The war on journalists in Palestine

No conflict in modern memory has seen the deliberate killing of press workers on the scale Israel has carried out in the Gaza Strip. In a statement to mark this year’s World Press Freedom Day, UN Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk put it plainly: Gaza, he said, has become a “death trap” for journalists.

Since the beginning of the genocide that came in the wake of Hamas’ October 7 attacks, Israel has barred entry to journalists from outside Gaza while deliberately targeting Palestinian journalists inside it, routinely accusing those killed of Hamas associations and of spreading misinformation. The death toll has now surpassed 263 journalists and media workers across Palestine, Lebanon, and the wider region. As such, the occupation army is responsible for two-thirds of all journalist killings worldwide over the past two and a half years.

Yet international law is unambiguous. Article 79 of the Geneva Conventions protects journalists in conflict zones, treating them as civilians, while UN Security Council Resolution 2222 goes further, recognizing the press vest as a legal declaration of this protected status and classifying the deliberate targeting of those wearing it as a war crime. For the past two and a half years, Israel has been violating both.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked Palestine as “the most dangerous state for journalists” in this year’s Press Freedom Index. The iconic blue press vest, once a shield of legal protection, has become a target. Israel carries on with impunity, protected by the very legal and political structures designed to prevent this.

Documentation without accountability

Since October 2023, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), and Reporters Without Borders have undertaken the painstaking work of documentation. They compile evidence of Israeli violations, cross-referenced, sourced, and formatted to meet the standards of international legal proceedings. The access blockade forces them to work at a remove; Martin Roux, head of RSF’s crisis desk told Al Manassa that they have been forced to conduct interviews with witnesses to killings and with journalists after their release from detention online. 

RSF has filed five formal complaints against Israel with the International Criminal Court (ICC) since Oct. 7, each accompanied by a fresh batch of documentary evidence. Yet the case against Israel did not begin there. The IFJ filed its first complaint in April 2022, after Israeli snipers killed four journalists clearly wearing press vests, reflecting a pattern that long precedes the current genocide. All these charges have been folded into the ICC’s Situation in the State of Palestine investigation, which was opened in March 2021 and expanded in November 2023 to cover the escalation of hostilities.

In September 2025, ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan confirmed that crimes against journalists are included in the Court’s ongoing investigation into Palestine, and that his office had integrated direct testimonies from victims and witnesses into the legal proceedings.

Journalist unions play a vital intermediary role in the documentation process, connecting victims wishing to testify with the international organizations that bring cases before courts. According to Khalil Al-Rimawi, spokesperson for the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, the union currently has four open cases before the ICC, the oldest dating back to 2018.

Meanwhile, the Lebanese Press Syndicate coordinates with Information Minister Paul Morcos to send memoranda and complaints to UNESCO, the Human Rights Committee, and the European Union, syndicate member Mohammad Nimer told Al Manassa. It also liaises with UNIFIL forces operating in southern Lebanon to have violations of international law against journalists documented in their official reports.

A systemic impasse

The volume of open cases is itself a measure of how deeply entrenched Israel’s impunity has become. Four years after the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a case with mountains of documented proof and international attention, the CPJ is still demanding “public updates” on an investigation that has yet to name a single suspect.

If the Court’s lethargy is partly structural, it is primarily political. While the preliminary phase of ICC investigations takes an average of four years according to the International Justice Monitor, in practice timelines vary from a single week in Libya to over a decade in Afghanistan. In Libya, a swift UN Security Council resolution bypassed all procedural friction to target the Gadhafi regime overnight. Conversely, when prosecutors turned their attention to war crimes committed by US forces in Afghanistan, Washington retaliated with aggressive punitive measures: revoking visas and imposing financial sanctions, forcing the Court to deprioritize the investigation.

Despite the hopes pinned on the ICC’s unprecedented November 2024 decision to issue arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, on the ground, little has changed since then.

