The Assassination of Palestinian Journalists

In contemporary conflict the “weaponization of information” or “targeting of journalists” shows a pattern of squashing dissent. Analysts like Martin Libicki and John Arquilla argue how information itself becomes a battlefield in what they call noopolitik. The U.S. and Israel are historically accustomed to exploiting land, sea and air. Manipulating the information space is also nothing new. +972 Magazine’s Yuval Abraham indicated that Israeli intelligence, or Aman, formed Legitimization Cells to preempt Gaza journalists as Hamas members when Palestinian reporting was spot on, although the press with a political affiliation is commonly accepted elsewhere in the world.

In this Q&A, legal scholar and international relations expert Richard Falk discusses the August 10, 2025, Israeli airstrike that killed four Al Jazeera journalists and two others in Gaza. Falk argues that discrediting truth-tellers and murdering the press is consistent with the apartheid worldview that dominates Zionist ideology.

Daniel Falcone: When we first spoke on the ruthless censorship of Palestinian journalism, you emphasized how they play a crucial role in challenging the symbolic dominance of the Israeli narrative, often costing their lives. How do you interpret the ongoing deliberate censorship of Palestinian journalism in both Israel and the U.S. and what does that say about the perceived threat of their reporting to dominant geopolitical interests?

Richard Falk: When our eyes and ears are conveying a sense of reality that collides with the strategic interests of autocratically disposed governance, the established elites and special interests attached to the status quo become anxious. One response is to exert pressure on private sector media, including advertisers, to engage in self-censorship of a character that obscures perception with ambiguities and false accusations. Israel, with Euro-American acquiescence has gone along with the weaponization of antisemitism to situate criticisms of Israel and Zionism in a zone of uncertainty that blunts action-oriented responses based on international law or shared values, while discrediting or punishing those critics however strong their credentials as skilled analysts and trustworthy presenters of reality as honestly perceived.

The prolonged reluctance of influential media in the West to name the assertion of Jewish primacy in various domains of Israeli life as racial or ethnic discrimination that constituted an institutional adoption of a governance style that violated the 1973 International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid is a striking pre-October 7 example of this phenomenon. Both Western governments, especially, the United States and its NATO partners, remained silent about these apartheid accusations even in the face of a series of academic style reports by the most respected international human rights NGOs (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International), the UN (ESCWA 2017), and even the leading Israeli human rights NGO (B’Tselem) each documented the apartheid allegation.

Despite these responsibly asserted apartheid accusations they were neither substantively challenged nor commented upon but completely ignored. Indeed, the most forthcoming response, although not intended as such, was from Israel, which indirectly confirmed apartheid allegations in the Knesset Basic Law adopted in 2018. This type of legislation enjoys the highest status in Israel, which has no constitution. The 2018 law explicitly identified Israel as the state of the Jewish people exclusively enjoying the right of self-determination, privileging Hebrew as the official language, and oblivious to the human rights of Palestinians and other minorities living in Israel as well as in the Palestinian Territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

This slippage of Israel’s formal democracy into the silent embrace of apartheid was revealingly not treated as relevant in any way to a proper appraisal of Palestinian resistance in the context of the October 7 attack. Instead, public discourse almost totally decontextualized October 7 without reference to the harsh Israeli blockade of Gaza maintained since 2007 or the periodic massive Israeli military incursions of 2008-09, 2012, 2014 or the failure to even explore the diplomatic initiative of Hamas for a long-term ceasefire with a duration of up to 50 years.

The response to the publication of the UN ESCWA (Economic and Social Commission of West Asia) report, of which I was co-author along with Virginia Tilley, seems especially illustrative of this impulse to fight back against fact-based scholarship, journalism, and independent experts. Shortly after its issuance in March 2017 our report was attacked in a Security Council meeting by the Israeli and American diplomats in a typical diatribe that was obviously intended to divert attention from the apartheid allegations to claims that the authors were biased against Israel. Seeming to expect self-censoring discipline even at the UN after October 7, the Trump chief representative at the UN, Ambassador Nikki Haley, dutifully launched a venomous personal attack on me (“What’s wrong with this Falk guy?”) and threatened U.S. defunding of the UN if the recently selected UN Secretary General, António Guterres, did not repudiate apartheid report.

