Nearly two years after Israeli warplanes bombed her family home west of Khan Younis, the bodies of Palestinian journalist Heba Al-Abadlah, her mother and about 15 members of the Al-Asstal family were pulled from the rubble on Friday Dec. 26.
Their remains have come to symbolize what Palestinian journalists describe as the systematic Israeli campaign to punish the press by killing their families.
The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said on Saturday that the Israeli army has killed 706 family members of journalists in the Gaza Strip since the start of Israel genocide in the besieged enclave in October 2023, calling the toll evidence of a deliberate escalation that extends far beyond direct attacks on media workers.
In its report, the syndicate said Israel’s assault on Palestinian journalism has not stopped at killing, injuring, arresting or barring reporters from coverage. Instead, it said, the Israeli army has pushed the violence into a more dangerous and brutal phase: the systematic targeting of journalists’ families and relatives.
Monitoring and documentation by the syndicate’s Freedoms Committee show that attacks on journalists’ families hardened into a repeated and entrenched pattern across 2023, 2024 and 2025. The committee documented the killing of about 706 relatives of journalists in Gaza during that period, the report said.
The breakdown underscores the scale of the loss. 436 relatives were killed in 2023, followed by 203 in 2024 and 67 in 2025, according to the Freedoms Committee.
Based on indicators cited by the syndicate, these killings cannot be explained away as incidental consequences of war. The union said the frequency, repetition and nature of the attacks point instead to a systematic approach, not isolated or accidental incidents.
“Despite forced displacement and life in tents and shelters, these figures mean that hundreds of children, women and elderly people were killed solely because of a family member’s professional work in journalism,” the syndicate said. “This constitutes a flagrant violation of all humanitarian and legal norms.”
The syndicate said the relative decline in killings in 2025 does not signal improved conditions on the ground. Instead, it attributed the drop to mass displacement, the widespread destruction of homes, families crowding into tents and shelters, the dispersal of extended families and the absence of fixed addresses that could be directly targeted.
The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate called for an independent international investigation, urgent action by human rights and trade union bodies at the local, Arab and international levels, and the provision of international protection for Palestinian journalists and their families. It also demanded that these killings be formally included in international legal accountability files.
The syndicate’s Freedoms Committee said the “blood of journalists’ families will remain a living testimony to the crime of attempting to silence the Palestinian voice, and that the truth will remain stronger than killing.”
The Syndicate had said in early December that the number of journalists killed by Israeli forces since the start of the war has risen to 257.
Meanwhile, the Israeli army has continued to violate the ceasefire agreement in Gaza since it came into force in October 2025, carrying out near-daily air raids on homes and tents sheltering displaced people.
Israel has refused to move to the second phase of the agreement unless all Israeli captives held by Hamas are released. One captive of war remains unaccounted for, Israeli army officer Ran Gvili, with Palestinian resistance groups saying they are still searching for him beneath the rubble.
