Despite Israel’s herculean efforts to avoid killing noncombatants in the Gaza Strip, a new wrinkle has been added to media charges of indiscriminate Israeli killing—a kind of blood libel within a blood libel—namely that Israel is also targeting journalists.

During its war with Hamas, Israel has eliminated nearly 100, if the numbers are to be believed. This would be astonishing as it surpasses the number of journalists killed in World War II and the Vietnam War.

In fact, according to U.K.-based journalist David Collier, the actual number is more like 15.

Collier, the author of a 200-page report titled, “The Journalists of Gaza: A Modern-Day Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory Promoted by Mainstream Media,” finds that the lists relied on by the press are nothing more than Hamas propaganda. “This report shows that the claim Israel has been targeting journalists to silence them is an unsupportable and disgraceful fiction,” he writes.

There are two lists of dead journalists. One is from the Gaza Media Office, i.e. Hamas. The second is put out by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a New York-based NGO. What Collier discovered is that the lists are essentially the same. The CPJ list is basically a whitewash of the terror group’s list.

“CPJ is a subset of the Hamas list. The key source that the CPJ is using are the Gazan-based Hamas organizations making the announcements,” Collier told JNS.

Collier focused most of his report on the CPJ list, the more important of the two as most reporting relies on it.

“We know we’re dealing with Hamas propaganda when we’re talking about the Hamas list, and there’s little point addressing it. The issue that we have is when Western NGOs run with what is effectively watered-down Hamas propaganda, which is what the CPJ is doing,” he said.

The CPJ list numbered about 60 to 70 journalists at the time of Collier’s report (it has grown to 88 as of Feb. 26). All the names on it came from the Hamas list, Collier discovered. At the time, the Hamas list numbered 107. Collier surmises that CPJ culled the list to strike off those individuals who were most obviously terrorist operatives and least defensible as journalists.

Collier was able to identify 93% of the 107 people listed through their social media accounts. He found that 35 of the 70 (50%) on the CPJ list worked for proscribed terror groups.

“I mean, you could argue that they are journalists. But they work for Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad,” he said.

About 19 (27%) weren’t journalists at all.

Seventy-nine percent endorsed terrorism and the killing of innocents. For Collier, the most egregious example was Hassuna Salim, who worked for Hamas-affiliated Quds News Network, and posted on a Telegram channel on Oct. 7 at 6:36 a.m. a directive from Islamic Jihad calling for everyone to pick up a gun and fight.

“Messages such as these sent 100s of armed ‘civilians’ across into Israel to help Hamas rape and murder,” his report notes.

Others celebrated terror attacks against Israelis over a period of years. Most sound more like psychopathic killers than journalists. Duaa Sharaf, who worked for Hamas-affiliated Radio Al-Aqsa, posted to social media on April 7, 2022 after a mass shooting in Tel Aviv, “Kill them. May Allah punish them with your hands, and humiliate them, and help you against them, and heal the hearts of a believing nation.”

“Hit Tel Aviv. Hit it,” wrote Assem Kamal Moussa, a journalist with news site Palestine Now of the same attack. On May 2, 2023, he posted a picture of Hamas rockets launched at Israel: “And you are on your way to transfer the occupier’s life to the sanctuaries of hell.”

Another journalist, Jamal Mohamed Haniyeh, is actually the grandson of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas.

Image - Majdi Fathi/TPS