Lost in the daily horror of Israeli massacres in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories is the ghastly reality that journalism is being asphyxiated.

On the morning of September 22, 2024, Israeli soldiers raided the offices of Al Jazeera in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank — the last remaining international media network in Palestine. Soldiers seized documents, confiscated equipment, and ordered a shutdown of the office’s operations. All this in the middle of Al Jazeera’s live Sunday morning broadcast.

Since then, the Israeli government has provided no evidence to substantiate its claims that its assault on an office of journalism was to combat “terror” and defend “security and public order.” What is significant about this attack is that it might have signalled the death knell of international journalism in Palestine.

Journalism in Palestine, as we currently understand it, goes back to the 19th century, beginning with the emergence of newspapers in the 1870s, radio in the 1930s — the first broadcast was in Ramallah- and continuing during the years the press in Palestine was placed under strict Israeli military censorship from 1967 to 1993. A national television service, the Palestine Broadcasting Corporation, only arrived in Palestine in 1994 due to a decades-long broadcasting ban by Israel. In January 2002 the IDF used explosives to flatten the PBC’s main building and transmission tower in Ramallah. One month later in February 2002 Israeli forces destroyed the offices and studios of the Palestinian National Authority’s broadcast outlets, Voice of Palestine radio and Palestine Television, in the Gaza city of Al-Shijaiyeh.

A surge in public communications from the 1990s until 2010 brought more than 100 radio and television stations to Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Israel’s sustained suppression of Palestinian media in recent years has incontrovertibly devastated the broadcasting landscape.

Israel routinely detains Palestinian journalists — without charge let alone conviction. In 2023 alone, Israel typically detained at least one journalist a day. The Committee for the Protection of Journalists has documented the arrests of 75 journalists in the occupied Palestinian territories and Jerusalem since the war in Gaza began following the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 that killed at least 1,139 people, including 639 Israeli civilians (39 children), and resulted in more than 200 Israelis being taken hostage — 100 of whom remain in captivity. “Israel arrested 72 [journalists]. Palestinian authorities arrested three.”

According to the CPJ, “29 of the journalists, including three held by Palestinian authorities, have since been released, while 45 remain under arrest.” Some 10 journalists arrested by Israel are currently being held under administrative detention. The policy allows for an individual to be held without charge usually for six months, but in practice, according to the Israeli human right organization B’Tselem, it allows Israel “to incarcerate Palestinians who have not been convicted of anything for years.” The CPJ has identified Israel as among the world’s “worst jailers of journalists” on par with its nemesis Iran. 

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) notes that since October 7, 2023, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) “has killed over 145 journalists and media workers” in Gaza “at least 35 of whose deaths were linked to their journalism.” This is “the highest number of journalists murdered in connection with their work in 5 years.”

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) says the scale and pace of deaths of journalists in Gaza is “without precedent” and that the mortality rate for journalists in Gaza is over 10 per cent. Palestine is currently the most dangerous place in the world for journalists, and “one of the most dangerous in the history of modern journalism behind Iraq, the Philippines and Mexico.” 

Journalists are considered civilians and are protected by international law. 

International journalism in Palestine has been effectively obliterated, and domestic Palestinian journalism is under relentless attack. RSF has also documented attempts to intimidate Israeli journalists from media outlets like Haaretz, deemed critical of Israel’s war in Gaza – on November 24 2024 Israel’s government imposed sanctions on Haaretz mandating “any government-funded body refrain from communicating with Haaretz or placing advertisements in the paper.” 

Al Jazeera is the only remaining international media network on the ground in Gaza and the occupied territories. 

In May 2021, the Israeli military levelled the 11-story al-Jalaa building in Gaza City, which housed international media offices for, among others, Al Jazeera and the Associated Press. Israel alleged the complex was being used by Hamas but has never presented evidence to back up the claim. In April 2024, Israel vowed to end Al Jazeera’s operations. In May 2024 Israel banned Al Jazeera operations in Israel “for 45 days” — lasting until the present and in September 2024 they did the same for the occupied West Bank. 

In the raid on Al Jazeera’s building in Ramallah in September 2024, Israeli soldiers tore down a memorial photo honouring prominent Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Akleh was a Palestinian icon, considered one of the most beloved and respected journalists in the Middle East. Despite wearing a blue protective vest with the word “PRESS” in large white letters across her chest and back, she was murdered by an unidentified Israeli army sniper in May 2022 while covering an Israeli army attack on the Jenin refugee camp.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented how Israel deliberately targets journalists — a war crime under international law — including Hamza Al Dahdouh, Mustafa Thuraya, Ismail Al Ghoul, and Rami Al Refee. Based on more than 100 videos and photographs, weapon fragment analysis, and interviews, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, among others, have called for a war crimes investigation and arms suspension following Israeli direct strikes on Lebanese, American, and Iraqi journalists in Lebanon last year, killing Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah. 

Hossam Shabat is one of the last remaining journalists reporting from Northern Gaza. On November 19, 2024, the 23-year-old Al Jazeera correspondent alleged that he was targeted by Israeli forces in a bombing of a home that killed several people. 

Israel has engineered a virtual media blackout in Gaza and seems intent on transforming Palestine into a vast news desert devoid of inconvenient journalists who may document uncomfortable truths. Those truths include the displacement of 90 per cent of Gaza’s population of two million people, the razing of 80 per cent of its buildings, the killing of more than 17,000 Palestinian children, including 2,100 infants and children under the age of two and, according to UNICEF, the destruction of 92.9 per cent of schools, and all 12 of Gaza’s universities either severely damaged or destroyed — more than 12,700 students, over 400 teachers, and 95 university professors have also been killed. According to the UN, since 7 October 2023 Israeli troops and settlers have also killed 171 Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and injured more than 1,000.

The United Nations Charter undertook “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms the right to freedom of opinion and expression. The United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states that everyone has the right to “hold opinions without interference” and “freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.”

Journalism matters. The Sharpeville Massacre in which 69 unarmed people were slaughtered by South African police on March 21, 1960, an event that shocked the world, was a turning point in what became the global struggle against apartheid. The story would’ve been lost to history were it not for the work of journalists documenting the atrocities of that fateful day.

The savage police beatings of peaceful civil rights demonstrators like John Lewis as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965, aka Bloody Sunday, may well have been dismissed as an unverifiable event were it not for the presence of the journalists who covered it like NBC News reporter Richard Valeriani and Roy Reed from the New York Times.

Without Al Jazeera, and the other international media outlets who are already shut down in Palestine by Israel, countless stories would have gone untold, and a litany of abuses of power by Israeli soldiers would have been buried. What will their absence from the occupied Palestinian Territories mean for the future of the historical record? The Committee to Protect Journalists notes that Israel has accredited about 4,000 international journalists to cover the war in Palestine, but has largely denied them access to Gaza save for “rare and tightly-controlled military-led press tours to the war torn territory.” 

The systematic erasure of journalists and journalism by forces of the Israeli state is an assault on international and domestic press freedom and memory. This erasure is an attempt — illegal under international law – to control the narrative and distort contemporary discourse.

Palestinians, like Israelis, and people everywhere, deserve to have journalists tell their stories. Palestinians, like Israelis and people everywhere, deserve to have access to free and independent information. It is their human right. The question now is: What happens when that right is violated in ways and in an order of magnitude rarely seen before in documented history?

Adrian Harewood is Associate Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University