War on journalism in Gaza and Lebanon part of cultural genocide

Journalists are never legitimate targets

April 8 will go down in history in Beirut as ‘Black Wednesday’. Within a short time, Israel launched a wave of attacks that cost the lives of nearly four hundred Lebanese. More than 1,200 people were injured. Most of the victims were civilians. Israel named the massive attack after one of the ten Biblical plagues: ‘Operation Eternal Darkness’.

Just as earlier in Gaza, the brutal Israeli violence was accompanied by attacks on the media. Three Lebanese journalists were killed in an Israeli drone attack in southern Lebanon: Fatima Ftouni and her brother Mohammed, who worked for Al Mayadeen, and Ali Shuaib of the Hezbollah-affiliated TV station Al Manar. In Tyre, radio presenter Ghada Dayek was killed in a bombing of her home. Journalist and TV presenter Suzanne al-Khalil was killed at her home in the mountain village of Kayfoun, in central Lebanon.

The Israeli army made no secret of the fact that these were targeted attacks. One of the journalists was allegedly a ‘Hezbollah intelligence officer’. Others were said to be Hezbollah propagandists. Just as in Gaza, where more than 260 journalists, cameramen, and media workers have been killed since October 2024, the accusations were not substantiated by facts.

In Lebanon, the attack on the journalists was widely condemned. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun—certainly no political friend of Hezbollah—called it a ‘shameless crime’. ‘Israel disregards international norms and treaties under which journalists enjoy protection.’ ‘Whatever one thinks of the editorial line or the role of media affiliated with or closely connected to Hezbollah, a journalist must never become a target, regardless of his or her opinion or the circumstances,’ wrote the liberal newspaper l’Orient le Jour. ‘The survival of press freedom depends on it.’

Lebanon has a decades-long, painful history of journalists being murdered because of their political views. Dozens of deadly attacks on prominent journalists were, for example, attributed to the Syrian intelligence service in the past. But in recent years, it is precisely Israel that has opened the hunt for journalists with impunity. As of October 2023, at least 21 Lebanese journalists have been killed by Israel; most of them in targeted attacks.

International law is crystal clear when it comes to the status of media in wars. Article 79 of the Protocol to the Geneva Conventions states that ‘journalists on dangerous missions during armed conflict must be treated as civilians’. In other words: journalists are never a legitimate target. Now, Israel is not known for showing extreme concern for any civilians whatsoever. Just look at the large numbers of civilian casualties in Gaza and Lebanon. But in the case of media workers, something else is at play: they are deliberately eliminated in the bedroom of their home or in their car marked with the letters PRESS, on their way to a journalistic assignment.

The unprecedented ‘war on journalism’ in Palestine and Lebanon is not an isolated incident. During the genocide in Gaza, but also before that, it became clear that Israel is doing everything it can to hit Palestinian society as hard as possible. In Gaza, the education sector was largely destroyed. Hundreds of academics, teachers, and educators were killed by the Israeli army. Students and pupils were denied access to books and learning materials. Academic exchange was made impossible. The United Nations speaks of scholasticide in Gaza: the systematic and deliberate destruction of the education system, libraries, and knowledge infrastructure.

The Israeli strategy seems aimed at cutting off the supply of crucial intellectual and cultural oxygen for Palestinians and Lebanese—certainly for the large Shiite population group in Lebanon—as much as possible. With military and political domination inevitably comes cultural dominance and the Israeli thought police. Hence the closure of UNRWA, responsible for education in Palestinian refugee camps. Hence the closure or obstruction of human rights organizations. Hence the, sometimes literally, silencing of Palestinian filmmakers, poets, and writers.

There is another reason why the media in Palestine and Lebanon are hit particularly hard by this cultural genocide. By hermetically sealing off Gaza from foreign journalists and other observers, Palestinian reporters, vloggers, cameramen, and photographers became the only ones who could gather, verify, and expose information about Israeli war crimes.

In the documentary Starving Gaza, broadcast by Al Jazeera about the famine caused by the Israeli blockade, Palestinian journalists became the eyes and ears of the world. For the documentary, footage was shot of pale, hollow-eyed, hungry Palestinian children at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. But the person holding the camera also risked his own life.

Shawan Jabarin, director of the Palestinian human rights organization Al Haq, points out that Israel discredits journalists, dehumanizes them (‘they are terrorists’), hinders them in their work, and even murders them, to prevent accountability for war crimes from ever being established. Al Haq documents the conflict by gathering information via satellite images and testimonies, but the material from journalists on the ground is indispensable. Jabarin also understands the targeted liquidation of journalists as part of the genocide: ‘the goal is not only to destroy the people but also their story, their narrative’. The same perverse logic plays a role in the Israeli aggression in Lebanon: it is not only about eliminating troublesome journalistic busybodies, but also about silencing unwelcome voices. South Lebanon must be recreated in Gaza’s image: controlled by Israel, in ruins, stripped of a large part of its ‘troublesome’ population. Its authentic but unwelcome voice must be silenced. Perhaps the name ‘Operation Eternal Darkness’ is not such a bad choice after all.

Journalist Mohammed Wishah was killed in Gaza on April 8 by an Israeli drone strike on his car. Wishah worked as a correspondent for Al Jazeera Mubasher. Al Jazeera published a statement mourning its correspondent Mohammed Wishah, ‘who joined the Network in 2018’. According to the statement ‘his killing was not a random act but a deliberate and targeted crime intended to intimidate journalists and prevent them from carrying out their professional duties.’ Al Jazeera lost 14 jojurnalists in Gaza since October 2024.