime, reports RSF.

According to the findings of Reuters and Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agencies, and the NGOs Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the shooting that killed Abdallah and injured journalists from AFP, Reuters, and Al Jazeera on 13 October 2023 originated from an Israeli tank.

• READ MORE: RSF video investigation into the death of Reuters reporter Issam Abdallah in Lebanon: the journalists’ vehicle was explicitly targeted
• Palestine: Impunity persists two years after the Israeli army’s murder of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh

A sixth  investigation, conducted by the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), found that “an Israeli tank killed Reuters reporter Issam Abdallah in Lebanon last year by firing two 120 mm rounds at a group of ‘clearly identifiable journalists’ in violation of international law,” according to Reuters.

Based on these findings, RSF and 10 human rights organisations sent a letter to the United Nations this week urging it to conduct an official investigation into the attack.

The letter, dated September 13, was specifically sent to the UN’s Commission of Inquiry charged with investigating possible international crimes and violations of international human rights law committed in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories since 7 October 2023.

With this letter, RSF and the co-signatories express their support for a similar request for an investigation into the circumstances of Abdallah’s murder, made by the reporter’s family last June which remains unanswered at the time of this writing.

Rare Israeli responses
Rarely does Israel respond on investigations over journalists killed in Palestine, including Gaza, and Lebanon.

Two years after the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank on 11 May 2022, and a year after Israel’s official apology acknowledging its responsibility, justice has yet to be delivered for the charismatic Al Jazeera journalist.

At least 134 journalists and media workers have been killed since Israeli’s war on Gaza began.

Jonathan Dagher, team leader of RSF’s Middle East bureau, wrote about tbe Abdallah case:

“Issam Abdallah a été tué par l’armée israélienne, caméra à la main, vêtu de son gilet siglé ‘PRESS’ et de son casque.

“Dans le contexte de la violence croissante contre les journalistes dans la région, ce crime bien documenté dans de nombreuses enquêtes ne doit pas rester impuni.

“La justice pour Issam ouvre une voie solide vers la justice pour tous les reporters.

>“Nous exhortons la Commission à se saisir de cette affaire et à nous aider à mener les auteurs de cette attaque odieuse contre des journalistes courageux et professionnels à rendre des comptes.”

A global media watchdog has expressed concern for the safety of an Al Jazeera reporter after false claims by the Israeli military.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said it was concerned for Anas al-Sharif, Al Jazeera Arabic’s correspondent in northern Gaza, after an Israel military spokesperson accused him of “presenting a lie” in his coverage of Israel’s air strike on al-Tabin School on August 10.

The Israeli military claimed al-Sharif was “‘covering up’ for Hamas and Islamic Jihad after Israel killed dozens in its strike on a Gaza City school complex,” said CPJ programme director Carlos Martinez de la Serna.

• READ MORE: Guessing game over when Iran is about to strike Israel over assassination
• Israel ‘deliberately’ caused civilian death in al-Tabin strike: Exclusive
• Other Israel’s war on Gaza reports

The strike killed some 100 people in a building housing Palestinians displaced by the war on the besieged enclave.

“Al Jazeera journalists have been paying a devastating price for documenting the war. They and all journalists should be protected and allowed to work freely,” Martinez de la Serna said.

Israel claims Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad were operating from a mosque in the school complex.

Al-Sharif has been threatened previously over his work and his father was killed on December 11, 2023, in an Israeli air strike on the family home in Jabalia.

CPJ has documented the killing of at least seven journalists and media workers affiliated with Al Jazeera — which Israel has banned from operating inside Israel — since October 7.

‘Blatant intimidation’
In an earlier statement made by the Al Jazeera Media Network, it described the Israeli military views as a “blatant act of intimidation and incitement against our colleague Anas Al-Sharif”.

“Such remarks are not only an attack on Anas’s character and integrity but also a clear attempt to stifle the truth and silence those who are courageously reporting from Gaza.”

Meanwhile, Jordan’s Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ayman Safadi, has also accused the Israeli government of lying.

“No amount of disinformation by radical Israeli officials spreading lies, including about Jordan, will change the fact that Israel’s continued aggression on Gaza . . .  [is] the biggest threat to regional security,” he said.

In a post on X, Safadi added: “The facts about the horrors this most radical of Israeli governments is bringing upon innocent Palestinian[s] . . .  and the threat of its illegal actions and radical policies to the security and stability of [the] region are so clear and documented.

“No propaganda campaigns, no lies, no fabrications can cover that.”

On Wednesday, the Israeli army killed two more Palestinian journalists in Gaza.

Ismail al-Ghoul and Rami al-Rifi were working when they were struck by Israeli forces in Gaza City.

Al-Ghoul, whose Al Jazeera reports were popular among Arab audiences, was wearing a press vest at the time he was killed.

• READ MORE: Targeting of Gaza’s journalists continues: Ismail al-Ghoul and Rami al-Rifi killed in Israeli strike
• Al Jazeera journalist, cameraman killed in Israeli attack on Gaza
• Other Israeli War on Gaza reports

The latest killings bring Israel’s world-record journalist kill total to at least 113 during the current genocide in Gaza, according to the more conservative estimate. However, the Gaza Media Office has documented at least 165 media people being killed by Israeli forces.

No other world conflict has killed as many journalists in recent memory.

Israel has a long history of violently targeting journalists, so their Gaza kill total is not necessarily surprising.

In fact, a 2023 Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) report documented a “decades-long pattern” of Israel targeting and killing Palestinian journalists.

Targeted attacks
For example, a Human Rights Watch investigation found that Israel targeted “journalists and media facilities” on four separate occasions in 2012. During the attacks, two journalists were killed, and many others were injured.

In 2019, a United Nations commission found that Israel “intentionally shot” a pair of Palestinian journalists in 2018, killing both.

More recently, in 2022, Israel shot and killed Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank.

Israel attempted to deny responsibility, as it almost always does after it carries out an atrocity, but video evidence was overwhelming, and Israel was forced to admit guilt.

There have been no consequences for the soldier who fired at Abu Akleh, who had been wearing a press vest and a press helmet, or for the Israelis involved in the other incidents targeting journalists.

CPJ has suggested that Israeli security forces enjoy “almost blanket immunity” in incidents of attacks on journalists.

Given this broader context, Israel’s targeting of journalists during the current genocide is genuinely not surprising, or out of the ordinary.

Relative silence
However, what is truly surprising, and even shocking, is the relative silence of Western journalists.

While there has certainly been some reportage and sympathy in North America and Europe, particularly from watchdog organisations like the CPJ and Reporters Without Borders (RSF), there is little sense of journalistic solidarity, and certainly nothing approaching widespread outrage and uproar about the threat Israel’s actions pose to press freedoms.

Can we imagine for a moment what the Western journalistic reaction might be if Russian forces killed more than 100 journalists in Ukraine in under a year?

Even when Western news outlets have reported on Palestinian journalists killed since the start of the current war, coverage has tended to give Israel the benefit of the doubt, often framing the killings as “unintentional casualties” of modern warfare.

Also, Western journalism’s overwhelming reliance on pro-Israel sources has ensured the avoidance of colourful adjectives and condemnations.

Moreover, overreliance on pro-Israel sources has sometimes made it difficult to determine which party to the conflict was responsible for specific killings.

BREAKING: Al Jazeera “journalist” Ismail al-Ghoul has reportedly been killed in Gaza.

Everything you need to know about him can be found in my thread below pic.twitter.com/HZq9I3b0wP

— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) July 31, 2024

A unique case?
One might assume here that Western news outlets have simply been maintaining their devotion to stated Western reporting principles of detachment and neutrality.

But, in other situations, Western journalists have shown that they are indeed capable of making quite a fuss, and also of demonstrating solidarity.

The 2015 killing of 12 Charlie Hebdo journalists and cartoonists provides a useful case in point.

Following that attack, a genuine media spectacle ensued, with seemingly the entire institution of Western journalism united to focus on the event.

Thousands of reports were generated within weeks, a solidarity hashtag (“Je suis Charlie,” or “I am Charlie”) went viral, and statements and sentiments of solidarity poured in from Western journalists, news outlets and organisations dedicated to principles of free speech.

For example, America’s Society of Professional Journalists called the attack on Charlie Hebdo “barbaric” and an “attempt to stifle press freedom”.

Freedom House issued a similarly harsh commendation, calling the attack “horrific,” and noting that it constituted a “direct threat to the right of freedom of expression”.

PEN America and the British National Secular Society presented awards to Charlie Hebdo and the Guardian Media Group donated a massive sum to the publication.

All journalists threatened
The relative silence and calm of Western journalists over the killing of at least 100 Palestinian journalists in Gaza is especially shocking when one considers the larger context of Israel’s war on journalism, which threatens all journalists.

In October, around the time the current war began, Israel told Western news agencies that it would not guarantee the safety of journalists entering Gaza.

Ever since, Israel has maintained a ban on international journalists, even working to prevent them from entering Gaza during a brief November 2023 pause in fighting.

More importantly, perhaps, Israel has used its sway in the West to direct and control Western news narratives about the war.

Western news outlets have often obediently complied with Israeli manipulation tactics.

For example, as global outrage was mounting against Israel in December 2023, Israel put out false reports of mass, systematic rape against Israeli women by Palestinian fighters on October 7.

