Twenty journalists killed in Gaza were either fighters of Hamas or the Islamic Jihad. Press organizations are reviewing the lists discreetly.

Twenty journalists killed in Gaza were also fighters of Hamas or the Islamic Jihad. Press organizations are discreetly reviewing lists. Twenty journalists killed in the Gaza Strip were also fighters of the Hamas or Islamic Jihad movements. Press defense organizations are discreetly beginning to review their lists, writes Le Point. On October 7, 2023, he was one of the first "journalists" to lose his life, a victim of the war. His obituary was global. Mohammad Jarghoun, aged 28, "reported the battles" for a local agency, announced the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ). His name was immediately included on the lists of the Journalists' Protection Committee (JPC) and the Reporters Without Borders (RSF), taken by editorial offices around the world. However, on June 22, 2026, his face reappeared on a Telegram channel of Al-Qassam brigades, which tribute to this "martyr". The photos depict him in camouflage uniform, his forehead surrounded by a green band and a weapon on his shoulder. One day at exercises, another in a tunnel… Mohammed Jarghoun actually belonged to a battalion of the brigades in Rafah. In August, RSF discreetly removed him from its list, followed by the JPC at the end of September. Journalist fighters Today, the JPC continues to record the deaths of 247 journalists and mass media workers in Gaza starting from October 7, and the RSF website reports "over 220, of whom at least 70 due to their profession". No one could verify these figures: access to Gaza has been blocked since the beginning of the war. To record a name, the JPC relies on "at least two credible sources", the organization specifies: families, colleagues, local organizations… all from Gaza. The collective Stop Murdering Journalists, which records 368 deaths, recognizes: "If a Palestinian journalists' organization recognizes them as such, then they are journalists." Taken by the whole world without distance and without reservations, these totals will be invoked for months as proof that Israel deliberately eliminates the witnesses of its war. Until the narrative, after the cessation of fighting in October 2025, begins to shake… Hamas and the Islamic Jihad (PIJ) begin to commemorate the deaths, publishing approximately ten obituaries a day, each with a photo, rank, and the name of the unit. Journalists are among them. Gabriel Epstein, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is one of the first to compare these tributes with the JPC list, the most restrictive. On September 28, he revealed to Le Point that he had already independently identified thirty-seven fighters. Thirteen were members of Hamas, and twenty-one of the Islamic Jihad. "It is a very prudent estimate," he specifies, "because thousands of obituaries still remain to be published." 170 suspicious profiles. Some received journalism awards When the Israeli army published 170 profiles of "journalists" killed on a dedicated website on October 1, the announcement had almost no echo. Contacted, the JPC, which has already removed twenty-two fighters from its list, refuses to answer questions. The same silence and with the RSF, where some admit they are being hunted. "I am very ashamed. I have been covered with terrorist laurels… Some even received journalism awards!", testified a former member of the organization. On September 26, following an in-depth investigation by the newspaper The Telegraph, the BBC announced that it will re-examine the case of 53 Palestinians presented as journalists killed, 43 of whom only on its Arabic channel. "As with all the totals of this war, there was a considerable interval between the announcement of a journalist's death and the revelation of their status as a combatant," analyzes Gabriel Epstein. Corrections were made, but only after the reporting and its political effect had already stabilized. The mass media should have examined these figures with more rigor, especially now that the first evidence, easily verifiable, of the presence of fighters on the list had appeared. » Terrorists were covered with laurels. A member of the Reporters Without Borders organization Since the beginning of the war, the images filmed in Gaza by local journalists fueled, alone, the media narrative. Without the conditions under which they were made being questioned, in most cases… On October 7, 2023, AP and CNN broadcasted such images of the attack captured by photographer Hassan Eslaiah. They stopped collaboration with him just a month later, after his links to Hamas came to light. Will there be other revelations? Roshdi Sarraj, killed in an air attack on October 22, 2023, was the intermediary for Radio France for over two years and also worked for Ouest-France and Le Monde. The Israeli army presents him today as an "operational member of the military wings" of Hamas – without independent confirmation, at this time. Mustafa Thuraya, cameraman for AFP, Reuters, and Getty Images, killed in January 2024, is in the same category, on the same basis. A profession under Hamas control "The editorial offices always knew, however, under what conditions their informants work," testified the editor-in-chief of a national newspaper. Since 2011, the NGO Human Rights Watch documents, in a detailed report, the threats against Palestinian journalists from the internal security services of Hamas. In 2014, the Foreign Press Association, which represents correspondents of major international mass media, denounced the "flagrant, relentless, coercive" methods aimed at putting reporters on a blacklist. Because they dared to criticize the terrorist organization, many Palestinian journalists will be arrested, tortured, or forced to exile… "Hamas is the one who grants us accreditation and you must know under what conditions we work. I do not speak Arabic. The intermediary-translator who accompanies us is criminally responsible for what I publish. Therefore, imagine how delicate it is to write and speak about Hamas…", testified Frédéric Métézeau, a former correspondent of Radio France in Jerusalem, on October 10, 2023. A week later, on October 17, 2023, an explosion hit the Al-Ahli Arabi hospital in Gaza. Less than an hour later, the Hamas Ministry of Health announced a "massacre" and announced hundreds of deaths. The whole world blamed an Israeli attack, and the masses revolted in the Near East. That same evening, several Western television stations broadcasted "exclusive images", filmed by "Palestinian journalists", with "hundreds of corpses". In some of them, it is explained to the French public, that residents of Gaza would be "gathering, for their relatives, the remains of the children." The American, British, and French intelligence services will conclude that a Palestinian missile had landed in the hospital parking lot. The total, according to Paris, actually amounted to "ten to fifty deaths". The New York Times will acknowledge, in a note to its readers, that it relied too much on Hamas's statements. In France, the photo author will receive the Bayeux Prize for war correspondents in 2024… Whoever dares to show the reality is persecuted "The photos from Gaza have gotten used to lowering their cameras as soon as someone speaks badly about Hamas, because anyone who dares to show the reality is relentlessly persecuted," testified Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza at the end of September, in the Arab podcast Taqarob, admitting that he himself censored images of Israelis caught in a crowd in Gaza, filmed three years earlier, on October 7, 2023. In June 2024, Motaz Azaiza received, in France, the Freedom Prize from Hervé Morin, the president of the Normandy region, in front of 4,000 high school students. "There is no free press in Gaza, but the desire to see 256 journalists who were deliberately massacred by Israel is so strong that it overcomes any form of rejection," analyzes philosopher Raphaël Enthoven, placed on the pedestal of infamy for reminding of the censorship imposed by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. To go back, he adds, "it would mean recognizing collectively that we have succumbed to a hypnosis." The Fragility of Western Narratives And should we also recognize, implicitly, the fragility of the narratives reported in the Western mass media? "If we question the independence of the journalists, no narrative about this war remains. Neither hunger nor genocide. This is the cornerstone of the cathedral," affirms Jean Quatremer, a former journalist at Libération, now an editor at Marianne. "The media blockade imposed by Israel on Gaza makes any independent verification of facts on the ground extremely difficult," asserts the RSF. Rightly so. "Gaza has been one of the most publicized places on the planet in the last three years," concludes Gabriel Epstein. "But the image we receive remains kaleidoscopic, unclear, often filtered. Permanent media coverage gives an illusion of precision and exhaustiveness. It is nothing more than that: an illusion." Editor: Marina Constantinoiu - Tags: - israel - hamas - gaza strip - press - journalists - fighters - islamic jihad - october 7, 2023 - reporters without borders Follow the news on Digi24.ro and on Google News