Israel has killed over 260 Palestinian journalists since October 7, 2023. Right now, at least 40 more sit in Israeli prisons many of them held without charge, without trial, and without any end in sight. This is not collateral damage. This is not war getting messy. This is a systematic campaign to eliminate the people who are showing the world what genocide looks like in real time.

Let that sink in for a moment. 260+ journalists. In under three years. That is not a number you get from accidents or crossfire. That is a number you get from a policy.

The Martyrs Who Were Showing Us the Truth

These weren't strangers. These were people with names, with families, with press credentials hanging around their necks when the bombs hit. I'm going to name as many as I can because the whole point of killing them is to make us forget they existed.

Ismail al-Ghoul Al Jazeera reporter, killed on July 31, 2024 alongside his cameraman Rami al-Rifi when Israel struck their vehicle in the Shati refugee camp. Ismail was 27 years old. He had been reporting from Gaza since the start of the genocide, documenting the destruction of his own city in real time. Israel later tried to claim he was a Hamas operative, because that is what they do they kill you, then they smear you.

Samer Abu Daqqa Al Jazeera cameraman, killed in December 2023 when Israeli forces struck a school in Khan Younis where he was sheltering. He bled to death over hours while Israel denied medical access to the area. His colleague Wael al-Dahdouh who had already lost his wife, son, daughter, and grandson to Israeli airstrikes weeks earlier was wounded in the same attack.

Hamza al-Dahdouh Wael's son, also a journalist, killed in January 2024 when an Israeli drone strike hit the car he was traveling in. Israel had already wiped out most of this man's family. They came back for his son too.

Anas al-Sharif another Al Jazeera correspondent, killed on August 10, 2025 in an Israeli airstrike on a makeshift press tent near Al-Shifa Hospital. Three of his colleagues died with him. Before Israel killed him, they had spent months circulating unverified claims that he was a Hamas commander a designation press freedom groups warned was designed to "manufacture consent to kill."

Ahmed al-Louh Al Jazeera journalist, killed December 15, 2024. Israel provided no justification for his killing.

Hossam Shabat Palestinian journalist killed while documenting conditions in Gaza.

Roshdi Sarraj co-founder of Ain Media, filmmaker and fixer for international media organizations. Killed in October 2023.

Ahmed Mansour Palestine Today journalist, burned alive in his work shelter when it was hit at night. His colleagues found what was left of him still wearing his press vest.

Saleh al-Jafarawi was a different kind of martyr but his story is maybe the most damning illustration of how the smear campaign works in practice.

The Burtal Campaign Against Saleh al-Jafarawi

Saleh was a 27-year-old citizen journalist and social media creator from Gaza City who had amassed millions of followers across Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok during the genocide. His frontline videos of civilian suffering and destruction went viral globally. He was a trained journalist with a degree from the Islamic University of Gaza, and he had represented Palestine in international table tennis competitions. He was, by any honest definition, exactly what a journalist is supposed to be someone showing the world what is happening on the ground.

And for that, Israel destroyed him.

In November 2023, pro-Israel influencers launched a coordinated campaign falsely accusing Saleh of faking a hospital scene. They labeled him "Pallywood" a derogatory term Israeli officials and their online armies use to claim Palestinian journalists stage their own suffering. Israeli government accounts, including the official X accounts of Israel's embassies in France and Austria, amplified the claim. Voice of America later confirmed the video had been misidentified the whole thing was a fabrication by Israel's supporters. Meta suspended his Instagram account indefinitely in March 2025, silencing his primary platform.

Then in September 2025, IDF Arabic-language spokesperson Lt. Colonel Avichay Adraee publicly accused Saleh of being affiliated with Hamas. His followers immediately recognized the pattern this was the exact same playbook Israel used before killing Anas al-Sharif. Within weeks, Saleh was dead, shot and killed on October 12, 2025 during clashes between Hamas and the Doghmush clan militia in the Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City. The ceasefire was in effect. The guns that killed him were not Israeli. But the smear campaign that marked him, the suspension of his platform, the systematic destruction of his credibility that was Israel's doing, and everyone knew it.