Western news outlets, including The New York Times, were suckered in. They downplayed the growing outrage against Israel and began prominently highlighting the “systematic rape” story.

ICJ provisional measures
Later, in January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued provisional measures against Israel.

Israel responded almost immediately by issuing absurd terrorism accusations against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).

Western news outlets downplayed the provisional measures story, which was highly critical of Israel, and spotlighted the allegations against UNRWA, which painted Palestinians in a negative light.

These and other examples of Israeli manipulation of Western news narratives are part of a broader pattern of influence that predates the current war.

One empirical study found that Israel routinely times attacks, especially those likely to kill Palestinian civilians, in ways that ensure they will be ignored or downplayed by US news media.

During the current genocide, Western news organisations have also tended to ignore the broad pattern of censorship of pro-Palestine content on social media, a fact which should concern anyone interested in freedom of expression.

It’s easy to point to a handful of Western news reports and investigations which have been critical of some Israeli actions during the current genocide.

But these reports have been lost in a sea of acquiescence to Israeli narratives and overall pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian framing.

Several studies, including analyses by the Centre for Media Monitoring and the Intercept, demonstrated overwhelming evidence of pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian framing in Western news reportage of the current war.

Is Western journalism dead?
Many journalists in the United States and Europe position themselves as truth-tellers, critical of power, and watchdogs.

While they acknowledge mistakes in reporting, journalists often see themselves and their news organisations as appropriately striving for fairness, accuracy, comprehensiveness, balance, neutrality and detachment.

But this is the great myth of Western journalism.

A large body of scholarly literature suggests that Western news outlets do not come close to living up to their stated principles.

Israel’s war on Gaza has further exposed news outlets as fraudulent.

With few exceptions, news outlets in North America and Europe have abandoned their stated principles and failed to support Palestinian colleagues being targeted and killed en masse.

Amid such spectacular failure and the extensive research indicating that Western news outlets fall well short of their ideals, we must ask whether it is useful to continue to maintain the myth of the Western journalistic ideal.

Is Western journalism, as envisioned, dead?

Mohamad Elmasry is professor in the Media Studies programme at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar. Republished from Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera Arabic journalist Ismail al-Ghoul and his cameraman Rami al-Rifi have been killed in an Israeli air attack on the Gaza Strip, reports Al Jazeera.

The reporters were killed when their car was hit on Wednesday in the Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City, according to initial information.

They were in the area to report from near the Gaza house of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas who was assassinated in the early hours of Wednesday in Iran’s capital, Tehran, in an attack the group has blamed on Israel.

• READ MORE: Haniyeh killing ‘dangerous escalation’ as fears of Gaza war spillover grow
• Other Israeli War on Gaza reports

Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif, reporting from Gaza, was at the hospital where the bodies of his two colleagues were brought.

“Ismail was conveying the suffering of the displaced Palestinians and the suffering of the wounded and the massacres committed by the [Israeli] occupation against the innocent people in Gaza,” he said.

“The feeling — no words can describe what happened.”

Ismail and Rami were wearing media vests and there were identifying signs on their car when they were attacked. They had last contacted their news desk 15 minutes before the strike.

During the call, they had reported a strike on a house near to where they were reporting and were told to leave immediately. They did, and were traveling to Al-Ahli Arab Hospital when they were killed.

There was no immediate comment by Israel, which has previously denied targeting journalists in its 10-month war on Gaza, which has killed at least 39,445 people, the vast majority of whom were children and women.

Al Jazeera journalist and cameraman killed in Israeli attack on Gaza. Video: Al Jazeera

In a statement, Al Jazeera Media Network called the killings a “targeted assassination” by Israeli forces and pledged to “pursue all legal actions to prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes”.

“This latest attack on Al Jazeera journalists is part of a systematic targeting campaign against the network’s journalists and their families since October 2023,” the network said.

According to preliminary figures by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least 111 journalists and media workers are among those killed since the start of the war on October 7. The Gaza government media office has put the figure at 165 Palestinian journalists killed since the war began.

Mohamed Moawad, Al Jazeera Arabic managing editor, said the Qatar-based network’s journalists were killed on Wednesday as they were “courageously covering the events in northern Gaza”.

Ismail was renowned for his professionalism and dedication, bringing the world’s attention to the suffering and atrocities committed in Gaza, especially at al-Shifa Hospital and the northern neighbourhoods of the besieged enclave.

His wife has been living in a camp for internally displaced people in central Gaza and had not seen her husband for months. He is also survived by a young daughter.

Both Ismail and Rami were born in 1997.

“Without Ismail, the world would not have seen the devastating images of these massacres,” Moawad wrote on X, adding that al-Ghoul “relentlessly covered the events and delivered the reality of Gaza to the world through Al Jazeera”.

“His voice has now been silenced, and there is no longer a need to call out to the world Ismail fulfilled his mission to his people and his homeland,” Moawad said. “Shame on those who have failed the civilians, journalists, and humanity.”

String of journalist killings
The killings on Wednesday bring the total number of Al Jazeera journalists killed in Gaza since the beginning of the war to four.

In December, Al Jazeera Arabic journalist Samer Abudaqa was killed in an Israeli strike in Khan Younis. Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael Dahdouh, was also wounded in that attack.

Dadouh’s wife, son, daughter and grandson had been killed in an Israeli air raid on the Nuseirat refugee camp in October.

In January, Dahdouh’s son, Hamza, who was also an Al Jazeera journalist, was killed in an Israeli missile strike in Khan Younis.

Prior to the war, Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh was shot dead by an Israeli soldier as she covered an Israeli raid in Jenin in the occupied West Bank in May 2022. While Israel has acknowledged its soldier likely fatally shot Abu Akleh, it has not pursued any criminal investigation into her death.

Reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza on Wednesday, Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary reflected on the daily dangers journalists face.

“We do everything [to stay safe]. We wear our press jackets. We wear our helmets. We try not to go anywhere that is not safe. We try to go to places where we can maintain our security,” she said.

“But we have been targeted in normal places where normal citizens are.”

She added: “We’re trying to do everything, but at the same time, we want to report, we want to tell the world what’s going on.”

Jodie Ginsberg, the president of the CPJ, said the killing of al-Ghoul and al-Refee is the latest example of the risks of documenting the war in Gaza, which is the deadliest conflict for journalists the organisation has documented in 30 years.

Ginsberg told Al Jazeera the organisation haD found at least three journalists had been directly targeted by Israeli forces in Gaza since the war began.

She said CPJ was investigating an additional 10 cases, while noting the difficulty of determining the full details without access to Gaza.

“That’s not just a pattern we’ve seen in this conflict, it appears to be part of a broader [Israeli] strategy that aims to stifle the information coming out of Gaza,” Ginsberg said, citing the ban on Al Jazeera from reporting in Israel as part of this trend.

Haggai Matar, executive director of the independent +972 Magazine, has described the Tel Aviv government’s decision to shut down Al Jazeera in Israel as “an attack on free speech and freedom of the press”.

The Israeli journalist told Al Jazeera the ban was “clearly a criminal and very dangerous decision”.

He described the move as an attack on Israel itself because it denies the country’s citizens alternative sources of information.

• READ MORE: Al Jazeera condemns Israeli government decision to shut down local offices

“We have very limited access to information coming out of Gaza in Israeli media outlets,” Matar said.

He said the absence of Al Jazeera journalists within Israel meant that different voices from Israeli society would also be heard less around the world.

His condemnation joined criticism from media freedom watchdogs and news media around the world.

+972 Magazine is an independent, online, nonprofit magazine run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists.

Founded in 2010, its mission is described on its website as to provide in-depth reporting, analysis, and opinions from the ground in Israel-Palestine.

The name of the site is derived from the telephone country code that can be used to dial throughout Israel-Palestine.

Al Jazeera’s final report from Israel before the ban.     Video: AJ

The Israeli government decision to close the award-winning Al Jazeera network’s operations in Israel came just two days after World Press Freedom Day when the Palestinian journalists covering the war on Gaza were awarded the Guillermo Cano world press freedom prize.

Al Jazeera Media Network condemned the Israeli government’s decision as a “criminal act” and warned that the country’s suppression of the free press “stands in contravention of international and humanitarian law”.

‘Violates human rights’
“Al Jazeera Media Network strongly condemns and denounces this criminal act that violates human rights and the basic right to access of information. Al Jazeera affirms its right to continue to provide news and information to its global audiences,” the network said in a statement last night.

“Israel’s ongoing suppression of the free press, seen as an effort to conceal its actions in the Gaza Strip, stands in contravention of international and humanitarian law.

Israel’s direct targeting and killing of journalists, arrests, intimidation and threats will not deter Al Jazeera from its commitment to cover, whilst more than 140 Palestinian journalists have been killed since the beginning of the war on Gaza.

“The Network vehemently rejects the allegations presented by Israeli authorities suggesting professional media standards have been violated. It reaffirms its unwavering commitment to the values embodied by its Code of Ethics,” it said.

The statement comes after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet voted unanimously to close Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel, weeks after Israel’s Parliament passed a law allowing the temporary closure of foreign broadcasters considered to be a threat to national security during the seven-month war in Gaza.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the National Press Club has condemned the Israeli government’s ban on Al Jazeera, calling it a “wrong” move for the country, for Palestinians and the rest of the world.

