October 20, 2025
Chris Hedges
This is how you know we are not at The National Press Club of Australia.
There are two types of war correspondents. The first type does not attend press conferences. They do not beg generals and politicians for interviews. They take risks to report from combat zones. They send back to their viewers or readers what they see, which is almost always diametrically opposed to official narratives. This first type, in every war, is a tiny minority.
Then there is the second type, the inchoate blob of self-identified war correspondents who play at war. Despite what they tell editors and the public, they have no intention of putting themselves in danger.
They are pleased with the Israeli ban on foreign reporters into Gaza. They plead with officials for background briefings and press conferences. They collaborate with their government minders who impose restrictions and rules that keep them out of combat.
They slavishly disseminate whatever they are fed by officials, much of which is a lie, and pretend it is news. They join little jaunts arranged by the military — dog and pony shows — where they get to dress up and play soldier and visit outposts where everything is controlled and choreographed.
The mortal enemy of these poseurs are the real war reporters, in this case, Palestinian journalists in Gaza. These reporters expose them as toadies and sycophants, discrediting nearly everything they disseminate. For this reason, the poseurs never pass up a chance to question the veracity and motives of those in the field. I watched these snakes do this repeatedly to my colleagues Robert Fisk and John Pilger.
When war reporter Ben Anderson arrived at the hotel where journalists covering the war in Liberia were encamped — in his words getting “drunk” at bars “on expenses,” having affairs and exchanging “information rather than actually going out and getting information” — his image of war reporters took a huge hit.
“I thought, finally, I’m amongst my heroes,” Anderson told me. “This is where I’ve wanted to be for years. And then me and the cameraman I was with — who knew the rebels very well — he took us out for about three weeks with the rebels. We came back to Monrovia. The guys in the hotel bar said, ‘Where have you been? We thought you’d gone home.’ We said, ‘We went out to cover the war. Isn’t that our job? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?’”
“The romantic view I had of foreign correspondents was suddenly destroyed in Liberia,” he went on. “I thought, actually, a lot of these guys are full of shit. They’re not even willing to leave the hotel, let alone leave the safety of the capital and actually do some reporting.”
This dividing line, which occurred in every war I covered, defines the reporting on the genocide in Gaza. It is not a divide of professionalism or culture. Palestinian reporters expose Israeli atrocities and implode Israeli lies. The rest of the press does not.
Palestinian journalists, targeted and assassinated by Israel, pay — as many great war correspondents do — with their lives, although in far greater numbers. Israel has murdered 245 journalists in Gaza by one count and more than 273 by another. The goal is to shroud the genocide in darkness. No war I covered comes close to these numbers of dead.
Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed more journalists “than the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined,” according to an April 2025 study by Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs.
Journalists in Palestine leave wills and record videos to be read or played at their death.
On a sweltering afternoon a few weeks ago, I was in the office of the head of the Palestinian TV in Old Cairo talking with Salman al-Bashir, who was the network’s correspondent in Gaza.
On the evening of Nov. 2, 2023, Salman was scheduled for the evening broadcast. It was, he tells me ruefully, the 106th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, which in 1917 committed the British government to establishing “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.
Palestine TV’s reporter Mohammed Abu Hatab was concluding his six-hour shift at 7 p.m. on the grounds of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. After reporting on the ongoing bombings and destruction, he handed broadcasting over to Salman. Abu Hatab, whose apartment was next to the hospital, went home. Most of the other journalists, because traveling any distance in Gaza was dangerous, slept in tents on the hospital grounds.
“There was an explosion near the hospital,” Salman says on a video he shows me of his broadcast.
“We can hear an explosion that is very loud.”
Television presenter Duha Shami in the Ramallah studio says to Salman, “It sounds close.”
“Yes,” Salman says on air. “There has been an explosion. I see the ambulances. I will let you know when we have any news.”
A member of the emergency team at the hospital runs towards Salman shouting “Mohammed Abu Hatab! Mohammed Abu Hatab! Your friend! Your colleague has been martyred! They targeted the house of Abu Hatab!”
