Key points
- 252 Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza
- Israel accused of silencing coverage
- Access to Gaza denied to press
GENEVA: A United Nations expert accused Israel of intentionally targeting journalists in a bid to cover up “genocide,” warning that the war raging there was the deadliest ever for media workers.
“The way in which journalists are being killed, silenced … is the cover-up of genocide,” Irene Khan, the special rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression, told reporters in Geneva on Monday, reports AFP.
She said the latest United Nations figure showed that at least 252 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza since the invasion was triggered by Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
That makes it “the deadliest conflict ever for journalists,” Khan said, warning that the number “is of course likely to go up, because every week we hear news of more killings.”
Targeting journalists
Already, “more journalists have been killed in Gaza than in both World Wars, Vietnam War, wars in Yugoslavia, and the war in Afghanistan combined,” she said.
By comparison, she said 14 journalists had been killed in Ukraine since Russia began its full-scale invasion in early 2022, while the number of journalists killed over two decades of conflict in Afghanistan was in “the dozens.”
Khan, who is an independent expert mandated by the UN Human Rights Council but who does not speak on behalf of the United Nations, maintained that many of the journalists killed in Gaza had been “targeted.”
They are being “deliberately picked out and killed because of the work that they are doing to expose the atrocities, the crimes, the genocide on the ground,” she said.
Killing the story
The expert slammed Israeli “smear campaigns,” accusing many of the journalists killed in its strikes of being “terrorist supporters or terrorists themselves” in a bid to “delegitimize and discredit” them and their work.
“So it is not just killing journalists, but (an) attempt is being very clearly made here to kill the story,” she charged.
Khan also voiced outrage that Israel has continued to block all access to Gaza for international journalists.
“What is happening in Gaza is extremely unusual,” she said. “I cannot recall another situation where a member state of the United Nations has denied access to independent international media for a conflict.”
She said a “terrible precedent” is being set for media freedom and demanded international action.
“States must stop Israel before all journalists in Gaza are silenced.”
