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The mainstream media’s coverage of the war in Gaza is scandalous. The casualty figures put out by ventriloquent Hamas, using the “Gaza Ministry of Health” as its puppet, are uncritically accepted. So are reports claiming, without any evidence, that “70% of those killed in Gaza are women and children.” And so, too, are the claims about the IDF deliberately killing two classes of people — medical personnel and journalists. There are many doctors in Gaza who have turned out to be members or supporters of Hamas, such as the director of Al-Shifa Hospital, Dr. Mohammad Abu Salmiya, who allowed Hamas to set up a command-and-control center inside the hospital he directed, and where the IDF later killed at least 200 Hamas members. Another 900 Gazans on the premises were arrested, of whom more than 500 were, subsequently found to be affiliated with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Earlier, the IDF said “forces found large quantities of weapons, intelligence documents throughout the hospital, encountered terrorists in close-quarters battles and engaged in combat while avoiding harm to the medical staff and patients.” But even more frequent than the charge that the IDF deliberately targets medical personnel is the accusation that the IDF “deliberately kills journalists.” Ira Stoll considers the latest examples of this charge here: “New York Times Conceals Hamas Role of ‘Journalist’ It Accuses Israel of Killing,” by Ira Stoll, Algemeiner, March 28, 2025:
The claim that Israel is “killing journalists” has become a staple of newspaper opinion pages, campus protests, and claims by advocacy groups.
For example, on March 24, 2025, a group called the Committee to Protect Journalists — whose board of directors includes Lydia Polgreen, Diane Brayton, and Geraldine Fabrikant Mertz of the New York Times — issued a statement headlined, “CPJ denounces Israel’s killing of 2 more Gaza journalists in return to war.”
“CPJ is appalled that we are once again seeing Palestinians weeping over the bodies of dead journalists in Gaza,” said CPJ’s Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna in New York. “This nightmare in Gaza has to end. The international community must act fast to ensure that journalists are kept safe and hold Israel to account for the deaths of Hossam Shabat and Mohammed Mansour, whose killings may have been targeted. Journalists are civilians and it is illegal to attack them in a war zone.”
Their killings “may have been targeted”? If Carlos de la Serna of CPJ is unable to state with assurance that these “journalists” were “deliberately” targeted, it is outrageous to make that claim, which leaves the distinct impression that the killings of those “journalists” were indeed “targeted.”
The New York Times news coverage was basically indistinguishable from the Committee to Protect Journalists’ press release. A Times news article credited to Hiba Yazbek and Bilal Shbair, with reporting contributed from Istanbul by Iyad Abuheweila, says, “On Monday, Al Jazeera reported that Hussam Shabat, a journalist who contributed to its coverage of the war, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on his car in northern Gaza. At least 208 journalists have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, according to the Gaza government press office.”
The Times dispatch goes on: “Videos circulating online and verified by the New York Times show the apparently lifeless bodies of Mr. Shabat and two other men, as well as a donkey that had been pulling a cart, on a dusty road in Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza. Next to them is a car pocked with what appear to be bullet or shrapnel holes, with an Al Jazeera emblem and the letters ‘TV’ on the windshield. A man shouts Mr. Shabat’s name and shakes his body, trying to get a response, while others carry away a person whose condition is unclear.”…
Note the details carefully chosen to tug at the readers’ heartstrings — those “lifeless bodies,” that humble donkey puling a cart “on a dusty road,” and an insistence that these three men whom the IDF killed were journalists because they had been riding in a car, now riddled with bullet holes, that bore the Al Jazeera emblem and the letters “TV” on its windshield. But, of course, it is possible to work as a “journalist” and simultaneously be a terrorist trained to be a a sniper as a member of Hamas.
