Nearly two hundred Palestinian journalists have been killed in Israeli bombings in the Gaza strip over the last 18 months. In response, a collective of French professional organisations defending journalists…

Nearly two hundred Palestinian journalists have been killed in Israeli bombings in the Gaza strip over the last 18 months. In response, a collective of French professional organisations defending journalists and press freedom have signed an open letter denouncing the attack on the profession and the media blackout they claim Israel is organising.

The organisations have also called for a gathering on Wednesday in Paris and Marseille in support of their colleagues in Gaza.

Here is their open letter in full:

"It is not common for a journalist to write his own obituary at the age of 23. Yet this is what Hossam Shabat, the Al-Jazeera Moubasher correspondent in the Gaza Strip, did. The young man, aware that Israeli bombardments on the Palestinian territory had drastically reduced the life expectancy of members of his profession, composed a short text, to be published if anything were to happen to him.

These words were finally posted on social networks on Monday, March 24. “If you are reading this, it means that I have been killed,” begins the message in which the Al-Jazeera reporter talks about his nights sleeping on the floor, the hunger that never stopped gnawing at him and his struggle to “document the horrors minute by minute.” “I will finally be able to rest, something I have not been able to do for the past eighteen months,” concludes the Palestinian reporter, killed by an Israeli drone strike on the car he was traveling in, in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza. A vehicle that bore the TV logo and the Al-Jazeera logo.

In a year and a half of war in the coastal enclave, Israeli operations have caused the death of nearly 200 Palestinian media professionals, according to international organizations for the defense of journalists such as Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), in conjunction with the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS). In the history of our profession, all conflicts combined, it is a carnage of a magnitude never seen before, as demonstrated by a recent study by Brown university.

At least forty of these journalists, like Hossam Shabat, were killed with pen, microphone or camera in hand. This was the case of Ahmed Al-Louh, 39, a cameraman for Al-Jazeera, who died in an air strike while filming a report in the Nusseirat refugee camp on December 15, 2024. In a similar manner, Ibrahim Mouhareb, 26, a contributor to the newspaper Al-Hadath, was killed by tank fire on August 18, 2024, while covering the Israeli army’s withdrawal from a neighborhood in Khan Younes. These cases have been carefully documented by the aforementioned organizations.

All these colleagues wore helmets and bulletproof vests with the word PRESS on them, clearly identifying them as media professionals. Some had received phone threats from Israeli military officials or had been identified as members of armed groups in Gaza by the army spokesperson, without the latter providing credible evidence to support these claims. All of these elements suggest that they were deliberately targeted by the Israeli army.

Other colleagues from Gaza died in the bombing of their homes or the tents where they had taken refuge with their families, like tens of thousands of other Palestinians. This is the case of Wafa Al-Udaini, founder of the 16-October journalists’ collective, who was killed in a strike on the city of Deir Al-Balah on September 30, 2024, along with her husband and their two children. And of Ahmed Fatima, a figure at the Gaza Press House, an NGO supported by European donors, which trained a new generation of journalists.

On November 13, 2023, a missile struck the floor of the building where he lived with his wife and their six-year-old son in Gaza City. His parents survived the explosion, but his child was injured in the face. Ahmed Fatima picked him up and rushed him into the street to take him to the hospital. He had barely covered fifty meters when a second missile struck near him, killing him. Six days later, on November 19, the founder and director of the Gaza Press House, Bilal Jadallah, was also killed when an Israeli tank fired on his vehicle.

Others survived, but in what condition? The photojournalist Fadi Al-Wahidi, 25, has been paraplegic since a bullet severed his spinal cord on October 9, 2024, while he was filming yet another forced displacement of civilians, as reported by the investigative media outlet Forbidden Stories. Wael Al-Dahdouh, Al-Jazeera’s famous correspondent in Gaza, learned of the death of his wife and two of his children in a bombing, live on air, on October 25, 2023. For Palestinian journalists, “covering” the death of a colleague or loved one has become part of a macabre routine.

We also mourn the deaths of the four Israeli journalists who perished in the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, as well as those of nine Lebanese and one Syrian colleagues in Israeli strikes. But Gaza is the urgent issue of today. For all human rights defenders, one thing is clear: the Israeli army is seeking to impose a media blackout on Gaza, to silence, as much as possible, the witnesses of war crimes committed by its troops, at a time when a growing number of international NGOs and UN bodies are describing them as acts of genocide. This desire to obstruct information is also reflected in the Israeli government’s refusal to allow the foreign press into the Gaza Strip.

Let us not forget the situation in the occupied West Bank, where in a few days’ time we will commemorate the third anniversary of the death of Shireen Abu Akleh. The star correspondent for Al-Jazeera was shot in Jenin on May 11, 2022, by an Israeli soldier who has not been held accountable for his crime. The attack on March 24 by settlers on Hamdan Ballal, co-director of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, who was then arrested by soldiers in the ambulance taking him for treatment, is a testament to the violence to which those who try to report on the reality of the Israeli occupation expose themselves. It also reveals the impunity almost systematically offered to those who seek to silence them.

As journalists, deeply committed to the freedom to inform, it is our duty to denounce this policy, to show our solidarity with our Palestinian colleagues and to demand, again and again, the right to enter Gaza. We are not asking this because we feel that the coverage of Gaza is incomplete in the absence of Western journalists. It is to support and protect, through our presence, our Palestinian colleagues who are showing incredible courage by sending us images and testimonies of the immeasurable tragedy currently taking place in Gaza.

A large collective made up of France’s main journalists’ unions (SNJ, SNJ-CGT and CFDT-Journalistes), Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the Albert Londres Prize, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), the Reporters Solidaires collective and the SCAM journalists’ commission therefore invites you to gather on Wednesday, April 16, at 6 p.m., in front of the stairs of the Opéra-Bastille in Paris and in the Vieux-Port in Marseille, around the following slogans:

  • Gaza Stop the massacre of Palestinian journalists

  • End the impunity of the perpetrators of these crimes

  • Immediate opening of this territory to the international press

Signed by the following Society of Journalists (SDJ), in alphabetical order:

Société des journalistes de l’AFP, Société des journalistes d’Arrêt sur Images, Société des journalistes de Arte, Société des journalistes de BFM TV, Société des journalistes de Blast, Société des journalistes de Capital, Société des journalistes de Challenges, Société des journalistes de Courrier International, Société des journalistes de France 2 Rédaction nationale, Société des journalistes de France 3 Rédaction nationale, Société des journalistes de France 24, Société des journalistes de FranceInfo TV et franceinfo.fr, Société des personnels de l’Humanité, Société des journalistes de L’Informé, Société des journalistes de Konbini, Société des journalistes de LCI, Société des journalistes et du personnel de Libération, Société des journalistes de M6, Société des journalistes de Mediapart, Société des rédacteurs du Monde, Société des rédacteurs du Nouvel Observateur, Société des journalistes du Parisien, Société des journalistes de Premières Lignes TV, Société des journalistes de Radio France, Société des journalistes de Radio France Internationale, Société des journalistes de RMC, Société des journalistes de Sept à Huit, Société des journalistes de Telerama, Société des journalistes de TF1, Société des rédacteurs de La Tribune, Société des journalistes de TV5 Monde, Société des journalistes de L’Usine Nouvelle, Société des rédacteurs de La Vie, Société des journalistes de 60 millions de consommateurs.