When the Watchdogs are Muzzled: The Hidden Costs of Shutting Foreign Journalists out of Gaza

On 16 March 1968, the U.S. Army’s Charlie Company, 11th Brigade, Americal Division, entered the Vietnamese village of My Lai. The soldiers–under orders of their superiors–began to kill indiscriminately. Rounding up the village’s unarmed women, children and elderly men, the soldiers shot, raped and mutilated hundreds before burning the village to embers.

Between 300 and 500 civilians were killed in the egregious assault that became known as the My Lai Massacre. Initially, the Army claimed that 128 Vietcong were killed and three weapons were captured, reporting My Lai as a significant military feat to the press.

Accounts of the egregious nature of the events were not made public at the time. My Lai was–at this point–a celebrated victory.

That was until U.S.-based journalist Seymour M. Hersh received a tip on charges made against U.S. Army officer Lt. William L. Calley. An Army investigation had uncovered details of the massacre, and Calley had been quietly court-martialed for his role in authorising the operation. After interviewing Calley and others involved in the attack, Hersh’s reporting rocked the nation and later earned him the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

While the U.S. had already been criticised for its involvement in Vietnam, Hersh’s story on the My Lai massacre ultimately served as a ‘check’ mechanism on U.S. foreign intervention. Owing to growing anti-war sentiment, the U.S. formally withdrew from Vietnam just three years later.

If Hersh had not been tipped off, the details of such an atrocity would likely have never made it to the American press. But with a lack of independent media access to the Vietnamese warfront, the tip was ‘a one-in-a-million bank shot’. Consider the number of war crimes that have gone unreported: How many belligerent states have never been held legally, nor morally, accountable for their crimes?

Fast forward 50 years to the Gaza Strip, where over 70,000 people have been killed since the attacks of 7 October 2023. Mounting accusations of war crimes–including genocide–have been brought against Israel, whose rejections of these claims share a common legal defence: these are simply acts of military necessity.

The Palestinian Authority is one of the few alternative accounts that disperses information on the war in Gaza. However, Israel regularly disputes these claims. Otherwise, there are almost no other ‘check’ mechanisms on the ground in Gaza to investigate Israeli defence operations, particularly the kind that independent reporting like Hersh’s can provide. This is because there are hardly any journalists left in Gaza at all.

Over 250 journalists have been killed since Israel invaded Gaza, according to estimates by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), making the conflict the deadliest ever for journalists. An additional 166 have been injured, while 94 remain imprisoned.

Palestinian journalists suffer from a lack of humanitarian aid and are regularly threatened, targeted by Israeli military operatives, detained and tortured by Israeli forces, CPJ says. Other press freedom organisations, the United Nations (UN) and media outlets have echoed these claims.

The death toll has resulted in more journalists killed in Gaza throughout the two-year-long war than in the war in Afghanistan, wars in Yugoslavia, the Vietnam War and both world wars combined.

Alongside moral concerns regarding Israel’s attacks on the press, the legality of its operations is doubtful. Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ratified by Israel in 1991, explicitly outlines protections for journalists under the Right to Freedom of Expression. A few lines later, however, these rights are subject to ‘certain restrictions’ as deemed necessary: ‘For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals’.

Press access to war zones is one of the only credible ‘checks’ on combatants to ensure adherence to the law of armed conflict, among other international legal frameworks. Targeting domestic journalists and prohibiting international media access as a means of protecting national security is a clear attempt to use the shortcomings of international law as a method of censorship.

Nine deaths took place in August alone, including five journalists killed by the 25 August attack on Nasser Hospital. Just weeks before this, prominent Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif and four others affiliated with Al Jazeera were killed by Israeli shelling. A day later, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) publicly admitted the attack was targeted, accusing al-Sharif of being the former ‘head of a Hamas terrorist cell’ who led rocket attacks against Israel.

While the IDF provided screenshots of alleged internal Hamas documents that it claimed proved al-Sharif’s affiliation, he denied these accusations before dying as a consequence of the strike. The UN, the CPJ and Reporters Without Borders have dismissed the IDF’s claims as a smear campaign.

