End Impunity: Silence is Complicity

By Dima Khatib,Palestinian journalist/Managing Director of AJ+

It is the largest massacre of journalists in human history.

In Gaza, 253 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed since October 2023 - more than those killed in the wars of Afghanistan, Vietnam, the Balkans, World War I, and World War II combined. Yet these killings remain mostly uninvestigated, unpunished, and unacknowledged by those responsible - a stark example of the impunity that allows attacks on journalists to continue.

Ten of those 253 were my colleagues at Al Jazeera Media Network.

I still miss the voice of my colleague, Anas Al-Sharif, every morning from Gaza City - reporting on the humanitarian situation, talking to people every day.

He was killed in a targeted attack on journalists near Al Shifa Hospital on 10 August 2025.

He left behind a family who will forever be without a father, and a farewell letter that went viral - a heartbreaking tradition now common among Gaza's journalists, who leave their last words in hospitals to be delivered to loved ones after their death.

No other media organisation has ever lost so many journalists in such a short time, in any single conflict.

These are reporters and camerapersons who have been working under inhuman conditions for a prolonged period: bombed, starved, displaced, hunted, and threatened.

Their killings are not accidents of war but deliberate state policy - and the whole world is watching it live on their phones.

Their work should be celebrated as heroic. Were it not for them, the world might never have known what has been happening in Gaza, since Israel allows no foreign journalists to enter unless embedded with the Israeli army and reporting under its scrutiny. It is still the case today, after the ceasefire agreement has entered in place.

Journalists have been inheriting gear from each other.

When one is killed, the next takes their vest and resumes their work - sometimes on the same day, reporting on the killing of their colleague while wearing that very vest. One particular vest is now being worn by a third journalist, after two were consecutively killed wearing it.

They know the risk they face, yet they continue - driven by duty to tell the world their people's stories, and by the conviction that their lives as Palestinians are already under threat, so they might as well use the time left to make a difference.

I remember our first loss in Gaza in December 2023: Samer Abu Daqqa. He was killed while documenting the aftermath of an airstrike.

Wounded and trapped, he bled for hours as medics were blocked from reaching him. We kept pleading with the world on all platforms to save him.

We knew he was still alive.

When colleagues later recovered his camera, it was still recording - smoke and silence filling the final frame.

His death turned Al Jazeera's newsroom into a mourning hall and sent a clear message: journalists in Gaza were now deliberate targets, exactly like the 8th April 2003 when our newsroom turned into a mourning hall as we lost our colleague Tarek Ayyoub, killed in a US airstrike on Baghdad, Iraq.

The aim is always the same: to silence the voice of the truth.

In Palestine this impunity had begun way before the genocidal war on Gaza - when my colleague and friend Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by a sniper in May 2022 while reporting from the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.

She was a dual Palestinian-American citizen. Dozens of investigations proved, time and again, that she was targeted - yet there were no consequences.

That lack of accountability allowed Israel to continue and intensify its killing of journalists without fear of repercussions.

It has even gone further, labelling journalists as "terrorists" to justify their murder.

Sadly, some media organisations echoed this propaganda, betraying their own profession by failing to verify Israel's claims.

The dehumanisation of Palestinians by the media extended to Palestinian journalists, who were not considered "white" enough to be defended in the name of "universal" human rights.

If the community of journalists does not defend its own - regardless of colour, race, nationality, ethnicity, or religion - then Israel's war on journalists will inevitably become a war on journalism itself.

If this massacre is allowed to continue in Gaza today, unpunished and unaccounted for, it can happen anywhere, anytime, again.

Silence is complicity.

Silence is complicity.

This article is made available to members of the WAN-IFRA community to republish on or around 2nd November to mark the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists.

The views expressed are those of the author.

WAN-IFRA External Contributor

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