The New Arab reported that activists described the campaign against al-Jafarawi as a "systematic attempt by Israelis to circulate misinformation or doctored images of Palestinians to undermine their legitimacy."

They couldn't kill him directly that time. But they made sure he was marked, discredited, and deplatformed and then the chaos they created in Gaza did the rest. On October 12th, 2025, in the Sabra neighborhood Israeli-backed militas clashing with Hamas security forces abducted and burtally murdered Saleh.

A Reuters journalist's car burns at the site where a missle killed Reuters visual journalist Issam Abdallah.

Direct Targeted Killings

And these are just the names we know. There are 260+ more.

Anas Ghunaim, Abdul Ra'ouf Shaath and Mohammad Qeshta three photojournalists killed in January 2026 while on assignment with the Egyptian Committee for Gaza Relief. They were on what was described as a "humanitarian, journalistic mission." The IDF struck their vehicle. Israel offered no explanation.

In September 2025, five Palestinian journalists Hussam al-Masri, Mariam Abu Dagga, Mohammed Salama, Ahmed Abu Aziz and Moaz Abu Taha were killed in a double Israeli strike on Nasser Hospital in a single day. Five journalists. One strike. One hospital.

Just days after October 7th, Israel killed Issam Abdallah, and two other Reuters journalists, Thaer Al-Sudani and Maher Nazeh, were injured, when Israel struck their car with a missle in southern Lebanon.

Wael Al-Dahdouh, Al Jazeera's Gaza correspondent, lost his wife and children from an Israeli airstrike on al-Nuseirat refugee camp. on October 25th, 2023.

"There is no safe place in Gaza at all, and no one is safe. No one is safe from the aggression or the treachery of the occupation. This is a profession of troubles wherever you follow it." ~ Wael Al-Dahdouh

The precedent for all of this was set long before October 7. Remember Shireen Abu Akleh the legendary Al Jazeera correspondent who was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper in Jenin in May 2022 while wearing her press vest and helmet, marked clearly with the word PRESS. Forensic Architecture and Al-Haq proved it was a deliberate, targeted killing. The sniper could see she was a journalist. He shot her anyway. Israel investigated itself and found surprise no wrongdoing. Ali al-Samoudi, who was shot beside her that day, would later spend a year in Israeli prison without ever being charged with a crime.

40 Journalists in Israeli Dungeons

As of mid-2026, at least 40 Palestinian journalists are sitting in Israeli detention facilities. Most are held under administrative detention a policy inherited from the British Mandate that allows the Israeli military to imprison people for up to six months at a time without charge or trial, renewable indefinitely. No evidence. No court hearing. No due process. You just disappear.

The CPJ confirmed that as of December 2025, 29 Palestinian journalists remained behind bars despite ceasefire agreements. That number has since climbed to over 40.

Ali al-Samoudi was one of them. He spent a full year in Israeli custody held at Ktzi'ot Prison in the Negev desert, in conditions so brutal that when he was finally released in April 2026, he was unrecognizable. Severe weight loss. Signs of torture. Denied medical treatment for his diabetes and high blood pressure, and for the shrapnel wounds he carried from three decades of reporting in the West Bank including the shrapnel from the day Israel killed Shireen Abu Akleh beside him. He was never charged with a single crime. Israel's use of indefinite detention without charge has been well-documented.

Samer Amin Khuwaira, a 45-year-old journalist from Nablus, was ripped from his home in a nighttime raid in April 2025. He spent nine months in administrative detention. No charges. No trial. Just taken.

These prisons have been described by Palestinian detainees as "cemeteries for the living" and that description comes from people who survived them. The torture is systematic. The medical neglect is intentional. The goal is not punishment for a crime because no crime has been committed. The goal is to break these people, to silence them, and to send a message to every journalist still holding a camera in Gaza or the West Bank. Israel has previously admitted to photoshopping evidence to justify killing journalists.

The Smear Machine: How Israel Manufactures Consent to Kill

This is the part the Western media barely touches, and it might be the most important part of the whole story.

