A Quick Addendum to the Previous Post About Palestine
Some essential information about Israel's war against a free press.
After sending out the last post I wrote on Palestine, I realized that I left out a critical aspect of how the West has abandoned any notion of valuing a free press: the fact that hundreds of journalists have been murdered in Gaza since October 7th. It is unfortunate that I forgot to mention the abuses against the many courageous Palestinian journalists who have been doing much of the on-the-ground reporting in the face of their own genocide, so I rectified this. I have updated the piece online with this additional information, and I am including it here below as well for your review:
Much worse than any of these instances is the fact that at least 232 journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 7th, many of them deliberately targeted by Israeli airstrikes. A report by Brown University’s Costs of War project says that this staggering number of journalists killed is “more journalists than the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined.” A recent horrific case is that of Ahmad Mansour, a journalist who was burned alive after an Israeli bombing near Nasser Hospital.
A notable case before October 7th is that of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American reporter who, while wearing clearly marked press jacket and helmet along with her film crew, was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper in the West Bank. As is typical in such cases, the Israelis claimed that the journalists were caught in cross-fire, only after first suggesting that it was actually a Hamas bullet that killed Abu Akleh. These Israeli claims have been authoritatively debunked, but no punishment was levied against them. Abu Akleh’s funeral procession was brutally attacked by Israeli security forces, causing the pall-bearers to nearly drop Abu Akleh’s casket under the blows of Israeli truncheons.