For two years we were told that Israel was waging a war on journalists. The statistics were recited at the UN, quoted in human rights reports, and repeated earnestly by presenters keen to prove their virtue from the safety of far-off studios and podcast sets. Gaza, we heard, had become the deadliest place on earth to be a reporter, and the dominant explanation offered was that Israel was deliberately silencing the press by mercilessly targeting those brave people who were simply serving the cause of objective truth.

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This week, the IDF published what it calls the Press Files: the names, photographs and roles of 170 of those people killed during the war who were presented to the world as journalists and media workers, and who were also operatives in terrorist organisations. 118 belonged to Hamas’s military wing, 49 to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the rest to smaller factions. Seventeen of them actually crossed into Israel on 7 October 2023. The deaths of more than 40 of them drew formal condemnation of Israel from the UN. Some, according to the IDF, had worked for Reuters, CNN, the BBC, AP, AFP, Le Monde and ABC Australia. But we were never told exactly who they were and who they really worked for.

If this list comes late in the day, that is because it took time to compile. It was built over months, painstakingly, from documents and rosters recovered by troops inside Gaza, many of them produced by the terrorist groups themselves, alongside other intelligence. In many cases the evidence came from Hamas and Islamic Jihad directly, which quietly claimed these men as their own martyrs once the international outrage had already done its work. By then the narrative was set, and the corrections never travelled as far as the accusations. Telling real truth takes time. Spreading propaganda is much quicker.

Anas al-Sharif was Al Jazeera’s best-known face in northern Gaza. When he was killed in August 2025, his death was condemned by the UN, press freedom groups and much of the western commentariat. The IDF has now published documents recovered by its troops in Gaza listing him as a company-level officer in the artillery company of Hamas’s Northern Gaza Brigade, complete with a Hamas military ID number. Hossam Shabat, whose posthumous ‘if you are reading this’ message went viral across the world, appears in recovered Hamas documents as an anti-tank operative in the Beit Hanoun Battalion. Ismail al-Ghoul, another Al Jazeera correspondent mourned as a martyr of the free press, is named in a captured roster of Hamas’s Gaza Brigade. Hamza al-Dahdouh, son of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, whose death prompted public sorrow from America’s secretary of state, is listed in a recovered Islamic Jihad document as an operative in........

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