Transparency & Accountability
Israel has killed 209 journalists and charged no soldier
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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When Israel's military announced on 19 August its first criminal investigations into the conduct of its troops in Gaza, no journalist's killing was on the list.
The military said it had completed reviews of 150 incidents and reached decisions on five, ordering criminal probes into the killing of five-year-old Hind Rajab and her family and of 15 Palestinian paramedics, while declining to investigate three attacks that killed aid workers from World Central Kitchen and Doctors Without Borders, NPR reported.
The statement did not mention cases Israel had earlier pledged to examine, among them the August 2025 strikes on Nasser hospital in Khan Younis that killed five journalists, including Mariam Dagga, who freelanced for The Associated Press.
Under the procedure NPR described, military investigators report to military prosecutors, and the military advocate general may then keep investigating, indict, or decline to charge. Tal Steiner, head of the Israeli rights group HaMoked, told NPR that any action would take a long time, if it came at all.
The gap between the number of dead and the number of prosecutions is the central fact of the record.
The Committee to Protect Journalists put the toll at 209 journalists and media workers killed by Israel in Gaza and in Israeli detention since 7 October 2023, as of 25 June this year.
That figure followed CPJ's removal of 20 names from its database — eight it said were later established to have been Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad combatants, after the two groups published obituaries identifying them as fighters, and 12 removed for other reasons.
Before the deletions, CPJ data cited by the Global Investigative Journalism Network in March counted 259 media workers killed in the wider conflict, 210 of them Palestinian journalists inside Gaza.
Palestinian counts are higher. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said Israel had killed 265 journalists in Gaza, among them 27 women, wounded about 500 and detained more than 34, Al Jazeera reported in July. Gaza's government media office gave 262 killed with three journalists unaccounted for. The Palestinian Prisoners' Club recorded more than 245 arrests of journalists in Gaza and the West Bank since October 2023, with 42 still held.
The International Federation of Journalists said in June that at least 240 journalists and media workers had been killed in Gaza. Its final 2025 tally counted 128 journalists and media workers killed worldwide that year, 74 of them in the Middle East and Arab world, with 56 killed in Palestine — the largest national toll on the list.
Reporters Without Borders, counting only cases it can conclusively tie to a journalist's work, documented 29 Palestinian journalists killed in the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces between December 2024 and December 2025 — 43 per cent of the 67 killed worldwide in that period, and enough to make Gaza the deadliest place on earth for the profession for a second year.
Mexico ranked second with nine. RSF labelled the Israeli military a "security predator".
CPJ recorded 129 press members killed during 2025 and attributed two-thirds of those deaths to Israel, saying the Israeli military has now killed more journalists than any other government since CPJ began keeping records in 1992.
Of 47 cases CPJ classified as murder — killing because of the work — it held Israel responsible for 81 per cent, while cautioning that the true number of targeted killings may be higher because the ban on independent foreign press access, destroyed communications and mass displacement make each death hard to investigate.
Israeli officials contest the framing. The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, in research reported by The Jerusalem Post, examined 266 media workers reported killed between 7 October 2023 and 30 November 2025 and concluded 60 per cent were members of or affiliated with armed groups. CPJ says Israel has repeatedly killed journalists it then alleged — sometimes in advance — were militants, without producing credible evidence.
The pattern is visible in the single most publicised case. After the 10 August 2025 strike on a tent outside al-Shifa hospital that killed Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif and four colleagues, the Israeli military said he had led a Hamas cell and advanced rocket fire at Israeli civilians and troops.
Al-Sharif denied any affiliation, Al Jazeera called the strike a targeted attack on journalists, CNN said it could not verify documents the military released, and Irene Khan, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, had two weeks earlier described the army's accusations against him as unfounded.
No charge, and no published independent finding, has resolved the dispute.
Nothing in the older record suggests a different outcome. CPJ's 2023 study "Deadly Pattern" found that 20 journalists had died by Israeli military fire in 22 years without anyone being held accountable.
In the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh in Jenin in May 2022, Israel opened no criminal investigation and charged no one; the army later acknowledged a high possibility its fire killed her and said it would not prosecute.
Four years on, CPJ wrote in May, the FBI inquiry opened in 2022 appears stalled, with no public update and no timeline. Israel placed second on CPJ's 2024 Global Impunity Index, its first appearance.
Palestinian authorities have their own record. MADA, the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms in Ramallah, documented 957 violations against media freedoms in 2025 and titled its annual report the "Year of Silence", describing violations as systematic and committed amid impunity.
In the first half of 2025 MADA counted 537 violations against 327 a year earlier, of which 34 — six per cent — were committed by Palestinian parties, a rise of 278 per cent on the nine it recorded in the same months of 2024.
Those included arrests, summonses, bans on coverage and confiscation of equipment. MADA's published summary does not split the 34 between the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas-run authorities in Gaza. Its 2025 press freedom index scored Palestine 401 points, in the band MADA calls "sensitive", and its researchers called for legislative reform.
RSF's country file notes that journalists suspected of collaborating with Israel are obstructed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and that the Palestinian Basic Law's guarantees of press freedom collide in practice with the interests of those in power.
CPJ said its full database review would conclude in July; its board voted to keep the existing definition of who counts as a journalist. What the review changes about the 209 has not been published. Neither has any decision by Israel's military advocate general on the Nasser hospital strikes, thirteen months after they killed five reporters.
