Analysis
‘Hamas cameras’: How Israel manufactured consent to exterminate reporters in Gaza
Israel has a long history of attempting to defame Palestinian journalists. They turned Gaza into a graveyard for journalism.
Israel's killing of at least 225 Palestinian journalists since October 7, 2023, briefly attracted international attention after it was calculated that more journalists had died in Gaza “than in the American Civil War, World War I and World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia, and the war in Afghanistan after September 11, combined.”
As part of its effort to eliminate witnesses and control the narrative, Israel, as one commentator wrote, turned Gaza into a graveyard for journalism. It has done so through the repeated use of drones and aircraft to hunt down media workers from afar, as when it targeted Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif along with Mohammed Qraiqea, Ibrahim al-Thaher, Mohamed Nofal, Moamen Aliwa and Mohammed al-Khaldi as they sat in a press tent near al-Shifa hospital.
Israeli forces have also executed journalists at close range, such as when an Israeli sniper killed Saed Abu Nabhan while he was working in the Nuseirat area, in the center of Gaza. In addition to injuring, arresting or disappearing many other journalists, Israeli forces have systematically damaged or destroyed 112 media institutions and offices, both government-owned and non-government-owned, including TV and radio stations, broadcast towers, and newspaper offices.
The killing of journalists is a war crime and a crime against humanity. Under the laws of armed conflict, journalists are civilians, and it is illegal to deliberately target civilians. However, they do not enjoy any special protection beyond that, despite the high risks they are exposed to while doing their job. The drafters of these laws, most recently in the 1977 Additional Protocols, recognized the difference between journalists and civilians and the fact that journalists are often on the front lines, yet inexplicably granted them no additional protection.
The limited protection they have available leaves them vulnerable to systematic targeting by Israel, which has been further encouraged by Western media and the role it has played in undermining the professionalism and credibility of Palestinian journalists.
Israel has a long history of attempting to defame Palestinian journalists through its hasbara government and military units, and has even used its government advertising agency to produce YouTube ads claiming Gaza journalists are an essential part of “Hamas propaganda” and are therefore legitimate targets.
It is unclear whether these insidious campaigns have influenced Western media or if their own longstanding biases have shaped the way they report on the killing of Palestinian reporters, but they often seem to simply repeat Israel’s lies. For instance, when Israel killed journalists Mohamed Salama, Ahmed Abu Aziz, Hussam al-Masri, Moaz Abu Taha and Mariam Dagga at Nasser Hospital, Western news agencies – including AP and Reuters (whose own journalists were killed in the attack) – simply repeated Israel’s claim that the target was a “Hamas camera.”
This novel expression, “Hamas camera,” was undoubtedly coined by Israel, yet dozens of media outlets repeated the phrase without stopping to ask what a “Hamas camera” actually is, as opposed to a Nikon or a Canon. The simple repetition of this phrase helps legitimize the deliberate attack on journalists – an attack which, it is crucial to remember, was carried out in a hospital complex where medical staff and patients were also killed.
This attack was perpetrated after more than 22 months of genocide. By that point, it was clear that Israel was methodically targeting journalists, having already killed over 200 media workers, often together with their families. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that the main Western media would have repeated Israel's self-legitimizing narratives if the journalists killed on the roof of Nasser hospital had been white and European. Undoubtedly, as Chris Hedges points out, such narratives “discredit the voices of the victims and exonerate the killers,” reinforcing impunity.
The accusation that Palestinian journalists are ideologically motivated comes from the same media that spread insidious narratives about babies beheaded and baked in ovens, and repeated the lie about a supposed main command center under Al Shifa Hospital, as well as the fabrication that Palestinian journalists direct the fire of Hamas’s missile units from the roofs of hospitals. Dehumanizing Palestinians helps normalize not only the genocide, but also the incitements to commit genocide it that Israeli journalists have been spewing since day one.
On October 7, 2023, Shimon Riklin of Channel 14 posted that “Gaza must be wiped off the face of the earth” and later asked, “why do we have an atomic bomb?” A few days later, Naveh Dromi, a journalist for Channel 14 (now a TV host for i24News), said on the TV show The Patriots: “There are no innocents. In ’48, they brought the Nakba upon themselves. Now they will get a second one, a real Nakba, to complete Ben-Gurion's work.”
Roy Sharon, a correspondent for Channel 11, explicitly justified the possibility of “a million corpses,” stating: “I spoke of a million corpses not as a goal, I said that if, in order to permanently eliminate Hamas' military capabilities, including Sinwar and Deif, we need a million corpses, then let there be a million corpses.”
In an interview for Walla, the journalist Yaron London reiterated his position that “Gaza must be razed to the ground ... even at the cost of hitting innocent people,” adding: “If you can't distinguish between the population and the authorities because the latter deliberately hide in hospitals or convents, then there is no choice but to be less ‘vegetarian’... From my point of view, we are very ‘vegetarian’ ... The punishment for Hamas’s provocations should have been much more severe. Unfortunately, the punishment must also fall on the population.”
Some Israeli journalists have directly attacked their Gaza colleagues. Hagai Segal, former editor of Makor Rishon, wrote: “All journalists in Gaza are members or supporters of Hamas, fabricators of bloody slander ... Maybe there are some in Gaza who wear ‘Press’ vests and who, in their hearts, disapprove of Hamas in some way, but even they do not deserve the protection of the journalists' association.”
Such statements may amount to direct and public incitement to commit genocide, a punishable act under Article 3 of the 1951 Convention. Similarly, Article 25 of the 1998 Rome Statute provides that a person who “orders, solicits, or induces” crimes or “directly and publicly incites others to commit genocide” is individually criminally responsible.
There are precedents for holding journalists and other media outlets responsible for such incitement. In 2003, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted three media leaders for direct and public incitement to commit genocide. Addressing the defendants, the presiding judge of the court explained that “without a firearm, machete or any physical weapon, you caused the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians,” emphasizing that their broadcasts and publications could not be protected by the right to freedom of expression.
Despite Israel's attempt to portray Palestinian journalists as instigators of violence, the great and tragic irony, as highlighted by the judge's statements in the Rwandan case, is that a not-insignificant number of Israeli journalists are, in fact, guilty of this very crime.
The time has come for the signatories to the Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention to ensure that those journalists and their media bosses who incite genocide are held accountable, by arresting them when they travel abroad and prosecuting them in national courts that have universal jurisdiction. What we have seen, instead, is that numerous media outlets have undermined the credibility of those who bear witness to Israel's crimes, facilitating the transformation of journalism into a tool that promotes and encourages genocide and crimes against humanity.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/telecamere-di-hamas-lo-sterminio-di-reporter-a-gaza on 2025-11-14