The report described 2025 as “a year of repeated mass targeting, particularly in tents, hospitals, and press gatherings”, warning that Palestine had become one of the most dangerous places in the world to practise journalism.
GAZA CITY — The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS) said on Saturday that Israel is “implementing a policy of “silencing the press” to “undermine the Palestinian narrative” and “prevent the documentation of crimes.”
In a statement, the Freedoms Committee of the syndicate said, “The Israeli occupation shifted from a policy of restricting journalistic work to a policy of neutralising the press through deadly force, with the aim of silencing witnesses, preventing the documentation of crimes, and undermining the Palestinian narrative on the ground.”
By the end of November 2025, at least 76 Palestinian journalists had been killed and wounded by Israel, in a “dangerous indicator of the escalating targeting policy” pursued by Israeli occupation authorities.
“Journalists are no longer merely ‘potential targets’, but rather confirmed and frequent targets,” the committee said.
According to the Gaza Government Media Office, Israeli forces have killed at least 257 Palestinian journalists in its genocidal war on Gaza since October 2023.
Muhammad al-Lahham, head of the Committee for Freedoms at the syndicate, said the scale and consistency of the attacks amount to international crimes.
The attacks in the past year, he said, “constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity, and represent a systematic targeting of a protected group, journalists, within the framework of an official policy to silence the media by force”.
Al-Lahham rejected claims that journalists had been caught accidentally in hostilities, describing instead a deliberate operational logic. What Israel was enforcing, he said, was a “field doctrine based on the principle of ‘no witnesses, no narrative, no image’”.
In December, a report by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) found that Israel killed more journalists in 2025 than any other country. It was the third year running that Israel was named the top killer of journalists by the NGO.
Nearly 300 journalists and media workers have been killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza in 26 months of genocidal war – or about 12 journalists every month – according to a tally by Shireen.ps, a monitoring website named after Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was shot dead by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank in 2022.
The report described 2025 as “a year of repeated mass targeting, particularly in tents, hospitals, and press gatherings”, warning that Palestine had become one of the most dangerous places in the world to practise journalism.
The committee also documented a sharp rise in life-altering injuries. Many journalists suffered amputations, paralysis or blindness after strikes to the head, neck, chest and abdomen. The dangers did not come solely from the Israeli forces, the report said, but also from settlers.
The committee marked April and May a phase of deliberate media massacres. On April 7 and 8, Israeli strikes hit a media tent at Nasser Hospital, wounding nine reporters and destroying equipment. Several died of their injuries later. This documented and recurring incident occurred and involved the use of heavy weaponry, “amounting to a complex war crime and a collective targeting of the press”, the committee said.
By mid-2025, patterns of permanent disability had emerged. Journalist Akram Dalloul lost his sight, Jamal Badah had his leg amputated, and Muhammad Fayeq was left paralysed.
The committee stressed that most attacks occurred while journalists were clearly identifiable, wearing protective gear and press badges, and working in locations long recognised as media gathering points. Many were targeted repeatedly, it added, underscoring what it described as Israel’s sustained assault on the Palestinian press.
The PJS also said that Israeli attacks on Palestinian journalists have expanded beyond killings, injuries, arrests and restrictions on coverage to include the systematic targeting of their families.
In its report, the union said Israeli forces have increasingly targeted the relatives of journalists in what it described as a deliberate effort to turn journalism into an existential threat, forcing families to pay the price for a loved one’s work.
The findings show that attacks on journalists’ families have become a repeated and organised pattern across 2023, 2024 and 2025.
The committee recorded the deaths of about 706 relatives of journalists in the Gaza Strip during that period, stressing that the scale and consistency of the attacks indicate they are not the result of random wartime conditions.
According to the committee, Israeli attacks killed about 436 relatives of journalists in 2023, followed by roughly 203 in 2024 and at least 67 more in 2025, even as many families were forcibly displaced and living in tents or makeshift shelters.
The report said the most recent case came just days ago, when recovery teams found the bodies of journalist Hiba Al-Abadla, her mother and around 15 members of the Al-Astal family. Israeli aircraft had bombed their home west of Khan Younis nearly two years earlier.
The syndicate said the figures show that hundreds of children, women and elderly people were killed solely because of a family member’s work in journalism, calling it a grave violation of international humanitarian and legal standards.
“Hundreds of children, women and the elderly were killed because of a family member’s professional connection to journalism, in flagrant violation of all humanitarian and legal norms,” the committee said.
The report said the attacks represent a deliberate strategy rather than deaths as a result of war.
Israeli violence against journalists has “evolved to take on a more dangerous and brutal dimension, represented by targeting the families and relatives of journalists, in a clear attempt to turn journalistic work into an existential burden for which sons, wives, fathers, and mothers pay the price”, the union said.
Targeting journalists’ families, Lahham said, “reveals that the Israeli occupation is waging a comprehensive war on the truth, making no distinction between the camera and the child, nor between the pen and the home”.
“The blood of the journalists’ families will remain a living witness to the crime of trying to silence the Palestinian voice,” al-Lahham added. — QNN
