Killing Journalists

70 journalists have been killed worldwide since the start of 2024. More than 60 are missing and 320 imprisoned, as of December 1, 2023 according to ‘Committee to Protect Journalists’. To silence journalists and suppress uncomfortable truths, countless others are threatened, harassed, assaulted, arrested and spied on daily. In a world where journalists are risking their lives in Gaza and Kyiv so that the world knows what is happening–revealing much more than the propaganda images from involved governments and actors.

This surge in violence against journalists is neither accidental nor isolated. It is part of a broader, deeply worrying trend: the systematic silencing of the media, often orchestrated by autocrats and regimes who seek to conceal their crimes in darkness. It is an assault not only on individual reporters but on the entire global public’s right to know, to understand the depth of human suffering, and to hold the powerful to account.

Just as the Gaza journalistic community thought matters could not get any worse, Benjamin Netanyahu’s brutal occupying forces carried out yet another cold-blooded murder on August 10, this time of the Al Jazeera journalists Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qraiqea, along with videographers Ibrahim Thaher, Mohammed Nofal and their colleagues. They were sheltering in a media tent near al-Shifa hospital, and were killed by a direct strike.

The Israeli war machine, accelerating its stated goal of occupying Gaza, showed no restraint in targeting journalists, in violation of international conventions. So far in this war it has killed 238 journalists. The war on Gaza has become the deadliest conflict for journalists and media workers in living memory, with 2024 recording the highest number of journalists killed, the vast majority at the hands of Israeli forces.

Gaza is not the only place where journalists are under siege. Threats, intimidation and murderous violence against journalists are on the rise throughout the world. However, what differentiates Israeli crimes is the impunity with which the occupation forces murder journalists and the indifference shown by leaders of the so-called free world.

By any measure, it is the most dangerous time to be a journalist in recent history. Reporters are threatened, harassed and killed merely for fulfilling their public duty of bearing witness and reporting the truth. Worldwide, the dangers faced by journalists in conflict zones have intensified. In 2023, a journalist or media worker was killed, on average, every four days. In 2024, this grim statistic worsened to once every three days, most of those by Israeli forces.

Beyond the killings of more than 230 journalists, Israel now employs starvation as a tool, with journalists pushed to the brink, collapsing from hunger while reporting.

The civic society’s inaction will be recorded by history as a monumental failure to protect those who stood at the frontlines of truth.

In Modi’s India journalists who dare to expose the atrocities against people, poor people–the socially disadvantaged and exploited–are silenced. GauriLankesh was murdered by Modi’s saffron brigade in 2017 because she exposed the Hindutva establishment’s hidden fascist project against minorities.

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Frontier
Vol 58, No. 11, Sep 7 - 13, 2025