Salman stops. He looks into the camera and says, “The target was apparently the house of Mohammed Abu Hatab’s family. A lot of people have been killed. Mohammed Abu Hatab was apparently martyred.”
Salman stands in front of the camera wearing a blue flak jacket with the word “PRESS” emblazoned on it. He is wearing a blue helmet and holds a microphone.
“There is no international protection at all and no immunity,” he says to the camera tearfully, as the red lights of an ambulance flash behind him. “These flak jackets and helmets do not protect us. They are just slogans that we wear. They do not protect journalists at all.”
“Here we are victims losing our lives one after another at no cost,” he says as he removes the chin strap of his helmet and takes the helmet off. “We are waiting for our turn, one after another.”
He undoes his flak jacket lets it drop to the ground.
“We can’t take it anymore,” he says emotionally on camera. “We’re exhausted. Here we become martyrs. It is only a matter of time. No one sees us or the size of this catastrophe. No one sees the crime we are experiencing in Gaza.”
“Psychologically I couldn’t accept it,” Salman told me in Cairo. “I was with him 20 minutes earlier. Now he was dead. They brought his body to the hospital. I refused to look at him. The people who saw him told me half of his face had blown away.”
In the video he turns away from the camera and sobs. Duha, in Ramallah, folds her head into her hands and wipes away tears.
“We are victims on live television,” he says in the broadcast. “Mohammed Abu Hatab was here half an hour ago. He left us, along with his wife, his son, his brother and other members of his family.”
Salman shows me a video of Mohammed’s funeral. He is one of the pallbearers. Mohammed’s body is wrapped in a white shroud. His blue flak jacket and a microphone lie on top of his body along with a small Palestinian flag.
“There is no God, but God!” the crowd chants. “The martyrs are God’s beloved!”
Salman then shows us a video of the gutted remains of Mohammed’s apartment where he and 10 family members were killed.
“Did you do anything differently after Mohammed was killed?” I asked.
“I was very cautious,” Salman answered.
“How?” I asked.
“With my language,” he said. “I started speaking very professionally. I talked about the war and the details of a war without using words other journalists were using. I tried not to aggravate the Israelis. I no longer referred to them as Zionists or the new Nazis. I stopped using words like ‘messianic.’ I stopped calling them the Israeli occupation army, I called them the Israeli army.”
Salman continued his work until his friend, the Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa — who had Belgian citizenship — was killed on Dec. 15, 2023, in a drone strike.
Samer had sent his family — including four children — to Belgium, but refused to leave Gaza. He and Wael Al-Dahdouh, Al Jazeera’s Gaza Bureau Chief, had been covering the aftermath of an Israeli strike that killed at least 20 people at Haifa School in Khan Younis, which was being used as a shelter for displaced families.
Wael was wounded in his hand and stomach, but was able to escape. The Israeli soldiers and hovering drones fired on ambulances and medics attempting to reach Samer. Three rescue workers were killed. Samer, who was 45, bled to death over five hours.
“I was with Samer on the day before he was martyred,” Salman said softly. “That was it. I couldn’t continue. I had to leave Gaza.”
In August 2025, when Middle East Eye journalists Mohamed Salama and Ahmed Abu Aziz, Reuters photojournalist Hussam al-Masri and freelancers Moaz Abu Taha, and Mariam Dagga — who had worked with several media outlets, including the Associated Press — were killed with 15 others at Nasser Hospital in a “double tap” strike designed to kill first responders following initial strikes, how did Western news agencies respond?
“Israeli military says strikes on Gaza hospital targeted what it says was a Hamas camera,” the Associated Press reported.
“IDF claims hospital strike was aimed at Hamas camera,” announced CNN.
“Israel army says six ‘terrorists’ killed in Monday strikes on Gaza hospital,” the AFP headline read.
“Initial inquiry says Hamas camera was target of Israeli strike that killed journalists,” Reuters reported.
“Israel claims troops saw Hamas camera before deadly hospital attack,” Sky News explained.
