It turns out the ‘reporters’ killed by the IDF really were jihadists after all.
by Jake Wallis Simons
Round and round we go. Well, this week provided an unexpected and happy little victory. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) – one of the world’s leading press-freedom organisations – was forced to concede that, after all this time, the Israelis had a point. ‘The [CPJ] is conducting a full review of its database of journalists killed during the Israel-Gaza War’, it said in a statement, ‘after militant groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad published obituaries identifying as combatants individuals previously listed by CPJ as journalists’.
Hallelujah! The irony of all this, of course, is that the CPJ and the rest of the media-NGO complex believe jihadis far more readily than they believe the Middle East’s only democracy. Israel has been telling them for years that terrorists were masquerading as civilians, only to be pooh-poohed – it’s only when the head-choppers let the cat out of the bag themselves that the matter is taken seriously.
The same dynamic was in play, of course, with the casualty figures during the Gaza war (which ended last year, by the way). According to a study by Andrew Fox for the Henry Jackson Society in 2024, only five per cent of the media organisations surveyed cited casualty figures issued by the Israeli authorities. By contrast, 98 per cent used those provided by the Hamas-controlled health ministry.
This means that almost all Western media outlets have unflinchingly disseminated Hamas propaganda to their tens of millions of viewers, while disregarding Israeli figures almost entirely. The world’s journalists have taken the word of jihadi butchers above the evidence-based testimony of a friendly democracy and shared this narrative with the world.