Emily Wilkins, the president of the National Press Club, said the group fully supports Al Jazeera’s decision to fight the case in court.

“As a democracy, the people of Israel depend upon the free flow of information,  particularly right now when the decisions their government is making are so enormously impactful for the future of their country’s relationships in the Middle East and with the broader international community,” she said.

“Most chilling about this decision is what it will mean for Al Jazeera  journalists and crews  working and living in Gaza.

“They are not mentioned in the government decision. By branding Al Jazeera as a national security threat, we are deeply concerned that the Israeli government  may view  them as legitimate military targets. They are not.”

Along with the devastating death toll – now almost 35,000 people, hundreds of aid workers and hundreds of medical staff have been killed in the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza — journalists have also paid a terrible price.

By far the worst of any war.

In Vietnam, 63 journalists were killed in two decades.

• READ MORE: Auckland Palestine rally honours Gaza journalists for freedom award
• Netanyahu government votes to close Al Jazeera channel in Israel
• Other War on Gaza reports

The Second World War was worse, with 67 journalists killed in seven years.

But now in the war on Gaza, we have had 143 journalists killed in seven months.

That’s the death toll according to Al Jazeera and the Gaza Media Office. (Western media freedom monitoring usually cite a lower figure, around the 100 plus mark, but the higher figure is more accurate).

And these journalists — sometimes their whole families as well – have been deliberately targeted by the Israeli “Offensive” Force – I call it “offensive” rather than what it claims to be, defensive (IDF).

Kill off journalists
Assassination by design. Clearly the Israeli policy has been to kill off the journalists, silence the messengers, whenever they can.

Try to stifle the truth getting out about their war crimes, their crimes against humanity.

But it has failed. Just like the humanity of the people of Gaza has inspired the world, so have the journalists.

Their commitment to truth and justice and to telling the world their horrendous story has been an exemplary tale of bravery and courage in the face of unspeakable horror.

But there has been a glimmer of hope in spite of the gloom. On Friday — on World Press Freedom Day, May 3 — UNESCO, the United Nations cultural agency, awarded all Palestinian journalists covering the war in Gaza the annual Guillermo Cano Award for media freedom.

This award is named in honour of Guillermo Cano Isaza, a Colombian investigative journalist who was assassinated in front of the offices of his newspaper El Espectador in Bogotá, Colombia on 17 December 1986.

Announcing the Gaza award in the capital of Chile, Santiago, in an incredibly emotional ceremony, Mauricio Weibel, chair of the international jury of media professionals, declared:

“In these times of darkness and hopelessness, we wish to share a strong message of solidarity and recognition to those Palestinian journalists who are covering this crisis in such dramatic circumstances.

“As humanity, we have a huge debt to their courage and commitment to freedom of expression.”

Ultimate price
For those of us who watch Al Jazeera every day to keep up with developments in Palestine and around the world — and thank goodness we have had that on Freeview to balance the pathetic New Zealand media coverage — I would like to acknowledge some of their journalists who have paid the ultimate price.

First, I would like to acknowledge the assassination of American-Palestinian Shireen Abu Akleh, who was murdered by Israeli military sniper while reporting on an army raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank on 11 May 2022.

A year later there was still no justice, and the Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders issued a protest, saying:

“The systematic Israeli impunity is outrageous and cannot continue.”

Well it did, right until the war on Gaza began five months later.

But I am citing this here and now because Shireen’s sacrifice has been a personal influence on me, and inspired me to take a closer look into Israel’s history of impunity over the killing of journalists — and just about every other crime. (It has violated 62 United Nations resolutions without consequences).

I have this photo of her on display in my office, thanks to the Palestinian Youth Aotearoa, and she constantly reminds me of the cruelty and lies of the Israeli regime.

Now moving to the present war, last December, Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh was wounded in an Israeli strike in which his colleague and Al Jazeera Arabic’s cameraman Samer Abudaqa was killed, while they were reporting in southern Gaza.

Dahdouh’s wife Amna, son Mahmoud, daughter Sham and grandson Adam were previously killed in an attack in October after an Israeli air raid hit the home they were sheltering in at the Nuseirat refugee camp.

Then the veteran journalist’s eldest son, Hamza Dahdouh, also an Al Jazeera journalist, was killed in January by an Israeli missile attack in Khan Younis, southern Gaza.

News media reports said he was in a vehicle near al-Mawasi, an Israel-designated safe area, with journalist Mustafa Thuraya, who was also killed in the attack.

According to reports from Al Jazeera correspondents, their vehicle was targeted as they were trying to interview civilians displaced by previous bombings.

In February, Mohamed Yaghi, a freelance photojournalist who worked with multiple media outlets, including Al Jazeera, was also killed in an Israeli air strike in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza.

Al Jazeera’s Gaza offices in a multistoreyed building were bombed two years ago, just as many Palestinian media offices have been systematically destroyed by the Israelis in the current war.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet has voted unanimously to close Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel.

Vote comes after the Knesset passed a law allowing the temporary closure of foreign broadcasters considered a threat to national security pic.twitter.com/zFDPQdowXG

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) May 5, 2024

Last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu branded Al Jazeera as a “terrorist channel”. Why? Because it broadcasts the truth about Israel’s genocidal war and Netanyahu threatened to ban the channel from Israel under a new law to control foreign media.

A month after that threat, Netanyahu has today followed up after his cabinet voted unanimously to order Al Jazeera to close down operations in Israel, which will curb the channel’s reporting on the daily Israeli harassment and raids on the Palestinians of the Occupied West Bank.

And this is the country that proclaims itself to be the “only democracy” in the Middle East.

Many of the surviving Gaza journalists are very young with limited professional experience.
They have had to learn fast, a baptism by fire.

I would like to round off with a quote from one of these young journalists, Hind Khoudary, a 28-year-old reporter for Al Jazeera since day one of the war, who used to sign on her social media reports for the day “I’m still alive”:

“I am a daughter, a sister to eight brothers, and a wife.

“Choosing to stay here is a choice to witness and report on the unbearable reality my city endures. Forced from my home, alongside countless Palestinians, we strive for the basics – clean food and water – without transportation or electricity.

“I am not a superhero; I am shattered from the inside. The loss of relatives, friends, and colleagues weighs heavy on my soul. Israeli forces ravaged my city, reducing homes to rubble. [Thousands of] civilians still lie beneath the remnants.

“My heart is aching, and my spirit is fragile. Since October 7, journalists have been targets; Israel seeks to stifle our voices.

“I miss my family.

“But surrender is not an option. I will continue to report, to breathe life into the stories of my people until my last breath. Please, do not let the world forget Palestine. We are weary, and your voice is our strength.

“Remember our voices, remember our faces.”

This article is adapted from a media freedom speech by Pacific Media Watch convenor Dr David Robie at the Palestine rally today calling for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza war.

US President Joe Biden has spoken at the annual White House Correspondents’ dinner in Washington in spite of protests over alleged “complicity” of media about Israel’s war on Gaza, offering a toast to “press freedom and democracy” but ignoring the death toll of Palestinian journalists.

Demonstrators targeted the Washington Hilton hotel which hosted the dinner, denouncing the Biden administration’s handling of the war and urging guests — especially media — to boycott the event.

Media freedom watchdogs have cited varying death toll figures for Palestinian journalists killed since October 7 although Al Jazeera network news today reported 142 dead — more than double the number of journalists killed in each of the Second World War and the Vietnam War.

• READ MORE: Is­raeli forces kill 27 in Gaza as pro-Pales­tine protests sweep US cam­pus­es
• Other War on Gaza reports

“It’s astonishing. We’ve never seen a White House correspondents’ dinner like this,” reported Al Jazeera’s Washington correspondent Shihab Rattansi.

“The President is here to speak while being warmly applauded by the national US press core.

“But these VIPs are all dressed up in the evening finery, and they have to run the gauntlet of hundreds of protesters out here who are shouting, ‘Shame on you’.

“‘Shame on you’ for breaking bread when there are [142] journalists dead as a result of, as far as they say, Biden’s complicity in their murder.”

Code Pink flag protest
Members of the feminist organisation Code Pink dropped a huge Palestinian flag from a top floor window of the Washington Hilton hotel.

The group said members involved in the action managed “to get out quickly and without arrest”.

The protesters were gathered outside the hotel to express solidarity with the dozens of Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza.

NOW: Protestors have dropped a Palestinian flag out of the window of the Washington Hilton, where the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is being held tonight. pic.twitter.com/v8womcm8QP

— CODEPINK (@codepink) April 27, 2024

More than two dozen Palestinian journalists had called for a boycott of the dinner, writing an open letter urging their American colleagues not to attend.

“You have a unique responsibility to speak truth to power and uphold journalistic integrity,” said the letter from the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate.

“It is unacceptable to stay silent out of fear or professional concern while journalists in Gaza continue to be detained, tortured, and killed for doing our jobs.”

‘It hurts our souls’
Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary was one of the signatories of the letter calling for the boycott.

She spoke to the network from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, saying she did not “have the words” to describe what she had been going through.

“This isn’t something that has been ending. It has been continuous every single day for more than 200 days.

“We have been killed, displaced and homeless, and we’re not only reporting on this, but we’re also living it with every single detail.

“We’re living this war in all aspects of life. We have not seen our families as journalists. We have not been able to eat well. We have been dehydrated.