For the record, the camera belonged to Reuters. The news agency said Israel was “fully aware” they were filming from the hospital.
Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif, one of the most popular journalists in Gaza who reported daily on the genocide, received death threats on his phone.
In November 2023, the Israeli military ordered Anas to cease reporting and leave northern Gaza. They sent him messages informing him he was being tracked. His family home was bombed, killing his father. The Israeli military’s Arabic spokesman, Avichay Adraee, accused him of terrorism and being a Hamas operative overseeing the launching of rockets into Israel. The Committee to Protect Journalists called the sustained attacks on Anas a “precursor to assassination.”
The Tel-Aviv-based magazine +972 reported that the Israeli military has a special unit called the “Legitimization Cell” which carries out campaigns to portray Palestinian journalists as Hamas operatives, in an effort to justify their assassination.
In October 2024, Anas was with a group of journalists who are fired upon by Israeli soldiers in Jabalia. Cameraman Fadi al-Wahidi, clearly marked as a journalist in his flak jacket, was shot in the neck and paralyzed.
Soon after, the Israeli military accused six journalists, including Anas, of being militants. His Instagram account was taken down.
On May 2, 2025, after Israel blocked food and humanitarian aid, Anas reported on the mounting malnutrition and starvation in Gaza.
In July, he posted on social media that he is “drowning in hunger” and called the starvation a “slow death.” In one broadcast, he choked back tears as a malnourished woman behind him fainted.
A bystander shouted, “Keep going Anas, you are our voice!”
On Aug. 10, 2025, Anas and three other journalists were killed by an Israeli drone while in their media tent outside Al-Shifa Hospital.
How was the killing of these journalists reported by their colleagues in the Western press?
“Israel Kills Al Jazeera Journalist It Says Was Hamas Leader,” Reuters titled its story, despite the fact that Anas was part of a Reuters team that had won a 2024 Pulitzer Prize.
German newspaper Bild published a front page story headlined, “Terrorist disguised as a journalist killed in Gaza.”
The colleagues of these Palestinian journalists in the Western press broadcast from the border fence with Gaza decked out in flak jackets and helmets, where they have as much chance of being hit by shrapnel or a bullet as being struck by an asteroid. They scurry like lemmings to briefings by Israeli officials. They are not only the enemies of truth, but also the enemies of journalists doing the real work of war reporting. This divide is one I experienced in every war I covered.
When Iraqi troops attacked the Saudi border town of Khafji during the first Gulf War, Saudi soldiers fled in panic. Two French photographers and I watched frantic soldiers commandeering fire trucks and racing south. U.S. Marines pushed the Iraqis back. But in Riyadh, the press was told of our gallant Saudi allies defending their homeland.
Once fighting ended, the press bus stopped a few miles down the road from Khafji. The pool reporters clambered out, escorted by military minders. They did stand-ups with the distant sound of artillery and smoke as a backdrop and repeated the lies the Pentagon wanted told.
Meanwhile, the two photographers and I were detained as we left Khafji and beaten by enraged Saudi military police, furious that we had documented the panicked flight of Saudi soldiers.
My refusal to abide by press restrictions in the first Gulf War saw the other New York Times reporters in Saudi Arabia write a letter to the foreign editor saying I was ruining the paper’s relationship with the military. If not for the intervention of R.W. “Johnny” Apple who had covered Vietnam, I would have been sent back to New York.
I do not fault anyone for not wanting to go into a war zone. This is a sign of normality. It is rational. It is understandable. Those of us who volunteer to go into combat — my colleague Clyde Haberman at The New York Times once quipped that I parachute into a war with or without a parachute — have obvious personality defects.
But I fault those who pretend to be war correspondents. They do tremendous damage. They peddle false narratives. They mask reality. They serve as witting — or unwitting — propagandists. They discredit the voices of the victims and exonerate the killers. They betray those who take great risks to report the truth.
