A high-value target for Israeli army
Truth dies with journalists in Gaza
Political analyst
Why would a commander order a targeted airstrike on a certain individual or class of individuals during a war? After all, rockets and artillery munitions aren’t cheap — far from it! Producing one used in modern combats costs at least a thousand US dollars and usually even more. So, you have to make every munition count. There are going to be all kinds of accountability later on, too, whether they be on domestic or international political and moral grounds. So, a commander’s probably not going to order the killing of any one target in particular for anything less than convincing reasons.
Let’s make our commander’s work easier. Assume that he’s not going to be questioned for ordering a strike on any ground other than how much it furthered their war effort and brought them closer to victory in any capacity. That presumption would untie his hands to even target children if he wanted to — as abhorrent as that is in real-world circumstances — but he still has to answer how killing a child would have helped. By just playing the devil’s advocate, I can imagine some commanders saying that a particular child was wearing a bomb, but even that argument loses its steam if the commander has mass murdered a large group of children. So, targeting a whole group of individuals needs sounder, reasonably generalizable reasons than targeting one or two individuals.
Even then, accusing certain groups of individuals of working for or against a country during a war doesn’t hold well. Babies, children, women, the disabled and the elderly, embassy staffers, employees of UN and various relief groups, nurses, doctors, and members of the press are some such groups that readily come to mind — bonus point if they are a citizen of other countries that are in no shape or form a party to that war.
Why are war correspondents protected?
Even though it is common knowledge that during wartime, war correspondents enjoy some kind of “immunity” — which we will show is not an accurate description — as evidenced by their easily identifiable, obligatory protective attire, many of our readers probably do not really know why that is the case. To be fair, the reason is not explicitly stated in any legal document. However, the fact that almost every country in the world has recognized the necessity of giving war correspondents a special status must amount to something.
Legal scholars, attorneys, and special interest groups would argue that no journalist in their right mind will seek the most dangerous places a modern human being can be if it was up to them. They are there to fulfill their job duties. Hopefully, they get paid handsomely for their sacrifices, as well. As such, it’s merely in their job descriptions to be there and report the news of the war from the ground.
That may well be true, but it would not merit their presence by itself. After all, many organizations would probably love to have their employees in war zones to perform non-hostile duties and generate profit. That doesn’t mean that the warring parties would or should give them free, protected access. There must be more to it than simply meeting job requirements.
Interestingly, just showing your journalist badge won’t get you anywhere and everywhere in peace time, either. Generally, members of the press are allowed wherever the public is allowed, but private, military, and crime scene grounds are off-limits. There certainly is a vetting process for news agencies that wish to work in another country. Some countries require individuals who wish to work in the media, in particular journalists, to obtain official permission before commencing their activities. But once you have the permission, you are again treated as a foreign national, enjoy the same rights, and are allowed wherever the public is allowed.
The more common and acceptable argument that follows from the “they’re-just-there-to-do-their-job” argument is that war correspondents are not working for or against any warring party and do not intend harm on anyone, especially soldiers as that would put the correspondents themselves in danger. While true, this doesn’t give us the whole picture. That same flaw can be found in this argument: there are many individuals, national or foreign, that do not intend any harm and are working for any warring party, but they don’t have the privilege of getting special treatment — however minor that privilege currently is for war correspondents, as you will see.
So, why did world leaders agree that journalists should be protected during wars, considering that it may someday be the turn for their country to be engaged in a war?
I believe that has to do with what journalists should stand for, not necessarily for what any one journalist or news organization stands for. To be sure, journalists are humans, not saints, and heads of media corporations often think more about how reports do to increase sales and ratings. But in this case, a few rotten apples do not spoil the bunch. Quite the contrary, only one or two good, honest journalists are enough to redeem the whole line of work. One need not look at it in such black and white terms, though. Representing the distribution of honest and dishonest workers of any profession on a graph generally results in a bell-shaped curve: most would fall in the middle and be considered rather honest.
So, what do journalists conceptually and ideally stand for? The clue is not found in the denotation of being a ‘journalist’; rather, it is found in the connotation that journalism has with holding state or non-state figures and agencies accountable, and rendering them transparent.