“We have been reporting in one of the harshest conditions any reporter can go through despite losing a lot of colleagues, and it hurts our souls and our hearts every single day.

“We have been constantly targeted by the Israeli air strikes and shelling.

“All of these daily things we have been living as journalists are overwhelming [and] exhausting, but we still continue because there have been at least 100 Palestinian journalists whom I personally know that have been killed since October 7.

“If they were here today with us, they would be reporting, and they would be raising the voice of the voiceless Palestinians.”

Nour Odeh, a Palestinian political analyst, says that the US is more likely to move in the “right direction” when it comes to Israel if it feels pressure from its allies, reports Al Jazeera.

“The more Washington feels pressure from its friends, that its policy on Israel is becoming a liability, the more likely I think that we’re going to see a movement in the right direction,” Odeh, who is also the former spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority, told Al Jazeera’s Inside Story.

Odeh noted a recent letter calling for the US to halt weapons sales to Israel, which showed more Democratic politicians, including Nancy Pelosi, are finding US policies “untenable” after a recent Israeli strike that killed seven aid workers in Gaza.

• READ MORE: Does Israel’s attack on aid workers mark a turning point for its allies?
• Six months on, no end in sight to Is­rael’s war on Gaza
• Al-Quds Day around the world

“What the Americans are doing now seems like a big deal because they’ve been complicit in this war since the beginning”, she said.

Odeh, who spoke to Al Jazeera from Ramallah, described the last six months as “soul-crushing”, but said that a lot of “solace if not hope is found in the global solidarity movement”.

“This is not a destiny anybody can accept,” she said.

Ngāmotu protest
Meanwhile, a Ngāmotu (New Pymouth) rally on al-Quds Day was featured on Al Jazeera Arabic world news as thousands of people took to the streets of New Zealand over the weekend to protest against the war and the failure of Israel to abide by the US Security Council resolution last month ordering an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.

International Quds Day is an annual pro-Palestinian event held on the last Friday of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan to express support for Palestinians and oppose Israel and Zionism.

It takes its name from the Arabic name for Jerusalem — al-Quds.

The Ngāmotu rally on Quds Day as featured on Al Jazeera Arabic.  Video: Al Jazeera

On RNZ’s Saturday Morning programme yesterday, the author of a new book featuring the hardships and repression facing Palestinians in their daily lives living under occupation in Jerusalem gave some insights into this human story.

Jerusalem-based American journalist and author Nathan Thrall’s book is named on 10 best books of the year lists, including The New Yorker, The Economist and The Financial Times.

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story is a portrait of life in Israel and Palestine, giving an understanding of what it is like to live there and the oppression and complexities of the pass system, based on the real events of one tragic day, where Jewish and Palestinian characters’ lives and pasts unexpectedly converge.

Thrall has spent a decade with the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project. His first book, published in 2017 is The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine.

The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa wrote about Thrall’s original article that led to the book:

I pray that Thrall’s article will remind President Joe Biden of the courageous stance he took against apartheid in South Africa as a senator.

I hope that it will provide a mirror which shows that the very same type of laws that he opposed in South Africa are now instrumental in oppressing Palestinians, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Pacific media commentator and Asia Pacific Report editor David Robie has criticised New Zealand media coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, describing it as “lopsided” in favour of Tel Aviv.

He said New Zealand media was too dependent on American and British news services, which were based in two of the countries most committed to Israel and in denial of the genocide that was happening.

New Zealand media were tending to treat the conflict as “just another war” instead of the reality of a “horrendous” series of massacres with a long-lasting impact on Western credibility and commitment to a global rules-based order.

• READ MORE: Israel’s war on Gaza live: Israel accused of ‘AI-assisted genocide’ in Gaza
• Norman Finkelstein and Chris Hedges discuss Israel, Gaza and the West
• David Robie’s Earthwise interview on the Pacific

Dr Robie was interviewed on Plains FM 96.9 community radio by Earthwise hosts Lois and Martin Griffiths.

Lois asked: “What is happening to Gaza now is a nightmare, very disturbing, or should be, and yet are we, the public, in New Zealand and other countries, are we getting the true picture from journalists?”

Dr Robie replied, “No, we are getting a very sanitised version through our media, particularly in New Zealand, less so in Australia, but it’s pretty bad there . . .”

He explained the reasons for his criticism.

Praise for AJ and TRT coverage
During the half-hour interview, Dr Robie praised television coverage of the “real war” by independent news services such as the Qatar-based Al Jazeera and Turkey-based TRT World News, which have had Arabic-speaking Palestinian journalists on the ground in Gaza throughout the six-month-old war.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened Al Jazeera this week with closure of the network’s operations in Israel — under the powers of a new law — because of its graphic and uncensored coverage from the besieged enclave.

Al Jazeera called Netanyahu’s attack “slanderous” and managing editor Mohamed Moawad said: “What we are doing is trying to give voice to the voiceless and try and make sure that the suffering of civilians on the ground is heard by the entire world.”

Almost 33,000 Palestinians and more than 75,000 others have been wounded as outrage grows globally following Israel’s strike and killing of seven aid workers in Gaza this week.

Dr Robie is the founding director of the Pacific Media Centre and is pioneering editor of Pacific Journalism Review.

• The earlier Earthwise interview with David Robie on the Pacific is here

Plains FM’s Earthwise talks to journalist David Robie.   Video/Audio: Plains FM

The New York-based media watchdog Committee to Protect Journalists says the announcement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of his intention to ban Al Jazeera follows a similar pattern of media interference, including the killing of media workers.

“We’ve seen this kind of language before from Netanyahu and Israeli officials in which they try to paint journalists as ‘terrorists’, as ‘criminals’. This is nothing new,” Jodie Ginsberg told Al Jazeera.

“It’s another example of the tightening of the free press and the stranglehold the Israeli government would like to exercise. It’s an incredibly worrying move by the government.”

• READ MORE: Other Gaza media freedom reports

Netanyahu wrote on X on Monday that “Al Jazeera harmed Israel’s security, actively participated in the October 7 massacre, and incited against Israeli soldiers.

“The terrorist channel Al Jazeera will no longer broadcast from Israel. I intend to act immediately in accordance with the new law to stop the channel’s activity.’

The Israeli parliament approved a law granting the government authority to ban foreign news networks, including Al Jazeera. PM Netanyahu pledged to “act immediately” to close the network’s local office pic.twitter.com/L2RXOzVi5t

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) April 2, 2024

The Qatar-based network rejected what it described as “slanderous accusations” and accused Netanyahu of “incitement”.

“Al Jazeera holds the Israeli Prime Minister responsible for the safety of its staff and network premises around the world, following his incitement and this false accusation in a disgraceful manner,” it said in a statement.

‘Slanderous accusations’
“Al Jazeera reiterates that such slanderous accusations will not deter us from continuing our bold and professional coverage, and reserves the right to pursue every legal step.”

Netanyahu has long sought to shut down broadcasts from Al Jazeera, alleging anti-Israel bias, the network reports on its website.

The law, which passed in a 71-10 vote in the Knesset, gives the prime minister and communications minister the authority to order the closure of foreign networks operating in Israel and confiscate their equipment if it is believed they pose “harm to the state’s security”.

White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said that an Israeli move to shut down Al Jazeera would be “concerning”.

“The United States supports the critically important work of journalists around the world and that includes those who are reporting in the conflict in Gaza,” Jean-Pierre told reporters.

“So we believe that work is important. The freedom of the press is important. And if those reports are true, it is concerning to us.”

The legislation’s passage comes nearly five months after Israel said it would block Lebanese outlet Al Mayadeen. It refrained from shutting Al Jazeera at the same time.

Move with closure
After the vote on Monday, Israel’s Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi said he intended to move forward with the closure. He said Al Jazeera had been acting as a “propaganda arm of Hamas” by “encouraging armed struggle against Israel”.

“It is impossible to tolerate a media outlet, with press credentials from the Government Press Office and offices in Israel, acting from within against us, certainly during wartime,” he said.

According to news agencies, his office said the order would seek to block the channel’s broadcasts in Israel and prevent it from operating in the country. The order would not apply to the occupied West Bank or Gaza.

Israel has often lashed out at Al Jazeera, which has offices in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

In May 2022, Israeli forces shot dead senior Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh while she was covering an Israeli military raid in the West Bank town of Jenin.

A UN-commissioned report concluded that Israeli forces used “lethal force without justification” in the killing, violating her “right to life”.

During the war in Gaza, several of the channel’s journalists and their family members have been killed by Israeli bombardments.

On October 25, an air raid killed the family of Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, including his wife, son, daughter, grandson and at least eight other relatives.

Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 32,782 people, mostly women and children, according to Palestinian authorities.

Pacific Media Watch and news agencies.

The United States’ airdrops of aid into Gaza are a textbook case of cognitive dissonance on the part of the US administration — dropping food while continuing to send Israel bombs with which to pulverise Gaza, reports Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post.

And, says the media watch programme presenter Richard Gizbert, the gulf between what is happening on the ground and the mainstream media’s reportage continues to widen.

Gizbert criticises the airdrops, what he calls the “optics of urgency, the illusions of aid”.

• READ MORE: Israel’s war on Gaza live: Nearly 100 people killed in last 24 hours
• Other Listening Post items

“An absurd spectacle as the US drops aid into Gaza while also arming Israel,” he says.

