IDF documents terror affiliations of 170 Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza war

The Israel Defense Forces on Thursday said it determined that 170 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who were identified as journalists following their deaths were actually members of terror groups.

“Following extensive research, the IDF is now revealing that 170 Gazans killed during the war who were presented as journalists and media personnel were in fact serving as terrorists for terror organizations in the Strip, foremost among them Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad,” the army said.

According to the military, 118 of the journalists were active in Hamas’s military wing, while 49 operated in Islamic Jihad, two were members of the Popular Resistance Committees, and one was in the Mujahideen Brigades.

Seventeen of the people on the list invaded Israeli territory in the October 7, 2023, attack, the army said.

Some of the journalists appearing on the IDF’s list also worked for international media outlets, including Reuters, CNN, BBC, AFP, AP, Le Monde, ABC Australia and others.

The 170 names are published by the IDF on a dedicated website. Each includes the name and role of the journalist/terror operative, along with their civil and military ID numbers.

The military said it was publishing “verified evidence, including visual material and documents produced by the terror organizations, some of which were found in the field, indicating the organizational affiliation of those terrorists and the roles they held within the terror organizations.”

The IDF said that during the war, various international media outlets “repeatedly accused Israel and the IDF, without presenting verified findings, of deliberately harming journalists.”

“This was despite the fact that in some cases the terror organizations themselves presented those individuals as terrorists in their ranks and even claimed responsibility for them,” the IDF asserted.

“The information now being revealed illustrates the gap between the picture presented to the world and the reality on the ground, and presents additional and conclusive evidence that the IDF does not deliberately and systematically target journalists, but rather terror organizations and their terrorists, in accordance with international law,” the military added, hours after announcing it killed a Hamas operative posing as a journalist.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has removed some names from its list of journalists killed in the war, after they were revealed to be terror operatives.

A Times of Israel investigation published in June identified multiple Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives previously reported as slain journalists.

Another study, by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center published last year, asserted that a majority of Gaza-based journalists killed since the outbreak of the current war were operatives in, or closely affiliated with, terrorist organizations.