When I covered the war in El Salvador, before I worked for The New York Times, the paper’s correspondent dutifully regurgitated whatever the embassy fed her. This had the effect of making my editors — as well as editors of the other correspondents who did report the war — question our veracity and “impartiality.” It made it harder for readers to understand what was happening. The false narrative neutered and often overpowered the real one.
The slander used to discredit my Palestinian colleagues — claiming they are members of Hamas — is sadly familiar. Many Palestinian reporters I know in Gaza are, in fact, quite critical of Hamas. But even if they have ties with Hamas, so what? Israel’s attempt to justify targeting journalists from the Hamas-run al-Aqsa media network is also a violation of Article 79 of the Geneva Convention.
I worked with reporters and photographers who had a wide variety of beliefs, including Marxist-Leninists in Central America. This did not prevent them from being honest. I was in Bosnia and Kosovo with a Spanish cameraman, Miguel Gil Morena, who was later killed with my friend Kurt Schork. Miguel was a member of the right-wing Catholic group Opus Dei. He was also a journalist of tremendous courage, great compassion and moral probity, despite his opinions about Spain’s fascist ruler Francisco Franco. He did not lie.
In every war I covered, I was attacked as supporting or belonging to whatever group the government, including the U.S. government, was seeking to crush. I was accused of being a tool of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, Hamas, the Muslim-led government in Bosnia and the Kosovo Liberation Army.
John Simpson of the BBC, like many Western reporters, argues that the “world needs honest, unbiased eyewitness reporting to help people make up their minds about the major issues of our time. This has so far been impossible in Gaza.”
The assumption that if Western reporters were in Gaza the coverage would improve is risible. Trust me. It would not.
Israel bans the foreign press because there is a bias in Europe and the United States in favor of reporting by Western reporters. Israel is aware that the scale of the genocide is too vast for Western outlets to hide or obscure, despite all the ink and airtime they give to Israeli and U.S. apologists. Israel also cannot continue its systematic campaign of annihilation of journalists in Gaza if it has to contend with foreign media in its midst.
Israeli lies amplified by Western media outlets, including my former employer The New York Times, are worthy of Pravda. Beheaded babies. Babies cooked in ovens. Mass rape by Hamas. Errant Palestinian rockets that cause explosions at hospitals and massacre civilians. Secret command tunnels and command centers in schools and hospitals. Journalists who direct Hamas rocket units. Protestors of the genocide on college campuses who are antisemites and supporters of Hamas.
I covered the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis, much of that time in Gaza, for seven years. If there is one indisputable fact, it is that Israel lies like it breathes. The decision by Western reporters to give credibility to these lies, to give them the same weight as documented Israeli atrocities, is a cynical game.
The reporters know these lies are lies. But they, and the news outlets that employ them, prize access — in this case access to Israeli and U.S. officials — above truth. The reporters, as well as their editors and publishers, fear becoming targets of Israel and the powerful Israel lobby. There is no cost for betraying the Palestinians. They are powerless.
Call those lies out and you will swiftly find your requests for briefings and interviews with officials rebuffed. You won’t be invited by press officers to participate in staged visits to Israeli military units. You and your news organization will be viciously attacked. You will be left out in the cold. Your editors will terminate your assignment or your employment. Your talks will be cancelled at press clubs. This is not good for careers. And so, the lies are dutifully repeated, no matter how absurd.
It is pathetic watching these reporters and their news outlets, as Fisk writes, fight “like tigers to join these ‘pools’ in which they would be censored, restrained and deprived of all freedom of movement on the battlefield.”
The barrage of Israeli lies amplified and given credibility by the Western press violates a fundamental tenet of journalism, the duty to transmit the truth to the viewer or reader. It legitimizes mass slaughter. It refuses to hold Israel to account.
It betrays Palestinian journalists, those reporting and being killed in Gaza. And it exposes the bankruptcy of Western journalists, whose primary attributes are careerism and cowardice.
Chris Hedges
The
Betrayal of Palestinian Journalists
The National Press Club of
Australia in Canberra canceled an engagement with journalist Chris Hedges after
it was announced on its website. Hedges delivered the banned speech on Monday
in Sydney.