Gizbert critically examines the Israeli disinformation strategy over atrocities such as the gunning down of at least 116 starving Gazans in the so-called “flour massacre” of 29 February 2024 — first denial, then blame the Palestinians, and finally accept only limited responsibility.

“The US air drops into the Gaza Strip are pure theatre. The US has been supplying thousands of tonnes into the Gaza Strip — but those have been high explosives,” says Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of Jadaliyya.

“And then to claim that somehow it is ameliorated by 38,000 meals ready to eat is quite obscene to put it politely.

“People have compared these scenes to The Hunger Games and for good reason.”

‘Who is the superpower?’
Australian author Antony Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory, says: “When I saw the US drop food, my first response was really anger; it was horror that this is apparently the best the US can do.

Absurd Aid Air Drops in Gaza.   Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post, 9 March 2024

“Who is the superpower here? Is it the US or Israel? There is no place that is safe. There is no place where you can find reliable food, where people can get shelter.

“Gazans are exhausted, angry and scared, and do not buy this argument that the US is suddenly caring about them by airdropping a handful of food.”

“People have compared these scenes to The Hunger Games and for good reason.

Contributors:
Laura Albast — Fellow, Institute for Palestine Studies
Mohamad Bazzi — Director of NYU’s Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies
Antony Loewenstein — Author, The Palestine Laboratory
Mouin Rabbani — Co-editor, Jadaliyya

On Our Radar:
Since Israel launched its assault on Gaza, the war has been a delicate subject for Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The war has led to censorship of news coverage and suppression of public protest. Meenakshi Ravi reports.

Israel’s cultural annihilation in Gaza
The Listening Post has covered Israel’s war on Gaza through the prism of the media, including the unprecedented killing of Palestinian journalists. But there is another level to what is unfolding in Gaza: the genocidal assault on Palestinian history, existence and culture.

Featuring:
Jehad Abusalim – Executive director, The Jerusalem Fund

• The Listening Post is a weekly media watchdog programme at Al Jazeera

The Israeli army has raided dozens of homes in the West Bank and detained 20 Palestinians, including two women — journalist Bushra al-Taweel and activist Sumood Muteer.

Quoting witness accounts, Quds News Network reported that al-Taweel was beaten up by an officer who insulted her before she was arrested.

Today is International Women’s Day.

• READ MORE: Biden to an­nounce Gaza port as Is­rael blocks aid from com­ing by road – 20 starve to death in Gaza

The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said 57 journalists have been detained since October 7, with 38 of them still in jail. The organisation added that 22 of them were detained without charge.

Since October 7, at least 424 Palestinians, including 113 minors, three women and 12 prisoners in Israeli custody, have been killed in the West Bank alone.

At least 7450 Palestinians have been detained since the start of the war in Gaza.

Female Palestinian journalist and ex-prisoner Bushra Tawil was arrested by Israeli occupation soldiers last night during a raid into the city of Al-Bireh in the occupied West Bank.

According to eyewitnesses, Al-Tawil was subjected to a brutal attack by soldiers during a field… pic.twitter.com/59aRvQLrgA

— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) March 7, 2024

The Gaza Media Office has reported at least 180 journalists and media workers have been killed since October 7.

Israeli forces ‘likely’ machinegunned reporters
Meanwhile, a new digital forensic report has found that Israeli forces “likely” shot machinegun at reporters after shelling them, killing one journalist and wounding six others on the Lebanese border last October 13.

The Israeli army targeted a group of journalists including AlJazeera’s crew, a colleague from another agency was killed and two of our colleagues at Aljazeera were injured, along with several others.

— Ali Hashem علي هاشم (@alihashem_tv) October 13, 2023

An Israeli tank crew fired shells at a clearly marked group of journalists near the border, killing one Reuters reporter and wounding six others, including two Al Jazeera reporters and an Agence France-Presse reporter.

An analysis by the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), commissioned by Reuters, has found that the journalists were also targeted with machineguns, likely fired by the same Israeli forces.

“It is considered a likely scenario that a Merkava tank, after firing two tank rounds, also used its machine gun against the location of the journalists,” TNO’s report said.

“The latter cannot be concluded with certainty as the direction and exact distance of [the machinegun] fire could not be established.”

AFP global news director Phil Chetwynd, reacting to the finding, said: “If reports of sustained machine gun fire are confirmed, this would add more weight to the theory this was a targeted and deliberate attack.”

The International Court of Justice (ICC) has held its last day of hearings examining the legality of Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian lands.

Fifty two countries and three international organisations have addressed the court in the hearings that ended on Monday.

Most called for Israel’s occupation to be declared illegal and for it to end, with some calling for reparations to be paid by Israel to the state of Palestine for illegal settlements.

• READ MORE: The ICJ hearings

Only the representatives of the United States, United Kingdom and Fiji claimed the occupation was legal while non-government organisations and opposition politicians in Fiji condemned their country’s surprise position.

Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst and a Middle East expert, said the final legal arguments had “demolished the shameless defences” of Israel’s illegal occupation.

“Ireland, Algeria and South Africa . . . projected their own experience, their own narrative, their own history, their own struggle with [colonial] occupation, and their own experience with liberation as well,” he said.

“Hence it was both instructive, if you will, not I mean liberating, not depressing.

“I want to say it was instructive that they did share with us that but then we had this disingenuous, selective, mind boggling, if not, you know, mind insulting presentations by the United States and the United Kingdom that I think set everyone back.

ICJ hearing: Final Israeli occupation arguments.  Video: Al Jazeera

“You know they were trampling over international law, expropriating international law, confiscating international legality in order to fit their own little geopolitical calculus on behalf of their little client Israel.

“So it was a bit shameful, it was a bit shameless to be honest and that’s why today we’ve heard from the Arab League and the [Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC)], legal opinions that were basically set or apparently revised in order to counter the arguments of the UK and the US and in that way I thought it was brilliant and it was entertaining almost.”

The African Union lawyers argued that “occuopatiion” and “self-determination” could not exist in the same place at the same time.

The toll of four months of war in Gaza on journalism is “nothing short of horrifying” — Palestinian journalists killed, wounded, and prevented from working without any possibility of safe refuge, reports the Paris-based global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

RSF has strongly condemned the “eradication of journalism and the right to information” in Gaza by the Israeli army, and has called on states and international organisations to increase pressure on Israel to “immediately cease this carnage”.

In 124 days of conflict, at least 84 journalists have been killed in Gaza, including at least 20 in the course of their journalistic work or in connection with it, according to RSF statistics.

• READ MORE: Fiji human rights activists pay tribute to slain Gaza journalists, but shunned by local media
• RSF condemns Israel over ‘silencing of media’ – 31 Palestinian journalists in jail, 80 plus killed
• Silencing the messenger: Israel kills journalists, while the West merely censors them — David Robie
• Other Gaza media reports

Journalists are being decimated as the days of this interminable war go by, through incessant Israeli strikes from the north to the south of the Gaza Strip, the watchdog said.

Journalists who had survived these four months were “living a daily hell” — in inhumane conditions, they suffered shortages of all kinds, particularly of equipment, as well as regular media blackouts, RSF said.

“In four months of conflict, Palestinian journalism has been decimated by Israeli armed forces with complete impunity, with a staggering death toll of more than 84 journalists killed — at least 20 in the line of duty,” said RSF’s Middle East desk in their statement.

“After filing two complaints with the International Criminal Court and making repeated appeals to States and international organisations, RSF is once again urging the UN Security Council to immediately enforce Resolution 2222 (2015) on the protection of journalists.

Journalists trapped in Rafah
Journalists in Gaza have no way out or any place of safe refuge. Forced to flee to the south of the enclave since October 7, the vast majority have taken refuge in Rafah, where the crossing point with Egypt is still closed and where an invasion of the city could lead to a new bloodbath.

Rafah was described by Israel as a “security zone” at the start of the conflict. Despite RSF’s calls for the Rafah gate to be opened, the Israeli authorities continue to prevent Gazan journalists from leaving and to block access to the enclave for foreign journalists.

As Gaza killings rise, so does the toll on Palestinian journalists.   Video: Al Jazeera

A chilling toll
According to the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate (PJS), about 50 local and international media outlets in Gaza have been totally or partially destroyed by the Israeli army since October 7, in addition to the appalling death toll.

RSF filed two complaints with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on 31 October and 22 December 2023 in connection with the killings of journalists and the destruction of media outlets.

In the aftermath of the killings of independent videographer Moustafa Thuraya and Al Jazeera journalist Hamza Dahdouh on January 7, RSF obtained a decision from the ICC prosecutor to include crimes against journalists in its investigation into the situation in Palestine.

Two days later, RSF called on the UN Security Council to urgently address Israel’s violations of Resolution 2222 on the protection of journalists.

The struggle of journalists in the field
Against this terrifying backdrop, Palestinian reporters in Gaza are showing untold courage in continuing to report on the war.

Most have lost loved ones. Forced to move, they live in tents, with no electricity and very little food or water.

Wounded journalists have very limited access to medical care. In partnership with Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), RSF has been providing grants to Gazan journalists since the start of the war to support their reporting work.

Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.

Al Jazeera rejects Israeli forces’ attempt to justify crimes against journalists

Al Jazeera Media Network has rejected the Israeli occupation forces’ attempt to justify the killing and targeting of journalists.