For one thing, journalists strive to bring transparency into issues of public interest. If that is not achieved by a direct, if sometimes driving line of questioning, journalists will hopefully turn to investigative journalism to uncover the truth that was not willingly made public. The world ‘public’ turns up time and time again in discussing matters of journalism — as it just did in the span of the last two sentences — because even though journalists are paid by news agencies or news outlets to report facts and figures, they are essentially working for the service industry. The people have a need to know the latest and/or most impactful factual information for various reasons, and journalists meet that need. If by any chance, the public loses interest in knowing these pieces of information, it’s hard to imagine that the press will still linger, even with state funding. Not to mention that states benefit heavily from outsourcing the more mundane parts of their intelligence gathering to local and international news agencies. Combined, the need for transparency and availability of information is among the principal reasons why there’s a consensus that we need the press.
Holding organizations and people in power accountable is another goal of journalism. It’s worth noting that journalists do not always get the chance to be the one to do it. Rather, they are most likely the first or one of the first links in that chain. Even by disseminating a piece of information matter-of-factly, they can set off a chain of events that leads to a measure being taken in the interest of the public or state(s).
That’s why we need journalists on battlefields and war zones. They are the places most susceptible to breaches of international laws — humanitarian or otherwise. Long gone are the times when history was exclusively “written by victors”. Nowadays, with the advances in technology, every citizen with a mobile phone can effectively play the role of a journalist and undermine the narratives of the supposed victors by increasing transparency that hopefully will result in increased accountability. But since journalists are professionally trained to gatekeep against fake or unverifiable news and more connected to means of general broadcasting, their continued presence is crucial.
How are war correspondents protected?
What has been done to protect reporters that work in the most dangerous places on earth to provide an essential service to the public? Very little, arguably. The myth that wearing a vest and helmet with the word ‘PRESS’ written on it makes a reporter immune to harm has to be debunked for everyone.
War correspondents are “protected” by the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their additional protocols. Now, what does this loose term of ‘protection’ entails? Under Articles 79.2 and 51.3 of Protocol I, journalists enjoy the protection afforded by international humanitarian law, provided that they do not take a direct part in the hostilities. So much is common sense. It’s extremely unprofessional, to say the least, and foolhardy for a war correspondent to make an aggressive move toward any warring party.
According to the Commentary of Article 51.3, “direct participation in the hostilities” means “acts of war, which by their nature or purpose are likely to cause actual harm to the personnel and equipment of the enemy armed forces.” The words “actual harm” make an important distinction, the willful neglect of which, as we will see, is the basis of many arguments for harming war correspondents. Even if a journalist engages in propaganda — which, by the way, is not a crime and not something that can be ascertained unilaterally — it cannot be considered direct participation. “It is only when a journalist takes a direct part in the hostilities that he loses his immunity and becomes a legitimate target,” the French Attorney Alexandre Balguy-Gallois writes.
Under the law, journalists of all kinds are civilians. Civilians do enjoy target immunity at the very least, meaning they cannot be directly attacked unless they take a direct part in hostilities. So, directly targeting journalists “constitutes a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions (of 1949) and Additional Protocol 1”. Moreover, intentionally directing an attack against a civilian, including journalists and media personnel, “amounts to a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court”.
The only difference between ‘war correspondents’ and other journalists and civilians is that if captured, they enjoy a prisoner-of-war status, “provided that they have received authorization from the armed forces which they accompany, who shall provide them for that purpose with an identity card”. This narrows the scope of protections to include only certain journalists; others are just considered civilians. Having a prisoner-of-war status means that they must be released at the end of the hostilities, may mail a ‘capture card’ to their family from detention, and the detaining power must inform the state of which the correspondent is a citizen, and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) of the detention, according to New Strait Times. You will find that this does not account to much if you get detained for the unforeseeable future, but it’s at least something.
Israel’s targeting of journalists in Gaza
Now, this wouldn’t be a discussion if journalists were not directly targeted in war zones ever, but astute readers would probably guess that this is not the case. The warring parties understandably deny that such attacks were deliberate, but many facts falsify those denials. The bombing of the Serbian state radio and television building in Belgrade by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in 1999, and the United States targeting of Al Jazeera offices in Kabul in 2001, and in Baghdad in 2003, were previous examples of direct attacks on the media. (As an aside, see if you can find a common perpetrator.)
The unfortunate events that inspired the writing of this piece were the unprecedented killings of 109 journalists (at the time of writing) in the Gaza Strip during the recent Israeli airstrikes and ground assaults that commenced in response to Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7, 2023. While there’s a substantial case to be made about Israel’s use of AI, dumb bombs, and inhumane tactics of denying access to water, food, fuel, and electricity to maximize civilian casualties in Gaza, there’s another case to be made about why this war has had the highest death toll of media workers in any recent conflict, and it’s not even over yet.