For Israel, accusations of war crimes like genocide–and the legal fallout that could result–pose a major threat to what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls ‘The War of Redemption’. The best strategy to circumvent international law during wartime? Prevent evidence of such crimes from being documented in the first place. In lieu of witnesses, Israel has carefully crafted its own narrative of the war in Gaza.

‘The way in which journalists are being killed, silenced, murdered, in fact, is the cover-up of genocide, because these local journalists are the main source for news right now from the ground up,’ UN Special Rapporteur Irene Kahn said at a 15 September press briefing. ‘And if they can be stopped, if the information that is leaking out to the world can be stopped somehow, the Israeli Defense Forces believe that they can continue to do what they are doing with impunity.’

Alongside smear campaigns, starvation and targeted killings aimed at the few journalists left in Gaza, Israel continues to deny the international media access to Gaza since the 7 October 2023 attacks. A select few are given restricted access to Gaza for a short period under IDF supervision–and therefore from the IDF perspective–followed by a review of their raw material by Israeli military censors.

A BBC report published earlier this month from an Israeli military base outside Gaza City noted the conditions laid out by Israel, whose forces took a group of journalists into the Strip for a brief visit that was ‘highly controlled and offered no access to Palestinians, or other areas of Gaza’. Reporters were required to show their material to military personnel before publication.

Alongside the targeting of Palestinian journalists, such restricted access means few eyes on the ground can serve as the nexus between Gaza and the rest of the world. The ‘grey area’ of credibility between Israel and Hamas can only be filled by independent journalists who, in other instances of wartime, would have the ability to witness and report on the results of Israel’s invasion firsthand.

‘Otherwise, war crimes will remain unwritten’, Director General of Al Jazeera Media Network, Sheikh Nasser bin Faisal Al Thani, told an audience at a recent conference on wartime safety for journalists. ‘Protecting journalists is protection of the truth itself’.

In contrast to Israel’s press restrictions, the international media’s relative freedom in Ukraine has allowed investigative journalists to extensively cover Russia’s invasion of the region. While Russia continues to dispute war crime accusations as disinformation, reporters have uncovered several violations of international law in the three years following the invasion.

In December 2022, the New York Times’ visual forensics unit concluded an eight-month-long investigation into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Its findings showed that Russian forces committed war crimes in Bucha in March 2022, killing dozens of civilians. The soldiers who took part in the killings were later identified by the Times as Russia’s 234th Regiment.

Another effort by investigative journalists at Slidstvo.info and IStories helped connect civilian killings in the Ukrainian village of Andriyivka to individual Russian soldiers, one of whom blamed his superiors for the deaths in an exclusive video interview.

These investigations have bolstered human rights-based support for Ukraine in recent years, and international organisations like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union, the UN and a number of state governments have largely rallied in support of efforts to hold Russia accountable.

But this is not the case in Gaza, where press freedom has been squashed in exchange for the jingoist and nationalist sentiment that drives Israeli media. During the first six months of the war, of the more than 700 prime-time news items aired by Israel’s mainstream Channel 12, only four mentioned civilian deaths in Gaza.

While 39% of Americans say Israel is ‘going too far’ in its military operations, up from 31% a year ago, restricted press access and contrasting accounts between Israel and the Palestinian Authority mean many remain sceptical. Roughly a third of respondents answered that they are not sure of their stance on Israel’s role in the war. Considering the influence that U.S. foreign policy has on Israeli intervention, public opinion can be incredibly consequential.

In the wake of dead journalists, military censorship and newsroom rubble lies room for interpretation. With only a small stream of reporting leaving the Gaza Strip, Israel has drafted its own wartime accounts, while the rest of the world must decide whether or not to believe them.

If Israel’s systematic attacks against journalists continue alongside its ban on independent media, how many eyes will be left on the ground in Gaza by the end of the war? Will breaches of international law be fairly documented? And perhaps more importantly, in a war without witnesses, who will get to tell Gaza’s story?