In a statement this week, the network has condemned the accusations against its journalists and recalled Israel’s “long record of lies and fabrication of evidence through which it seeks to hide its heinous crimes”.

• READ MORE: Israeli forces killed Abu Akleh ‘without justification’, UN inquiry says

The statement continued:

“At a time when its correspondents and field crews are making great sacrifices to cover what is happening in Gaza, Al Jazeera’s employment policies stipulate that employees are not to engage in any political affiliations that may affect their professionalism, and to adhere to the controls and directives contained in the Network’s code of ethics and code of conduct.

“Al Jazeera ensures that all its journalists and correspondents adhere to the editorial standards.

“The network recalls the systematic targeting of Al Jazeera by the Israeli authorities, which includes:

• the bombing of its office in Gaza twice,
• the assassination of its correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh,
• the killing of colleagues Samer Abu Daqa and Hamza Al-Dahdouh,
• the deliberate targeting of a number of Al Jazeera journalists and their family members, and
• the arrest and intimidation of its correspondents in the field.

“Given Israel’s unprecedented campaign against journalists, Al Jazeera urges media outlets worldwide to exercise the utmost caution and responsibility when headlining Israel’s justifications for its crimes against journalists in Gaza.”

Senator and deputy leader of the Australian Greens party Mehreen Faruqi says the survival of millions of people in Gaza depends on the “live-saving” humanitarian aid provided by UNRWA, and it is “totally irresponsible” to cut funds to the UN agency.

“Western countries, like Australia, who have suspended this aid [to UNRWA] have made a pretty disgraceful and morally indefensible decision,” she said.|

“We know that people are being starved in Gaza at the moment. We know that there is a humanitarian crisis.

• READ MORE: Which countries have cut funding to UNRWA, and why?
• In waging war on the UN refugee agency, the West is openly siding with Israeli genocide
• Other UNRWA reports

“We know that there is a mission of genocide that Israel is committing, and at this time to suspend aid is disgraceful,” Faruqi told Al Jazeera.

Australia joined some 15 US-led countries to cut UNRWA funding by US$667 million — more than half of its total pledges.

The people of Australia had taken to the streets to protest over “weeks and weeks” in support of Gaza. But the government was refusing to listen to their demands, Faruqi said.

“By refusing to listen to the people of Australia, the Australian government is making decisions that are completely opposed to the sentiments, feelings and demands of the Australian people,” she said.

‘People can see . . . 26,000 have been massacred’
“People in Australia can actually see what is going on in Gaza. They can see more than 26,000 people have been massacred.

“They can see that more than 12,000 of those are children. This is completely unacceptable. This [Israeli] mission of genocide.

“And especially the cheerleading by Australia, by the UK, by the US of this invasion of Gaza is reprehensible.”

UNRWA’s funds should be restored immediately and increased, Faruqi added.

Countries such as Ireland, Norway and Spain have continued to fund UNRWA – in some cases increasing their aid — and have condemned the funding cuts as an “attack on humanity”.

New Zealand is currently still funding UNRWA and will review the situation before its next instalment is due mid-year.

‘Happy to keep war going’

Also interviewed by Al Jazeera, independent journalist Antony Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory exposing the Israeli military profit machine, talked about the views of the Israeli population and the Jewish diaspora.

Answering a question about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declared goal of “total victory” as the war drags on, Loewenstein acknowledged how global diasporas were split in their opinions with younger Jewish groups in the US increasingly seeking a ceasefire, but his view of Israel was grim.

“One of the things that is really clear. . . is that most Israelis want their hostages back, which makes sense. But at the same time they are also very happy to keep the war going.

“In fact, most polls do not suggest that the majority of Israeli Jews want the war to end.,” he said.

“They do want Hamas to be removed in some way. What that looks like, of course is up to debate.”

Author Antony Loewenstein discusses Jewish diaspora splits over the Gaza war. Video: Al Jazeera

Agnes Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International, has called the funding cuts to the UN’s Palestinian humanitarian relief agency a “heartless decision” by some of the world’s richest countries “to punish the most vulnerable population on earth because of the alleged crimes of 12 people”.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, she added: “Right after the ICJ [International Court of Justice] ruling finding risk of genocide. Sickening.”

While nine Western nations, including the US, rushed to suspend UNRWA’s funding after allegations that members from the agency participated in the October 7 attack, the same countries have failed to formally revise their ties to Israel despite mounting reports of genocidal abuse by Israeli forces.

• READ MORE: Palestinian agency condemns funding cuts as ‘ collective punishment’
• Israel’s war on Gaza live: Aid cuts are ‘collective punishment’ – UNRWA
• More countries pause funds for UN Palestinian agency

Sickening heartless decision of the richest countries in the world to punish the most vulnerable population on earth because of the alleged crimes of 12 people. Right after the ICJ ruling finding risk of genocide. Sickening. https://t.co/ARrPqUdyHA

— Agnes Callamard (@AgnesCallamard) January 28, 2024

The Director-General of the World Health Organisation, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that “cutting off funding” to UNRWA at what he called a “critical moment” would only “hurt the people of Gaza who desperately need support”.

The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs highlighted the plight of some 1.9 million displaced Palestinians in Gaza with the main UN agency delivering humanitarian aid losing its major financial backing.

“Scenes of forcibly displaced people are a disgrace to humanity,” it said in a statement.

“Over half a million Palestinians in Khan Younis were instructed by the occupying forces to evacuate their homes, including hospitals and health centres, in a cruel expansion and deepening of forced displacement from southern regions.”

UNRWA employs about 13,000 people and provides humanitarian aid, education, health and social services to 5.9 eligible Palestinian refugees living in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

The UN agency received almost US$1.2 billion in pledged in 2020, with the US being the biggest donor providing $343.9 million. The fifth-largest donor, Norway, provided $34.2 million and is continuing is funding in spite of the action by the US and its allies.

Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza, who has been documenting the impact of the war in the Gaza Strip, has left the enclave for Qatar and gave his first interview there with the Doha-based Al Jazeera global news channel.

Azaiza announced on Instagram yesterday that he was leaving the besieged enclave before boarding a Qatari military airplane at Egypt’s El Arish International Airport.

However, it was unclear how he was able to leave Gaza or why he had evacuated, reports Al Jazeera.

• READ MORE: Israel’s war on Gaza live: ‘Collective punishment’ inflicted on Gaza – UN
• RSF condemns Israel over ‘silencing of media’ – 31 Palestinian journalists in jail, 80 plus killed
• Friendly fire may have killed hostages on October 7. These Israeli families want answers now
• NZ foreign policy critics warn over ‘inflaming’ Red Sea crisis, call for Gaza ceasefire

“This is the last time you will see me with this heavy, stinky [press] vest. I decided to evacuate today. … Hopefully soon I’ll jump back and help to build Gaza again,” Azaiza said in a video.

The 24-year-old Palestinian captured the attention of millions globally — including in the South Pacific — as he filmed himself in a press vest and helmet to document conditions during Israel’s war, which has killed more than 25,000 people in Gaza.

“Motaz Azaiza – A 24-year-old man from Gaza, in 108 days, did what CNN, Fox, the BBC, and all their ‘journalism’ predecessors refused to do for 75 years.

“Humanise a people!”

– Khaled Beydoun

Israel launched its offensive after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, killing 1,139 people and taking more than 200 people captive. However, there are demands within Israel for an inquiry into allegations that some hostages were killed by “friendly fire” from a tank.

In response, Israel has killed more than 25,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in a relentless attack on Gaza.

Azaiza’s coverage often took the form of raw, unfiltered videos about injured children or families crushed under rubble in the aftermath of Israeli air strikes.

He said he has had to “evacuate for a lot of reasons you all know some of it but not all of it”.

In his post, he was seen on a video about to board a grey plane emblazoned with the words “Qatar Emiri Air Force”.

I’m at Al Jazeera studios where they are streaming.
حلل يا دويري pic.twitter.com/fWoABDKD3t

— MoTaz (@azaizamotaz9) January 24, 2024

“First video outside Gaza,” he said in one clip, revealing that it was his first time on a aircraft. “Heading to Qatar.”

He also shared a video of the inside of the plane as it landed in Doha.

Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza leaves Gaza after his “heroic” humanitarian reporting . . . “we are all Palestinian.” Video: Al Jazeera

Since the start of the war, the photojournalist has amassed millions of followers across multiple platforms.

His Instagram following has grown from about 27,500 to 18.25 million in the more than 108 days since October 7, according to an assessment of social media analytics by Al Jazeera.

His Facebook account grew from a similar starting point to nearly 500,000 followers. He now has one million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter.

As well as his social media posts, Azaiza has produced content for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNWRA).

I left Gaza with a broken heart and eyes filled with tears.
There was no other option after 108 days of continuous massacres against us.
It’s time to move somewhere else so I can do more work and I pray that I can be a reason to stop this war and help rebuild Gaza again.
I’ve… pic.twitter.com/kg3FwTi38d

— MoTaz (@azaizamotaz9) January 24, 2024

Social media users thanked Azaiza for his coverage of the war, many saluting him as a hero.

“Thank you for everything you have done, you have moved mountains, what you have done in the last 100 days people can’t do in their whole lifetime. You were a pivotal voice in showing the world the Israeli atrocities in Gaza. Wishing you well and safety,” one user said on X.