This talk is not sponsored by
Raytheon, BAE Systems and Thales, which sell weapons to Israel to sustain the
genocide. It is not sponsored by Amazon Web Services – which provides cloud
infrastructure to Israeli defense and intelligence agencies – Deloitte or
Mastercard, which also do business with the apartheid state of Israel.
This is how you know we are not at The National Press Club of Australia.
There are two types of war correspondents. The first type does not attend press conferences. They do not beg generals and politicians for interviews. They take risks to report from combat zones. They send back to their viewers or readers what they see, which is almost always diametrically opposed to official narratives. This first type, in every war, is a tiny minority.
Then there is the second type, the inchoate blob of self-identified war correspondents who play at war. Despite what they tell editors and the public, they have no intention of putting themselves in danger.
They are pleased with the Israeli ban on foreign reporters into Gaza. They plead with officials for background briefings and press conferences. They collaborate with their government minders who impose restrictions and rules that keep them out of combat.
They slavishly disseminate whatever they are fed by officials, much of which is a lie, and pretend it is news. They join little jaunts arranged by the military — dog and pony shows — where they get to dress up and play soldier and visit outposts where everything is controlled and choreographed.
The mortal enemy of these poseurs are the real war reporters, in this case, Palestinian journalists in Gaza. These reporters expose them as toadies and sycophants, discrediting nearly everything they disseminate. For this reason, the poseurs never pass up a chance to question the veracity and motives of those in the field. I watched these snakes do this repeatedly to my colleagues Robert Fisk and John Pilger.
When war reporter Ben Anderson arrived at the hotel where journalists covering the war in Liberia were encamped — in his words getting “drunk” at bars “on expenses,” having affairs and exchanging “information rather than actually going out and getting information” — his image of war reporters took a huge hit.
“I thought, finally, I’m amongst my heroes,” Anderson told me. “This is where I’ve wanted to be for years. And then me and the cameraman I was with — who knew the rebels very well — he took us out for about three weeks with the rebels. We came back to Monrovia. The guys in the hotel bar said, ‘Where have you been? We thought you’d gone home.’ We said, ‘We went out to cover the war. Isn’t that our job? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?’”
“The romantic view I had of foreign correspondents was suddenly destroyed in Liberia,” he went on. “I thought, actually, a lot of these guys are full of shit. They’re not even willing to leave the hotel, let alone leave the safety of the capital and actually do some reporting.”
This dividing line, which occurred in every war I covered, defines the reporting on the genocide in Gaza. It is not a divide of professionalism or culture. Palestinian reporters expose Israeli atrocities and implode Israeli lies. The rest of the press does not.
Palestinian journalists, targeted and assassinated by Israel, pay — as many great war correspondents do — with their lives, although in far greater numbers. Israel has murdered 245 journalists in Gaza by one count and more than 273 by another. The goal is to shroud the genocide in darkness. No war I covered comes close to these numbers of dead.
Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed more journalists “than the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined,” according to an April 2025 study by Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs.
Journalists in Palestine leave wills and record videos to be read or played at their death.
On a sweltering afternoon a few weeks ago, I was in the office of the head of the Palestinian TV in Old Cairo talking with Salman al-Bashir, who was the network’s correspondent in Gaza.
On the evening of Nov. 2, 2023, Salman was scheduled for the evening broadcast. It was, he tells me ruefully, the 106th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, which in 1917 committed the British government to establishing “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.
Palestine TV’s reporter Mohammed Abu Hatab was concluding his six-hour shift at 7 p.m. on the grounds of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. After reporting on the ongoing bombings and destruction, he handed broadcasting over to Salman. Abu Hatab, whose apartment was next to the hospital, went home. Most of the other journalists, because traveling any distance in Gaza was dangerous, slept in tents on the hospital grounds.
“There was an explosion near the hospital,” Salman says on a video he shows me of his broadcast.
“We can hear an explosion that is very loud.”
Television presenter Duha Shami in the Ramallah studio says to Salman, “It sounds close.”
