If you look carefully at one of the pages of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)’s website you’ll see a short, matter of fact statement. It’s a statement deemed so inconsequential by the CPJ that it’s not even mentioned on the organisation’s social media.
But the headline gives the game away. Far from being inconsequential, the statement issued last week (which the CPJ clearly hoped would escape much attention) is a devastating indictment of the CPJ’s claim that Israel has been systematically and deliberately killing journalists in Gaza. Which is, of course, a variation on the same theme about Israel that has been made in regard to children, last week by a report to the UNHRC, and more generally in the notion that Israel is committing genocide.
“CPJ undertakes review of its documentation of journalists killed in Israel-Gaza war since 2023”, says the headline. Sounds bland, doesn’t it? It’s checking its work, as all good journalists do. But it means something rather more. Ever since the CPJ started publishing its findings of journalists supposedly being deliberately killed by Israel there has been pushback; obviously from the Israelis but also from others who have looked into the backgrounds of some of the “journalists” whose deaths have been recorded by the CPJ as an indictment against Israel. What is clear from this work is that CPJ has been including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists in its numbers of dead journalists.
CPJ has strenuously denied this. It has cast aspersions on the motives of those who have been pointing it out over the past two years and more. And – hugely damaging to Israel as it fights not just a kinetic but a global PR war – CPJ’s figures have been quoted universally as fact. Indeed, the idea that Israel has been targeting journalists to kill them has taken hold as a statement of fact, in large part due to the work and behaviour of CPJ.
But there comes a time when no matter how strongly an errant organisation defends itself, reality – the truth – can no longer be resisted. CPJ is now at that point.
Ironically, CPJ’s crisis – a crisis which goes to the heart of its integrity – is not the result of the superb work by researchers such as Eitan Fischberger, Salo Aizenberg, Gabriel Epstein, Gnasher Jew and David Collier, who have exposed numerous terrorists listed as journalists. No, CPJ’s ethics have been publicly shamed by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who have themselves outed supposed journalists as terrorists by publishing obituaries identifying them as “combatants”, as the CPJ calls them in its statement: “In all countries and conflicts, CPJ removes names from its database if subsequent evidence shows individuals were not journalists or media workers, were not active in those capacities at the time of their deaths, or were engaging in combat. Consistent with this documentation approach, CPJ has removed eight names from its Killed database because they were later established to have been Hamas or PIJ combatants. A further 12 individuals were removed for other reasons. Each of these 20 names is listed on CPJ’s Journalist casualties page.”
The statement is a classic of its kind. What it is actually saying is the opposite of what it wants readers to think, that it is fastidious and accurate. What the statement suggests is that CPJ prints the names of those it labels as journalists killed in Gaza without any proper scrutiny or examination of the idea that they were using their status as journalists to carry out military and terror operations against Israel.
The statement suggests that CPJ’s threshold for reconsidering names on its list of alleged journalists killed by Israel is extremely narrow. It appears to treat claims by Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad themselves as decisive in a way that evidence from independent researchers is not. The result is that even serious evidence that a listed individual may have had ties to a terrorist organisation may not, by itself, be enough to prompt CPJ to amend its listing.
But even when Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad claim an individual as a terrorist – as a martyr, as they put it – CPJ will still not necessarily accept that they were a terrorist. Take, for example, Mohamed Abu Skheil, who remains listed on CPJ’s roster of journalists killed by Israel. Palestinian Islamic Jihad have themselves said that he was a commander (killed inside Shifa Hospital in March 2024). As also were two of his family, Tariq and Muhammad Skheil – also still listed by the CPJ as journalists despite Palestinian Islamic Jihad celebrating both as martyrs. As Salo Aizenberg writes: “The Gaza war in a nutshell: Terrorists posing as civilians, operating from hospitals, global media runs cover for them accusing Israel of attacking hospitals.”
The CPJ’s statement is nothing if not determined to keep up the pretence that its figures are correct, despite it only having to release the statement because that pretence is no longer possible: “As of June 25, 2026, the current total of individuals documented by CPJ as journalists or media workers killed by Israel in Gaza and in Israeli detention centres since October 7, 2023, stands at 209”, says the CPJ.
To which I say – as should anyone with a functioning brain – how do you know how many of these are journalists and not terrorists? Because it is obvious to anyone who does not set out to convict Israel of targeting journalists, despite there being zero evidence, that many of those listed by CPJ were no more merely journalists than they were Nobel Prize winning chemists or concert pianists.
Last December a study by the Israeli Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre found that most Gaza-based "journalists” killed since the outbreak of the war were operatives in, or closely affiliated with, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The centre looked at 266 individuals identified as journalists killed in Gaza between October 7, 2023, and November 30, 2025. At least 157 – around 60 per cent – were either members of the organisations or affiliated to them. That figure was a conservative estimate: the report only labelled as members those for whom it found clear evidence, using public records, Palestinian media reports and Hamas documents seized by the Israel Defense Forces.
Research by Eitan Fischberger shows the extent of CPJ's broken methodology, allowing it to include the eight terrorists it has now admitted were terrorists.
The sources CPJ relied on for the claim that these individuals were journalists were a combination of these: people who worked at a dead man’s own outlet, a group run by his own relatives (cited as if it was independent), the outlet one founded (vouching for its own founder), one where the claim to a journalist was never reviewed alone but was folded into someone else's write-up, and some where the claim was made by an advocacy group aligned with Hamas.
CPJ’s claim that it always uses “two independent sources of information, desk-based research, and in-person research where possible before adding someone as a journalist or media worker to its database” would be funny if the reality of its data did not have such devastating consequences. Instead, it offers this as an explanation: “In-person verification by researchers from outside Gaza has been impossible since the start of the war because Israel has refused access to the territory, including to international correspondents.” In other words: we can’t verify claims so we rely on whatever anyone tells us.
There is a pressing need for an organisation like the Committee to Protect Journalists. There are combatants globally who do target journalists. War reporters die. But the CPJ is not that organisation. It is so determined to hold Israel up as a unique evil that it lists terrorists as journalists and then defends itself against all criticism, until it is finally forced to admit it is wrong when terrorist organisations pull the rug from under its feet.
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