Human rights lawyer and ICC practitioner Nasser Amin explained to Al Manassa that on some level, this is to be expected. Cases of this scale are inherently complex, multi-staged, and protracted. Crucially, the court has no independent enforcement mechanism, relying entirely on the cooperation of member states.

Not only does Israel refuse to ratify the Rome Statute, thereby rejecting ICC jurisdiction, it has also actively blocked proceedings, compounding systemic delays, Amin added. Allied states have run parallel interference: the UK, for instance, filed a jurisdiction challenge generating 63 additional response briefs and pushing back the expected arrest warrants for Israeli leaders from July to November 2024. When those warrants were finally issued, Israel appealed again on grounds ultimately rejected by the Appeals Chamber in December 2025. At every procedural juncture, the machinery of obstruction has kept pace with the machinery of justice.

Obstruction by design

That obstruction has included direct, personal threats to the ICC prosecutor. In May 2024, twelve US senators threatened sanctions against Khan if he continued pursuing Israeli officials. At same the time, he told Christiane Amanpour in a CNN interview that unnamed “elected leaders” had spoken to him “explicitly,” with one telling him outright that the ICC was built “not for democracies” like the United States and Israel, but for “Africa and thugs like Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

Egyptian Journalists Syndicate head Khaled Elbalshy is blunt about what this means for Palestinian journalists: “Political interests get in the way of truth-finding, accountability, and retribution.” For Elbalshy, international legal mechanisms in their current form have simply become incapable of addressing Israeli violations.

Israel’s powerful vanguard of Western allies—chiefly the United States, Germany, Hungary, and Argentina—routinely flout the court’s arrest orders by hosting Netanyahu on official state visits. But, as journalist and legal researcher Mohamed Bassal explained to Al Manassa, the interference goes deeper than diplomatic hospitality. He pointed to the White House’s unprecedented sanctions in February 2025 targeting Khan and the ICC’s judicial apparatus, which included travel bans, asset freezes, and prohibitions on the Prosecutor’s office using American banking infrastructure or software.

The court’s paralysis, then, is not a failure of bureaucracy. It has been actively engineered. A joint investigation by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian revealed that, since 2015, Israel’s intelligence community has routinely surveilled ICC prosecutors and dozens of court officials, mobilizing the highest branches of government to derail the probe by intercepting communications, running smear campaigns, and labeling the Palestinian human rights organizations feeding evidence to the court as terrorist groups. 

Beyond those overt, heavy-handed geopolitical maneuvers, Bassal argues that the biggest threat to accountability is a quiet, decades-long campaign of indirect lobbying to suppress any criticism of Israel’s crimes at the domestic and international levels. “Even if these smear campaigns and diplomatic assaults fail to stop the ICC from conducting its independent mandate,” he stressed to Al Manassa, “we cannot underestimate the effect they exert behind closed doors.” 

This pressure seems to have spilled over into the documentation process too. In December 2024, CPJ whistleblowers alleged that the organization had suppressed an Impunity Index report at the instruction of senior leadership, under pressure from pro-Israel donors. Separately, researchers at Human Rights Watch resigned after a blocked report on Palestinian refugee return, a decision one anonymous staffer called “unprincipled and cowardly.”

Beyond the playbook

The organizations working to protect Palestinian journalists have done everything within their mandates: emergency aid, solidarity, documentation, legal complaints, diplomatic advocacy, lobbying at the UN General Assembly, bringing Palestinian media workers to testify at the Hague. Yet the systems of international law are still failing to protect journalists targeted by the Israeli regime.

There is no precedent for this scale of journalist killing in one conflict zone, by one military. The CPJ puts it plainly: “Israel’s disregard for the lives of journalists — and for the international laws designed to protect them — is unparalleled.” 

And because there is no precedent, there is no existing playbook, no ready-made and tested rules. The organizations that have exhausted the mechanisms available to them must now ask what lies beyond.

The press vest used to mean something; restoring that meaning in law and in practice will require more than everything tried so far.