“Yes,” Salman says on air. “There has been an explosion. I see the ambulances. I will let you know when we have any news.”
A member of the emergency team at the hospital runs towards Salman shouting “Mohammed Abu Hatab! Mohammed Abu Hatab! Your friend! Your colleague has been martyred! They targeted the house of Abu Hatab!”
Salman stops. He looks into the camera and says, “The target was apparently the house of Mohammed Abu Hatab’s family. A lot of people have been killed. Mohammed Abu Hatab was apparently martyred.”
Salman stands in front of the camera wearing a blue flak jacket with the word “PRESS” emblazoned on it. He is wearing a blue helmet and holds a microphone.
“There is no international protection at all and no immunity,” he says to the camera tearfully, as the red lights of an ambulance flash behind him. “These flak jackets and helmets do not protect us. They are just slogans that we wear. They do not protect journalists at all.”
“Here we are victims losing our lives one after another at no cost,” he says as he removes the chin strap of his helmet and takes the helmet off. “We are waiting for our turn, one after another.”
He undoes his flak jacket lets it drop to the ground.
“We can’t take it anymore,” he says emotionally on camera. “We’re exhausted. Here we become martyrs. It is only a matter of time. No one sees us or the size of this catastrophe. No one sees the crime we are experiencing in Gaza.”
“Psychologically I couldn’t accept it,” Salman told me in Cairo. “I was with him 20 minutes earlier. Now he was dead. They brought his body to the hospital. I refused to look at him. The people who saw him told me half of his face had blown away.”
In the video he turns away from the camera and sobs. Duha, in Ramallah, folds her head into her hands and wipes away tears.
“We are victims on live television,” he says in the broadcast. “Mohammed Abu Hatab was here half an hour ago. He left us, along with his wife, his son, his brother and other members of his family.”
Salman shows me a video of Mohammed’s funeral. He is one of the pallbearers. Mohammed’s body is wrapped in a white shroud. His blue flak jacket and a microphone lie on top of his body along with a small Palestinian flag.
“There is no God, but God!” the crowd chants. “The martyrs are God’s beloved!”
Salman then shows us a video of the gutted remains of Mohammed’s apartment where he and 10 family members were killed.
“Did you do anything differently after Mohammed was killed?” I asked.
“I was very cautious,” Salman answered.
“How?” I asked.
“With my language,” he said. “I started speaking very professionally. I talked about the war and the details of a war without using words other journalists were using. I tried not to aggravate the Israelis. I no longer referred to them as Zionists or the new Nazis. I stopped using words like ‘messianic.’ I stopped calling them the Israeli occupation army, I called them the Israeli army.”
Salman continued his work until his friend, the Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa — who had Belgian citizenship — was killed on Dec. 15, 2023, in a drone strike.
Samer had sent his family — including four children — to Belgium, but refused to leave Gaza. He and Wael Al-Dahdouh, Al Jazeera’s Gaza Bureau Chief, had been covering the aftermath of an Israeli strike that killed at least 20 people at Haifa School in Khan Younis, which was being used as a shelter for displaced families.
Wael was wounded in his hand and stomach, but was able to escape. The Israeli soldiers and hovering drones fired on ambulances and medics attempting to reach Samer. Three rescue workers were killed. Samer, who was 45, bled to death over five hours.
“I was with Samer on the day before he was martyred,” Salman said softly. “That was it. I couldn’t continue. I had to leave Gaza.”
In August 2025, when Middle East Eye journalists Mohamed Salama and Ahmed Abu Aziz, Reuters photojournalist Hussam al-Masri and freelancers Moaz Abu Taha, and Mariam Dagga — who had worked with several media outlets, including the Associated Press — were killed with 15 others at Nasser Hospital in a “double tap” strike designed to kill first responders following initial strikes, how did Western news agencies respond?
“Israeli military says strikes on Gaza hospital targeted what it says was a Hamas camera,” the Associated Press reported.
“IDF claims hospital strike was aimed at Hamas camera,” announced CNN.
“Israel army says six ‘terrorists’ killed in Monday strikes on Gaza hospital,” the AFP headline read.