In response, Guterres appeased the U.S. by ordering the report withdrawn from the ESCWA website, where it was reported to be receiving record number of requests, but stopped short of repudiating its contents. It was enough of a cave in to prompt the principled resignation of the Executive Secretary of ESCWA, Rima Khalif, to resign. [See “Dismissing Israel apartheid report is an abuse of power writes author,” Middle East Monitor, April 26, 2017.]

This ESCWA anecdote is significant because it demonstrates that the diversionary formula of silence + defamation + naming inhibitions + threats was relied upon before October 7 to protect Israel not only from allegations of serious international crimes but from truth-telling efforts by experts and scholars to name the realities reported upon in a truthful, recognizable language by individuals whose work was highly respected in professional circles. It should not occasion surprise that the same tactics of deflection have been used with even greater vigor to obscure the shameful realities of Gaza genocide. These tactics are losing their self-censoring implementation in recent months as the persistence of genocidal language and tactics by Israeli leaders become increasingly undeniable, not so much by words as by the daily images of dying children and starving Palestinians being shot and often killed at crowded and unruly U.S./Israeli administered aid sites while struggling for death-averting sacks of food.

Daniel Falcone: The recent Israeli strike that killed several Al Jazeera journalists outside Al-Shifa Hospital, including Anas al-Sharif, was later accused posthumously of being a Hamas operative, a practice from allies and outlets with actual problematic connections. How does international law evaluate such retroactive justifications for targeting press members in conflict zones?

Richard Falk: I regard as this post-hoc justification for targeting and killing Anas al-Sharif in a Gaza hospital safe zone as an extension of Israel’s determination to destroy, discredit, and inhibit scathing criticism of its genocidal campaign against a defenseless civilian population, estimated at about 2 million survivors of an October 7 population of 2.3 million. Israel tries here to envelop brave Gaza journalists in an intentionally dense ‘fog of war,’ reinforced in relation to Anas al-Sharif by the inflammatory accusation without any accompanying evidence that he is an undercover Hamas operative.

Ever since this military onslaught commenced nearly two years ago, Israel has been targeting the most influential journalists by relying on advanced surveillance techniques being developed by Palantir and Anduril, companies mentioned by name in the UN Special Rapporteur in her report that led to her formal sanctioning by the U.S. Government on July 9. The report to the UN entitled “From the Economics of Occupation to the Occupation of Genocide,” devoted to depicting corporate complicity drawing upon a large data base. This continues Israel’s policies of non-cooperation with the most carefully crafted critical journalism that justifies punitive action against truth-telling journalists by an appeal to economic and political national interests.

The U.S. Government acting outside the combat zones in Gaza or neighboring Israel has been experimenting with less lethal tactics that have similar goals of inducing confusion, silence, and uncertainty, reinforced by strongly discouraging naming of the carnage and accompanying dehumanizing language as ‘genocide’ on principal media platforms. The defunding of leading university research programs by claiming to be reacting to campus antisemitism and the mounting challenges to undocumented foreign students seems both integral to the commitment to silence Israel’s critics and an aspect of the wider Trump agenda to discredit knowledge based governance, which would make the citizenry even more susceptible to the ultra-right belief-based agenda of the MAGA base, which includes waging a regressive epistemological war against reliance on science-oriented experts. Such a worldview diverts attention from the gravity of increased global warming and indulges the most rapacious dimensions of capitalism.

Let me conclude my response by grieving over Anas al-Sharif’s untimely and vengeful assassination by quoting his words indicting our silence and passivity: “If this madness doesn’t end, its people’s voices silenced, their faces erased—and history will remember you as a silent witness to a genocide you chose not to stop.”

Daniel Falcone: Al Jazeera has long accused the IDF of running a campaign of incitement against its journalists, calling it a tactic to justify the targeting. How do you view this use of dehumanizing language in priming the public for violence against media workers?

Richard Falk: I regard Al Jazeera’s accusations as well founded as a first approximation. The fact that more than 230 journalists have been killed by Israel firepower in Gaza since October 2023, many by design and at close range does give these accusations what lawyers call a prima facie case. It would seem consistent with the stress that Israel has long put on the control of the public discourse pertaining to the underlying Israel/Palestine conflict with tactics shifting as the context shifts. The gravity of the sustained assault on Gaza has gradually turned the tide of public opinion against Israel including its escalations of attempts by Israel to suppress journalistic realism and smear brave journalist as they try to cover the deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the weakening of Western support for the Zionist Project. Al Jazeera has led this effort to tell it like it is, generating extreme hostility among the war planners and political leaders in Tel Aviv. It still not appreciated that this genocide is reaching the point of no return, where the next phase of lament will be in the spirit of ‘we did too little too late.’