Another, Khaled Beydoun, wrote on Instagram, “Motaz Azaiza – A 24-year-old man from Gaza, in 108 days, did what CNN, Fox, the BBC, and all their ‘journalism’ predecessors refused to do for 75 years.

“Humanise a people!”

“I’m so glad you had the opportunity to get out, God willing, YOU WILL RETURN TO A FREE PALESTINE,” wrote another.

“We love you so deeply,” American musician Kehlani wrote, adding, “Thank you for your humanity.”

“Frame that vest. It’s the armor of one of history’s greatest heroes,” comedian Sammy Obeid said.

Pacific Media Watch sourced from Al Jazeera.

Pacific Media Watch

Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara says Israel’s legal team “started off weak” but made a few strong points near the end.

Bishara said the lawyers’ efforts at the genocide hearings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague yesterday to deflect blame for Israel’s attacks and ignore the context of Israel’s 75-year occupation of Palestine came across as “illogical”, the Al Jazeera video clip reports.

Their claims that Israel’s forces are “trying to protect, rather than harm”, civilians were also unconvincing, he said, given the toll of the war: 23,357 Palestinians, including 9,600 children, since October 7.

• READ MORE: South Africa’s genocide case against Israel over Gaza ‘chilling’ in detail
• ICJ genocide case: What are Israel’s arguments and do they hold up?

However, Bishara said Israel’s lawyers did well to zero in on the jurisdiction of the ICJ — pointing out that the court must specifically prove Israel was guilty of genocidal intent, not any other violations.

“You can claim Israel has committed heinous crimes, but if they do not fall under the framework of genocide, the court has no jurisdiction,” Bishara said.

Speaking to reporters outside the ICJ in The Hague, Palestinian Foreign Ministry official Ammar Hijazi said Israel’s legal team was not “able to provide any solid arguments on the basis of fact and law”.

“What Israel has provided today are many of the already debunked lies,” he added, referring to, among others, Israeli clams that hospitals in Gaza were being used as military bases.

“Additionally, we think that what the Israeli team today has tried to provide is the exact thing that South Africa came to the court for — and that is, nothing at all justifies genocide.”

Thomas MacManus, a senior lecturer in state crime at Queen Mary University of London, said the ICJ was likely to see a “massive disconnect” between the picture Israel painted of its humanitarian concern for Gaza and “the reality on the ground where UN agencies say people are starving, lacking water, and seeing attacks on hospitals, schools, and universities.”

‘Nothing can ever justify genocide’
South Africa’s Minister of Justice Ronald Lamola told media “Self-defence is no answer to genocide”.

Here are the main points from his interaction:

• “”Israel failed to disprove South Africa’s compelling case that was presented;
• Israel tells the court that statements read out by senior Israeli political, military and civilian society leaders are simply rhetorical, and we shall not ascribe them any importance;
• “There is no debate about what Prime Minister Netanyahu’s term ‘Amalek’ means and how it is understood by soldiers fighting on the ground and by the Israelis;
• “How can you ignore Netanyahu’s statement, the statement of the defence minister and the ground forces? That is a clear implementation of policy.
• “Israel chose to focus extensively on the events of October 7. South Africa has not ignored this event as Israel alleged because it has unequivocally condemned and continues to condemn October 7; and
• “Self-defence is no answer to genocide. Nothing can ever justify genocide.”

Marwan Bishara comments on the Israeli ICJ defence. Video: Al Jazeera

Reporting Israel’s war on Gaza has become the greatest credibility challenge for journalists and media of our times. The latest assassination of an Al Jazeera photojournalist yesterday while documenting atrocities has prompted a leading analyst to appeal to global journalists to “take a stand” to protect the profession.

The killing of Hamza Dahdoud, the 27-year-old eldest son of Al Jazeera Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, along with freelancer Mustafa Thuraya, has taken the death toll of Palestinian journalists to 109 (according to Al Jazeera sources while global media freedom watchdogs report slightly lower figures).

Emotional responses and a wave of condemnation has thrown the spotlight on the toll faced by reporters and their families.

• READ MORE: War on Gaza: The voices that really matter are the journalists on the ground
• Israeli military accused of targeting journalists and their families in Gaza
• Safe zones: Israel’s technologies of genocide
• This Israel has no future in the Middle East – Marwan Bishara

Wael Dahdouh, 52, lost his wife, daughter, grandson and 15-year-old son on October 25 in an earlier Israeli air raid that hit the house they were sheltering in. After mourning for several hours, Dahdouh senior was back on the job documenting the war.

Just under 20 months ago, Al Jazeera’s best known correspondent, Shireen Abu Akleh, was fatally shot by an Israeli sniper while reporting on the Occupied West Bank on 11 May 2022 in what Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemned by saying this “systematic Israeli impunity is outrageous.”

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists protested about the killing of Hamza Dahdoud and Thuraya, saying it “must be independently investigated, and those behind their deaths must be held accountable”.

But few journalists would accept that this is anything other a targeted killing, as most of the deaths of Palestinian journalists in the latest Gaza war have been – a war on Palestinian journalism in an attempt to suppress the truth.

‘Nowhere safe in Gaza’
Certainly, Al Jazeera’s Palestinian-Israeli political affairs analyst and Marwan Bishara, who was born in Nazareth, has no doubts.

Speaking on the 24-hour Qatari world news channel, with at least 22,835 people killed in Gaza – 70 percent of them women and children — he said: “Nowhere is safe in Gaza and no journalists are safe . . . That tells us something.

“Killing the messenger”: Marwan Bishara’s interview with Al Jazeera — more tampering over the message? There is nothing “sensitive” in this clip.

“It is understood they are war journalists. But still the fact that more than 100 journalists were killed within three months is breaking yet another record in terms of killing children, and destruction of hospitals and schools, and the killing of United Nations staff.

“And now with 109 journalists killed this definitely requires a certain stand on the part of our colleagues around the world. Not just in a higher up institution.

“I am talking about journalists around the world – those who came to cover the World Cup in Doha for labour rights, or whatever. Those who are shedding tears in the Ukraine, those who are trying to cover Xinjiang in China [persecution of the Uyghur people], those who are claiming there are genocides happening right, left and centre – from China to Ukraine, to elsewhere.

“The same journalists who see in plain sight what is happening in Gaza should – regardless if we disagree on Israel’s motives, or Israel’s objectives in this war – must agree that the protection of journalists and their families is indispensable for our profession. And for their profession,” Bishara said.

“Journalists, and journalism associations and syndicates around the world – especially in those countries with influence on Israel, as in Europe, or the United States; journalists need to take a stand on what is going on in Gaza.

New investigations on U.S. and UK media bias have exposed chilling double standards by Western media when it comes to reporting on killings of Israelis compared to killings of Palestinians in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/uQ0I7cT340

— AJ+ (@ajplus) January 10, 2024

‘Cannot go unanswered’
“This cannot continue and go on unanswered. What about them?

“They’re going to be from various media outlets deploying journalists in war-stricken areas. They will have to call for the defence of journalists and their lives and their protection.

“This cannot go on like this unabated in Gaza,” Bishara added, as Israeli defence officials have warned the fighting could go on for another year.

The South African genocide case filed against Israel in the International Court of Justice seeking an interim injunction for a ceasefire and due for a hearing later this week could pose the best chance for an end to the war.

Bishara has partially blamed Western news networks for failing to report the war on Gaza accurately and fairly, a criticism he has made in the past and his articles about Israel are insightful and damning.

His call for a stand by journalists has in fact been echoed in some quarters where “media bias” has been challenged, opening divisions among media groups about fairness and balance that have become the most bitter since the climate change and covid pandemic debates when media “deniers” and “bothsideism” threatened to undermine science.

In November, more than 1500 journalists from scores of US media organisations signed an open letter calling for integrity in Western media’s coverage of “Israeli atrocities against Palestinians”.

Israel has blocked foreign press entry, heavily restricted telecommunications and bombed press offices. Some 50 media headquarters in Gaza have been hit in the past month.

Israeli forces explicitly warned newsrooms they “cannot guarantee” the safety of their employees from airstrikes. Taken with a decades-long pattern of lethally targeting journalists, Israel’s actions show wide scale suppression of speech.

In the United Kingdom, eight BBC journalists wrote an open letter in late November to Al Jazeera accusing the British broadcaster of bias in its coverage of Gaza.

A 2300-word letter claimed that the BBC had a “double standard” and was failing to tell the Israel-Palestine conflict accurately, “investing greater effort in humanising Israeli victims compared with Palestinians, and omitting key historical context in coverage”.

What is next? He lost everyone!!! Literally!!! #GazaGenocide pic.twitter.com/1LVh4eruIt

— Palestine News (@palestine) January 7, 2024

In Australia, another open letter by scores of journalists and the national media union MEAA called for “integrity, transparency and rigour” in the coverage of the war and joined the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), RSF and others condemning the Israeli attacks on journalists and journalism.

Leading Australian newspaper editors of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and the Nine network hit back by banning staff who had signed the letter. According to the independent Crikey, a senior Nine staff journalist resigned and readers were angrily cancelling their newspaper subscriptions over the ban.

Crikey later exposed many editors and journalists who had made junket trips to Israel and is currently keeping an inventory of these “influenced” media people — at least 77 have been named so far.