“Initial inquiry says Hamas camera was target of Israeli strike that killed journalists,” Reuters reported.
“Israel claims troops saw Hamas camera before deadly hospital attack,” Sky News explained.
For the record, the camera belonged to Reuters. The news agency said Israel was “fully aware” they were filming from the hospital.
Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif, one of the most popular journalists in Gaza who reported daily on the genocide, received death threats on his phone.
In November 2023, the Israeli military ordered Anas to cease reporting and leave northern Gaza. They sent him messages informing him he was being tracked. His family home was bombed, killing his father. The Israeli military’s Arabic spokesman, Avichay Adraee, accused him of terrorism and being a Hamas operative overseeing the launching of rockets into Israel. The Committee to Protect Journalists called the sustained attacks on Anas a “precursor to assassination.”
The Tel-Aviv-based magazine +972 reported that the Israeli military has a special unit called the “Legitimization Cell” which carries out campaigns to portray Palestinian journalists as Hamas operatives, in an effort to justify their assassination.
In October 2024, Anas was with a group of journalists who are fired upon by Israeli soldiers in Jabalia. Cameraman Fadi al-Wahidi, clearly marked as a journalist in his flak jacket, was shot in the neck and paralyzed.
Soon after, the Israeli military accused six journalists, including Anas, of being militants. His Instagram account was taken down.
On May 2, 2025, after Israel blocked food and humanitarian aid, Anas reported on the mounting malnutrition and starvation in Gaza.
In July, he posted on social media that he is “drowning in hunger” and called the starvation a “slow death.” In one broadcast, he choked back tears as a malnourished woman behind him fainted.
A bystander shouted, “Keep going Anas, you are our voice!”
On Aug. 10, 2025, Anas and three other journalists were killed by an Israeli drone while in their media tent outside Al-Shifa Hospital.
How was the killing of these journalists reported by their colleagues in the Western press?
“Israel Kills Al Jazeera Journalist It Says Was Hamas Leader,” Reuters titled its story, despite the fact that Anas was part of a Reuters team that had won a 2024 Pulitzer Prize.
German newspaper Bild published a front page story headlined, “Terrorist disguised as a journalist killed in Gaza.”
The colleagues of these Palestinian journalists in the Western press broadcast from the border fence with Gaza decked out in flak jackets and helmets, where they have as much chance of being hit by shrapnel or a bullet as being struck by an asteroid. They scurry like lemmings to briefings by Israeli officials. They are not only the enemies of truth, but also the enemies of journalists doing the real work of war reporting. This divide is one I experienced in every war I covered.
When Iraqi troops attacked the Saudi border town of Khafji during the first Gulf War, Saudi soldiers fled in panic. Two French photographers and I watched frantic soldiers commandeering fire trucks and racing south. U.S. Marines pushed the Iraqis back. But in Riyadh, the press was told of our gallant Saudi allies defending their homeland.
Once fighting ended, the press bus stopped a few miles down the road from Khafji. The pool reporters clambered out, escorted by military minders. They did stand-ups with the distant sound of artillery and smoke as a backdrop and repeated the lies the Pentagon wanted told.
Meanwhile, the two photographers and I were detained as we left Khafji and beaten by enraged Saudi military police, furious that we had documented the panicked flight of Saudi soldiers.
My refusal to abide by press restrictions in the first Gulf War saw the other New York Times reporters in Saudi Arabia write a letter to the foreign editor saying I was ruining the paper’s relationship with the military. If not for the intervention of R.W. “Johnny” Apple who had covered Vietnam, I would have been sent back to New York.
I do not fault anyone for not wanting to go into a war zone. This is a sign of normality. It is rational. It is understandable. Those of us who volunteer to go into combat — my colleague Clyde Haberman at The New York Times once quipped that I parachute into a war with or without a parachute — have obvious personality defects.
But I fault those who pretend to be war correspondents. They do tremendous damage. They peddle false narratives. They mask reality. They serve as witting — or unwitting — propagandists. They discredit the voices of the victims and exonerate the killers. They betray those who take great risks to report the truth.