Israelis have ‘a need not to know,’ and that places a strain on its highly effective state propaganda machine given what is seen and heard daily throughout the world with decreasing or abandoned filters. For journalism to flourish in this era it needs to be liberated from the beliefs of the ruling elites and get back to addressing the facts as impartially interpreted. There is no other means of assuring a revival of reality-based journalism that is not life threatening to the journalist, but this will depend on the educating the citizenry to demand the protection and valuing of such reportage by organizing civil society pressure on government and special interest private sector lobbying.

As suggested earlier in the moving words of Anas al-Sharif it may be already too late, even if such pressures arise forcefully to help end the suffering of Gaza survivors, but we owe it to ourselves and to the human future to shed cautious impulses, and go all out to end this horrifying spectacle of genocide and seek an edifying process by which the perpetrators are held accountable. At present it seems a dream, but some dreams are indirect agents of change.

Daniel Falcone: The journalists killed at the gates of the hospital were at a protected site under international law. This compounds the violation. Does this all suggest a greater erosion of respect for international humanitarian norms in Gaza?

Richard Falk: Such targeted assassinations aggravate the criminal offense of killing journalists properly identified. This assessment is especially true in relation to Gaza which remains an Occupied Territory subject to compliance by Israel with the framework of international humanitarian law, especially as set forth in the Geneva Convention IV governing Belligerent Occupation.

The manner by which these Al Jazeera journalists were targeted should also be legally and morally condemned as forming a vital component of the ongoing genocide by its obvious intention of punishing an influential journalist who conveyed to readers the true nature of the Israeli tactics, thereby warning surviving journalists to avoid truth-telling if they hope to live, a terrifying message that hopes to insulate this Israeli genocide from scrutiny and sanctions.

Daniel Falcone: Reports indicate possibly 186 journalists killed in Gaza since October 2023. Are we witnessing a collapse of traditional protections for war correspondents (Also see: “the limits of the war photograph” – Mary Turfah)? Or does this mark a change in how information and its messengers are deliberately neutralized as part of military strategy? Israel almost seems proud of this rogue element and technique to state building through state violence.

Richard Falk: You pose an essential question that it is difficult for me to offer a helpful response as I lack necessary familiarity with developing doctrine and how reporting the news is manipulated to avoid friction with public support for military operation. One of the learning lessons of Washington think tanks and foreign policy advisors was the misleading belief that ‘the war was lost in American living rooms,’ and especially seeing flag-draped coffins on TV carrying the remains of combat casualties. The solution devised, which conveniently relieved the military strategists for the political outcome of the Vietnam War was to embed journalists in combat units, supposing more favorable coverage of military operations and less emphasis on depicting casualties.

Israel seems to have followed a much cruder approach in relation to allegations of genocide -given plausibility by fearless journalists reporting from Gaza’s many ground-zero sites of devastation and suffering. Simply put, it is a matter of discrediting truth-telling journalists and other experts if the damaging reports are from Westerners, assassinating if from Palestinians, a pattern borne out by the statistics so far compiled and consistent with the apartheid worldview that dominates Zionist ideology and is subscribed to by a broad echelon of high-level Israeli advisors.

For Further Reading:

Abraham, Yuval – +972 Magazine

Albanese, Francesca – UN Human Rights Council

Davidson, Lawrence – To the Point Analysis

El-Ad, Hagai – B’Tselem

Falk, Richard and Tilley, Virginia – UN ESCWA report, …The Question of Apartheid (2017)

Levy, Gideon – Haaretz

Loewenstein, Antony – Middle East Eye

Mansour, Sherif – Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)

Morayef, Heba – Foreign Policy

Paul, Ari – FAIR, The Battleground

Reporters Without Borders (RSF)

Nassar, Tamara – The Electronic Intifada

Pappé, Ilan – Al Jazeera, The Guardian

Shakir, Omar – Human Rights Watch

Turfah, Mary – Los Angeles Review of Books

Zunes, Stephen – The Progressive

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