In The Daily Blog, editor Martyn Bradbury has also questioned how many New Zealand journalists have also been influenced by Israeli media massaging. Bradbury wrote:

“If Israel has sunk that much time and resource charming Australian journalists and politicians, the question has to be asked, [has] the pro-Israel lobby sent NZ journalists and politicians on these junkets and if they have, who are they?”

He wrote to the NZ Press Gallery, the “journalist union” and media companies requesting a list of names.

Pacific journalists ought to be also added to the list.

I have just returned from a two-month trip in the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Australia. After a steady diet of comprehensive and well backgrounded reporting from global news channels such as TRT World News and Al Jazeera (which contrasted sharply in quality, depth and fairness with stereotypical Western coverage such as from BBC and CNN), I was stunned by the blatant bias of much of the Australian news media, particularly News Corp titles such as The Australian and The Advertiser in Adelaide.

Some examples of the bias and my commentaries can be seen here, here, here, here, here and here.

A pithy indictment of much of the Western reporting — including in New Zealand — can be read in the Middle East Eye and other publications.

Exposing much of the Israeli propaganda and fabricated claims since October 7 (and even from time of The Nakba in 1948), award-winning columnist Peter Osborne wrote:

“I am haunted by one other consideration. It is not just that Western commentators, columnists and chat show hosts often don’t know what they are talking about. It’s not even that they pretend they do.

“It’s the comfort of their lives. They sit in warm, pleasant studios where they earn six-figure sums for their opinions. They take no risks and convey no truths.”

A polar opposite from the Gaza carnage and the risks that courageous Palestinian journalists face daily to bear witness. They are an inspiration to the rest of us.

Dr David Robie is editor and publisher of Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific.

Hamza Dahdouh, son of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, has been killed along with another journalist in an Israeli air strike west of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, the news channel reports.

The 27-year-old photojournalist was killed when a missile directly hit the vehicle he was travelling in to “document new atrocities” in the latest Israel attack.

Gaza’s media office condemned the killing of two more Palestinian journalists, describing it as a “heinous crime” committed by the “Israeli occupation army against journalists”.

• READ MORE: Why NZ should join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel
• Israel is eradicating journalism in Gaza, with ten reporters killed in three days

Hamza Dahdouh and colleague Mustafa Thuraya, who has worked as a journalist for Agence France-Presse news agency, were in the car at the time it was targeted, Al Jazeera reports.

Thuraya also died.

Wael Dahdouh, 52, lost his wife, daughter, grandson and 15-year-old son in October in an Israeli air raid that hit the house they were sheltering in.

Dozens of journalists have been killed in the Israeli strikes since the war began on October 7 and Al Jazeera reports that a total of 109 Palestianian journalists have died.

Journalists ‘being targeted’
Interviewed live on Al Jazeera, another AJ correspondent, Hani Mahmoud, described the work of Dahdouh and other Palestinians journalists documenting the war.

He said “journalists are being targeted and killed for telling the true story” as an Israeli drone hovered overhead during the interview.

Hamza and his colleagues were doing fieldwork, documenting the level of destruction that was caused by an overnight airstrike targeting a residential zone near the road that connects Khan Younis with Rafah.

Reporting from Rafah, Mahmoud said that Hamza and his colleagues had been doing fieldwork, documenting the level of destruction caused by an overnight airstrike targeting a residential zone near the road connecting Khan Younis with Rafah.

“Every airstrike has an aftermath — it does not only cause a great deal of damage to the targeted home but also to the surrounding area,” he said.

“So they were documenting these crimes — destruction, displacement, and people under the rubble — when they were targeted.”

An Al Jazeera news executive compared the war on Gaza and on Palestinians with the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War, saying “it is genocide”.

Israel aims to “intimidate journalists in a failed attempt to obscure the truth and prevent media coverage”, the Gaza media office said.

It also demanded “the occupation to stop the genocidal war against our defenceless people in the Gaza Strip”.

More than 22,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry, 40 percent of them children.

Al Jazeera journalist, Wael Dahdouh, bidding farewell to his son Hamza, who has been killed along with journalist Mustafa Thurayya in an Israeli strike, which targeted a journalists’ car. pic.twitter.com/2h0zEizoKo

— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) January 7, 2024

Aotearoa New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins is correct to condemn Hamas killing Israeli civilians in its attacks on Israel this week.

The killing of civilians or taking them hostage is a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention and should be universally condemned.

However, the Labour government has been deathly silent on the war crimes committed by Israel against Palestinians under Labour’s watch these past six years.

• READ MORE: War on Hamas: Gaza health ministry appeals for ‘safe corridor’ amid heavy bombardment
• Gaza-Israel war: Death toll rises as Israeli attacks continue to pound Gaza – live updates
• What is Hamas? A simple guide to the armed Palestinian group
• Systemic NZ misreporting on Israeli occupation of Palestine and Palestinian resistance
• Al Jazeera coverage of the war
• Other Palestine reports

Under his prime ministerial watch this year, Chris Hipkins has looked the other way while Israel has built more illegal Israeli settlement homes on Palestinian land; killed more than 250 Palestinian civilians; supported Israeli settler pogroms against Palestinian towns and villages across the occupied West Bank and encouraged highly-provocative Israeli ministerial and settler incursions into the Al Aqsa compound in occupied East Jerusalem.

Why does he only wake up when Israelis are killed? Why does he think Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian lives?

The Prime Minister’s pro-Israel stance is one-sided and blatantly racist.

New Zealand, along with other Western countries, bears heavy responsibility for the deaths of Palestinians and Israelis in recent days because we have never held Israel to account for its crimes against the Palestinian people.

We have given Israel a free pass to murder and abuse Palestinians and this led to the inevitable tragedy last weekend.

It is precisely the attitude of Western leaders such as our Prime Minister which has meant so many lives have been lost.

The Prime Minister has the blood of Palestinians and Israelis on his hands.

John Minto is national chair of Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

The besieged Gaza Strip
The Palestinian enclave — home to about 2.3 million people — has been under an Israeli air, land and sea blockade since 2007, reports Al Jazeera.
More than 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and thousands have taken shelter in UN schools as Israeli attacks intensify, forcing Palestinians to flee their homes.

Buildings, mosques and offices have been targeted as Netanyahu promised “mighty vengeance” for the deadly attacks that has sent shockwaves across Israel.

Harrowing images from inside Gaza have emerged with 19 members of a family killed when an air strike on Sunday hit their residential building. More than 60 percent of Gaza’s population are refugees who were ethnically cleansed from their homes currently in Israel.

Israel has maintained a land, sea and air blockade on Gaza since 2007, a year after Hamas was democratically elected into power. The voting came nearly two years after Israeli troops and settlers withdrew from the enclave.

The blockade gives Israel control of Gaza’s borders, and Egypt has stepped in to enforce the western border.

Israel has stated it has blocked the borders to protect its citizens from Hamas, but the act of collective punishment violates the Geneva Conventions and has long been considered illegal by groups including the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The New Zealand government bears heavy responsibility for loss of life of Palestinians and Israelis in the latest fighting in Israel/Palestine and must revisit its policy, says the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) national chair John Minto.

“Whatever the eventual outcome of the Hamas attacks on Israel today [Saturday], the New Zealand government bears heavy responsibility for the loss of life of Palestinians and Israelis,” he said in a statement.

“Like other Western countries, New Zealand has failed to hold Israel to account for its multiple crimes, including war crimes, against the Palestinian people, day after day, year after year and decade after decade.

• READ MORE: Israel-Palestine escalation live: Strikes hit Gaza after Hamas offensive
• Why Hamas launched the attacks on Israel
• Other Israel-Palestine reports

“We have ignored human rights reports of Israel’s apartheid policies. Our government has been looking the other way.”

Hamas launched a large-scale military operation “Al-Aqsa Flood” against Israel, describing it as in response to the desecration of Al-Aqsa Mosque and increased settler violence.

The group running the besieged Gaza Strip (population 2.1 million) said it had fired thousands of rockets and sent fighters into Israel. Reports said at least 40 Israelis had been killed, 35 people taken captive and more than 750 had been wounded and taken to hospitals.

Palestinian sources said 160 people had been killed, mostly in Gaza Strip.

Repeated Israeli attacks
Minto described the Hamas attacks as “understandable”.

“Over recent months Western countries have turned a blind eye to the brutality of the Israeli army and settler groups engaging in repeated attacks on Palestinian towns and villages and the killing of civilians and children,” he said.

“The result is now playing out in more violence initiated by Israel’s brutal occupation — the longest military occupation in modern history. The occupation includes Israel’s 17-year-old blockade of the Gaza strip — the largest open-air prison in the world.”

Al Jazeera reports that almost 250 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli occupation forces so far this year.

“New Zealand must reassess its policy on the Middle East and demand Israel adopt a timetable to implement international law and United Nations resolutions.”

“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is finished. Politically and otherwise,” declared Al Jazeera political analyst Marwan Bishara, who says Israel has never learnt from history of colonialism.

“His arrogance has finally caught with him. No matter how many Palestinians this corrupt opportunist kills before his final downfall, he will go down in utter humiliation.

“Israel gets a glimpse of the real future days after Netanyahu cavalierly showed us at the United Nations future maps of the new Middle East centered around Israel — with no Palestine existence.”

Israel launched air strikes on Gaza in retaliation in an operation called “Iron Swords”.