When I covered the war in El Salvador, before I worked for The New York Times, the paper’s correspondent dutifully regurgitated whatever the embassy fed her. This had the effect of making my editors — as well as editors of the other correspondents who did report the war — question our veracity and “impartiality.” It made it harder for readers to understand what was happening. The false narrative neutered and often overpowered the real one.
The slander used to discredit my Palestinian colleagues — claiming they are members of Hamas — is sadly familiar. Many Palestinian reporters I know in Gaza are, in fact, quite critical of Hamas. But even if they have ties with Hamas, so what? Israel’s attempt to justify targeting journalists from the Hamas-run al-Aqsa media network is also a violation of Article 79 of the Geneva Convention.
I worked with reporters and photographers who had a wide variety of beliefs, including Marxist-Leninists in Central America. This did not prevent them from being honest. I was in Bosnia and Kosovo with a Spanish cameraman, Miguel Gil Morena, who was later killed with my friend Kurt Schork. Miguel was a member of the right-wing Catholic group Opus Dei. He was also a journalist of tremendous courage, great compassion and moral probity, despite his opinions about Spain’s fascist ruler Francisco Franco. He did not lie.
In every war I covered, I was attacked as supporting or belonging to whatever group the government, including the U.S. government, was seeking to crush. I was accused of being a tool of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, Hamas, the Muslim-led government in Bosnia and the Kosovo Liberation Army.
John Simpson of the BBC, like many Western reporters, argues that the “world needs honest, unbiased eyewitness reporting to help people make up their minds about the major issues of our time. This has so far been impossible in Gaza.”
The assumption that if Western reporters were in Gaza the coverage would improve is risible. Trust me. It would not.
Israel bans the foreign press because there is a bias in Europe and the United States in favor of reporting by Western reporters. Israel is aware that the scale of the genocide is too vast for Western outlets to hide or obscure, despite all the ink and airtime they give to Israeli and U.S. apologists. Israel also cannot continue its systematic campaign of annihilation of journalists in Gaza if it has to contend with foreign media in its midst.
Israeli lies amplified by Western media outlets, including my former employer The New York Times, are worthy of Pravda. Beheaded babies. Babies cooked in ovens. Mass rape by Hamas. Errant Palestinian rockets that cause explosions at hospitals and massacre civilians. Secret command tunnels and command centers in schools and hospitals. Journalists who direct Hamas rocket units. Protestors of the genocide on college campuses who are antisemites and supporters of Hamas.
I covered the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis, much of that time in Gaza, for seven years. If there is one indisputable fact, it is that Israel lies like it breathes. The decision by Western reporters to give credibility to these lies, to give them the same weight as documented Israeli atrocities, is a cynical game.
The reporters know these lies are lies. But they, and the news outlets that employ them, prize access — in this case access to Israeli and U.S. officials — above truth. The reporters, as well as their editors and publishers, fear becoming targets of Israel and the powerful Israel lobby. There is no cost for betraying the Palestinians. They are powerless.
Call those lies out and you will swiftly find your requests for briefings and interviews with officials rebuffed. You won’t be invited by press officers to participate in staged visits to Israeli military units. You and your news organization will be viciously attacked. You will be left out in the cold. Your editors will terminate your assignment or your employment. Your talks will be cancelled at press clubs. This is not good for careers. And so, the lies are dutifully repeated, no matter how absurd.
It is pathetic watching these reporters and their news outlets, as Fisk writes, fight “like tigers to join these ‘pools’ in which they would be censored, restrained and deprived of all freedom of movement on the battlefield.”
The barrage of Israeli lies amplified and given credibility by the Western press violates a fundamental tenet of journalism, the duty to transmit the truth to the viewer or reader. It legitimizes mass slaughter. It refuses to hold Israel to account.
It betrays Palestinian journalists, those reporting and being killed in Gaza. And it exposes the bankruptcy of Western journalists, whose primary attributes are careerism and cowardice.
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