Israel has been engaged in the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists ever-documented since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a US-based non-profit.
Nikolaj Nielsen
Israel has been engaged in the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists ever-documented since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a US-based non-profit.
“Since October 2023 in a spate of two years, we’ve just had an unprecedented number of journalists who have been killed,” said Tom Gibson at the CPJ’s office in Brussels.
Speaking on Monday (20 April) Gibson said some 262 have been killed over the those two years. Most of them were Palestinians killed in Gaza but there were also journalists killed in Yemen, Lebanon and Iran.
Last September, a strike on two newspaper offices in Yemen killed 31 journalists in what Gibson described as a the second-deadliest single attack they have ever recorded.
“To put these figures into context, Israel in 2024 was responsible for the majority of killings worldwide, nearly 70 percent,” he said, accusing Israel of deliberately targeting journalists.
Israel claims that killed individuals belonged to terror groups like Hamas while posing as journalists or were just unintended casualties.
Gibson’s comments come ahead of a meeting in Luxembourg where EU foreign ministers are likely to discuss possible trade sanctions with Israel given widespread human rights violations carried out in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon.
EU trade deal
It also follows a letter of some 60 civil society organisations and unions demanding the EU suspend its Israel association agreement as well as impose trade ban with illegal Israeli settlements.
The EU knows Israel has violated the agreement, as first revealed by EUobserver last year.
Israel has also allowed a record number of illegal settlements on Palestinian territory and recently passed a death penalty law that only applies to Palestinians.
“This is not a crisis of knowledge. It’s a crisis of political will,” said Claudio Francavilla of Human Rights Watch, noting that EU states are fully aware of the abuses but have chosen not to act in accordance with international law.
Similar criticisms came from Hamdi Shaqura of EuroMed Rights, a human rights network.
“EU policy towards Palestine reveals a clear pattern, not ending the occupation, but rather managing it,” she said.
Ireland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden are set to put the EU trade issue on the table at Tuesday’s meeting among foreign ministers.
However, the mounting criticism of Israel’s alleged violations appears unlikely to secure the qualified majority needed in the EU to suspend the trade agreement.
A blocking minority persists even without Hungary’s support although Italy’s stance could waiver amid Donald Trump’s public attacks on the Pope and recent Israeli warning shots targeting Italian peacekeepers in southern Lebanon.
The latter incident saw Italy suspend its defence agreement with Israel.
Italy is the third-biggest arms exporter to Israel, followed by Germany and the United States, according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri).
