For nearly two years, Israel has been systemically targeting and killing Palestinian journalists in Gaza. On Sunday night, the Israeli military brazenly killed another six journalists, who had been sheltering in a tent housing media workers in Gaza City. Among them was the 28-year-old Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif and the rest of the network’s team reporting from the besieged territory.

Israel is able to kill Palestinian journalists with impunity not just because of the unconditional military and political support it receives from the US and other western powers, but also the failure of many western media organizations and journalists to stand up for their Palestinian colleagues. Western outlets are often willing to publicly criticize governments and campaign for journalists who are harassed or imprisoned by US adversaries like Russia, China or Iran. But these institutions are largely silent when it comes to Israel, a US ally.

This shameful hypocrisy of western, and especially US, media has been laid bare by Israel’s targeting of journalists since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack. Journalists have the same protection as civilians under international law, which considers the targeted killing of journalists a war crime. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says that 192 journalists have been killed since 7 October – 184 of them Palestinians killed by Israel. Of the Palestinians killed, the CPJ found that at least 26 were deliberatively targeted for their work as journalists, but the group couldn’t determine whether others were killed specifically for their work.

Other organizations put the number of media workers killed in Gaza even higher, with a recent study by the Costs of War project at Brown University finding that at least 232 were killed as of late March. In one of its starkest conclusions,

© The Guardian