First, the facts and figures.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) — an American independent non-profit, non-governmental organization — has accused the Israeli military of targeting journalists and their families in Gaza. The New York-based CPJ said at least 68 journalists and other media workers had been killed in Gaza, Israel, and southern Lebanon since October 7, and the subsequent Israeli assault, the Guardian reported. By December 21, 2023, 61 of the journalists killed were Palestinian and three Lebanese. In addition, four Israeli journalists were among the people killed by Hamas in the October attack.
“More journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of the Israel-Gaza war than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year,” it said. For that matter, the number of media workers killed by Israel in approximately three months exceeds the total count of journalists (69) killed throughout the entire six-year span of World War II, according to the Freedom Forum. Let’s see how the Israeli army pulled off this terrible feat.
Earlier this month, an Al Jazeera cameraman, Samir Abudaqa, was wounded in a drone strike and trapped in a UN school. When people attempted to rescue Abudaqa and take him for treatment, they too were shot. He died of his injuries several hours later.
“In at least one case, a journalist was killed while clearly wearing press insignia in a location where no fighting was taking place. In at least two other cases, journalists reported receiving threats from Israeli officials and Israel Defense Forces officers before their family members were killed,” according to the CPJ.
The non-profit also said there was a “pattern of journalists in Gaza reporting receiving threats, and subsequently, their family members being killed”. It said the 90-year-old father of the Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif was killed by an Israeli airstrike on his home after multiple threats were made to his son. “The journalist told Al Jazeera that he had received multiple phone calls from officers in the Israeli army instructing him to cease coverage and leave northern Gaza. Additionally, he received voice notes on WhatsApp disclosing his location,” it said.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has warned that “journalism is in the process of being eradicated in the Gaza Strip as a result of Israel’s refusal to heed calls to protect media personnel”. “Reporters there have no safe refuge and no way of leaving. They are being killed one after another. Since 7 October, the Palestinian territory has been subjected to a veritable eradication of journalism,” it said.
The Paris-based NGO said December 22 that it has filed a second complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) on seven Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza from October 22 to December 15, according to Anadolu Agency. The “RSF has reasonable grounds to believe that the journalists named in this complaint were the victims of attacks amounting to war crimes,” it said. The non-profit added the “journalists may have been deliberately targeted as journalists,” which is why it is describing these deaths as “intentional homicides of civilians.” Its first war crimes complaint since October 7 was filed with the ICC on October 31, and concerned the deaths of seven other journalists.
Human Rights Watch and other groups found that an IDF attack that killed Reuters journalists Issam Abdallah and injured six others in southern Lebanon was probably a deliberate assault by the IDF on civilians.
Al Jazeera has accused Israel of the targeted killing of two of its journalists in Gaza, one of whom was a photojournalist and the eldest son of Wael Dahdouh, the face of Al Jazeera’s 24-hour coverage of this war. Witnesses told the AFP news agency that two rockets were fired at a car carrying the reporters — one hit the front of the vehicle and the other hit Hamza Dahdouh, who was sitting next to the driver.
“Last year, we had the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera journalist who was a US citizen, and again we’ve really seen no accountability. She was killed in what seems to have been a targeted attack because she was shot in the neck between her helmet and her press jacket,” Jodie Ginsberg, the CPJ president, maintained.
Ginsberg’s use of the word “accountability” was perfect. Journalists, who are usually the ones that the public looks up to in order to hold powerful figures and organizations accountable, are now calling for accountability for the arguably established pattern of the Israeli army threatening and then killing their colleagues, or worse, their family members.
Israel is picking off our sources of information on what is happening in Gaza, and why? As we’ve established in length, it’s not because they pose any harm to its army. It’s not because they report misleading or false information. It’s not because the IDF is exclusively targeting Hamas and those journalists were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. In fact, if you look at the pattern of threats to their lives, you can claim that it’s because they were at the right place at the right time.
Israel is killing journalists because they are making dangerous pieces of information about the horrendous state of the streets of Gaza available for the world. It can be argued that for Israel, removing journalists has a higher value than eradicating Hamas, which admittedly seems unlikely in the coming months. With the chess piece of independent journalists on the board, Israel can’t ideally go for any other piece except for Hamas lest it risks international backlash; but with journalists gone, the truth is whatever Israel says it is. The transparency that these journalists are promoting by doing their jobs will make it hard for Israel to escape responsibility for its actions. No warring party in modern history has killed so many journalists over such a short time because no warring party in modern history had so much to hide and to lose in public opinion.