In Gaza, Israeli strikes have killed at least 189 Palestinian journalists, sparking international condemnation and calls for accountability. Photo / Getty Images
The biggest single massacre of journalists in modern memory took place more than a decade and a half ago.
About 100 armed men linked to a powerful local political clan in the southern Philippine province of Maguindanao ambushed and killed 58 people who were part of a convoy headed to register an opposition candidate in upcoming elections.
Thirty-two of those killed were journalists or media workers who had been invited to cover the trip, partially out of the presumption that their presence would offer a degree of protection to the delegation.
Instead, three days later, their bullet-riddled corpses were exhumed from a pit where they had been dumped by their assailants.
The November 2009 massacre was the worst-ever act of election violence in the Philippines and also the worst ever recorded attack on journalists in the world.
It drew global headlines and a political backlash in a country shaped by deep, quasi-feudal networks of patronage and plagued by extrajudicial violence.
But justice was hardly swift: a tangled, troubled legal process rolled on for years, with key witnesses murdered by unidentified gunmen.
Senior politicians cast aspersions on the agendas of the slain journalists.
Finally, in 2019, a judge in Manila handed out life sentences to some members of the influential family behind the killings, as well as to many of their accomplices.
To many observers, the delay reinforced a worrying climate of impunity.
“This prolonged failure to achieve justice highlights the authorities’ inability to curb violence against journalists,” Reporters Without Borders noted last year.
“Since the massacre in November 2009, an additional 43 journalists have been killed in the Philippines, making it the most dangerous country for the profession in the Asia-Pacific region.”
It’s worth considering what happened in Maguindanao in the context of what’s unfurled in the Gaza Strip.
At least 189 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been “killed by Israel in Gaza”, according to a tally maintained by the Committee to Protect Journalists, since the start of the war that began on October 7, 2023, when militant group Hamas attacked southern Israel and abducted hundreds of hostages.
That figure is far larger than the toll from two decades of war in Afghanistan, a decade of war in Ukraine, and the wars in Vietnam and Korea.
If the project of seeking justice for the killings in Maguindanao was tough and protracted, finding any sort of accountability for the deaths of Palestinian journalists will probably prove all the more difficult.
There still have been no convictions for the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022, even as multiple investigations appear to have confirmed she was gunned down by an Israeli sniper while covering hostilities in the West Bank.
In Gaza, Israel pins the blame for any civilian casualties on Hamas for operating in areas where there are non-combatants.
It has also accused some journalists of being extensions of Hamas, and therefore legitimate targets.
As international media has not been allowed by Israel to freely enter or report from Gaza, local journalists have shouldered the burden of covering the war alone – and paid a bitter price.
The latest example came on Tuesday NZT when the Israeli military killed at least 20 people, including five journalists, when it struck Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza.
It hit the facility once shortly after 10am local time and then targeted it again in what’s known as a “double tap” strike as reporters and first responders gathered at the scene.
The attack was captured live on camera, making it difficult for Israeli authorities to dismiss.
Among the dead were Mariam Dagga, a freelancer for the Associated Press, and Hussam al-Masri, a freelance photographer for Reuters.
Israeli military officials invoked the presence of a “Hamas camera” and cited Hamas terrorists at the location as grounds for choosing the target.
But in the face of international condemnation, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the situation as a “tragic mishap” and said in a statement that Israel “values the work of journalists, medical staff, and all civilians” and only wants to defeat “Hamas terrorists”.
Watchdog groups were unimpressed.
“Israel’s broadcasted killing of journalists in Gaza continues while the world watches and fails to act firmly on the most horrific attacks the press has ever faced in recent history,” Sara Qudah, Middle East director for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in a statement.
This month, an Israeli strike killed Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif, one of the most-recognisable journalists covering the war on the ground, and three members of his crew.
Israel said Sharif was the head of a “Hamas terrorist cell” - charges rejected by Al Jazeera, Sharif’s friends and family, and United Nations’ experts.
Israel shared no documentation or evidence indicating his involvement in military activities during the current conflict.
The CPJ, for its part, had warned three weeks before Sharif’s killing that his life was in danger and that he could be “targeted by an Israeli military smear campaign” that might be “a precursor to his assassination”.
Even as Israeli authorities denied targeting Palestinian journalists, some prominent Israeli journalists and commentators have cheered these killings.
On Monday, i24 News Arab affairs analyst Zvi Yehezkeli welcomed the news of the Nasser Hospital strike.
“Just consider how much cognitive damage those terrorist-journalists … inflicted on Israel,” he said, referring to their reporting as propaganda damaging to Israel.
“If Israel has decided to eliminate the journalists, better late than never,” he concluded.
Such sentiment is not exactly a minority opinion in Israel.
According to a recent opinion poll, 76% of Israeli Jews agree to varying extents with the claim “there are no innocents in Gaza”.
It’s a reflection of the broader suspicion with which the Israeli public views Gaza’s more than two million Palestinians, who have seen their homeland obliterated by Israeli bombardments and where increasing parts of it are in the grips of a UN-declared famine thanks to months of Israeli blockade.
Still, Netanyahu’s management of the war is unpopular, and a mass protest movement is consistently bringing out tens of thousands to the streets of Tel Aviv, clamouring for an immediate ceasefire deal that would free the remaining hostages.
The journalists’ deaths on Tuesday “should make people aware that the ongoing war is a bottomless pit, whose logic even the IDF has a hard time explaining,” wrote Einav Schiff in Yediot Ahronot, a major Israeli daily.
“Instead of collapsing the Hamas regime, what has collapsed is the legitimacy (the human legitimacy, not the international legitimacy) of the war as an act of defence.”
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