In August 2025, +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call exposed the existence of a secret Israeli military unit a so-called "legitimisation cell" established after October 7, 2023 with a specific mandate: identify Palestinian journalists, fabricate or exaggerate links between them and Hamas, and use those fabricated links to justify killing them. The unit's primary motive was not national security. It was public relations.

According to three intelligence sources who spoke to +972, officers in this unit were "eager to find a media worker they could link to Hamas" because they were convinced Gaza-based journalists were "smearing Israel's name in front of the world." When media criticism of Israel intensified over a particular killing, the cell would be dispatched to declassify intelligence or fabricate it to counter the narrative.

"If the global media is talking about Israel killing innocent journalists, then immediately there's a push to find one journalist who might not be so innocent, as if that somehow makes killing the other 20 acceptable."

That quote is from one of their own intelligence sources. Let that sink in.

In at least one documented case, the unit misrepresented evidence to falsely label a journalist as a Hamas militant. A source described how the team fabricated a narrative that the target was "a journalist by day and a platoon commander by night." They were "everyone was excited" to have found their target. But there was "a chain of errors and corner-cutting" and eventually someone realized the man was actually just a journalist. He was pulled off the target list. This time.

The most visible example of this smear campaign came in October 2024, when the IDF published the names and photos of six Al Jazeera journalists on social media and branded them as "Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists." The IFJ, CPJ, and RSF all condemned it as a transparent attempt to pre-justify assassinations. Reporters Without Borders documented over 10,000 posts on X alone between January and August 2025 that paired the term "Pallywood" with "journalist" a coordinated online smear campaign designed to strip Palestinian media workers of their protected status under international law.

In February 2026, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz signed a military order designating five Palestinian news outlets Al-Asima News, Quds Plus, Al-Quds Albawsala, Maraj, and Maydan Al-Quds as "terrorist organizations." No evidence was provided. The outlets cover events in Jerusalem. That is their crime reporting on occupied territory from occupied territory.

From the first weeks after October 7, Israeli officials and ministers publicly called for Palestinian journalists to be labeled terrorists and "dealt with accordingly." Israel suggested that some of Gaza's most prominent journalists including AP's Ali Mahmud and Reuters' Mohammed Abu Mostafa had foreknowledge of October 7 or were "embedded with Hamas." The evidence? There was none. But the damage was done. Once you slap the word terrorist on a journalist in a war zone, you have effectively put a target on their back.

When Anas al-Sharif was killed in August 2025, the IDF pointed to their own unverified dossier of "Hamas links" the same kind of dossier the legitimisation cell had been caught fabricating in other cases. Israel's pattern of fabricating evidence to justify killing journalists has been documented before. They didn't even bother to explain why they also killed his three colleagues in the same strike.

The entire family of Wael al-Dahdouh, Al-Jazeera correspondent from Gaza, was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Central Gaza.

The Rhetoric That Greenlights Murder

None of this happens in a vacuum. Israeli politicians have spent years building the rhetorical infrastructure that makes killing journalists politically possible.

• Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu the same man who suggested nuking Gaza was "one of the possibilities" publicly stated that Israel "must find ways for Gazans that are more painful than death."
• Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has called for the "total annihilation" of Gaza and, as of August 2025, is pushing for phased annexation of the territory.
• When far-right Israelis attacked the offices of Channel 12 in July 2026 smashing windows and vandalizing the building over the network's reporting on the Sde Teiman torture scandal Eliyahu responded by saying journalists should themselves face trial.
• Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced on day one of the genocide that Israel would impose a "complete siege" on Gaza "no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel" and that the IDF was fighting "human animals."
• Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu evoked the biblical Amalek a passage widely interpreted as a call for total extermination.

A UN commission of inquiry found that Netanyahu, Herzog, and Gallant all committed the crime of "direct and public incitement to genocide." Al-Haq has documented over 1,000 instances of genocidal incitement from Israeli officials, military personnel, and media figures. Law for Palestine's database of incitement has logged over 500 instances.

When you have ministers calling journalists terrorists, calling for the annihilation of Gaza, and facing zero consequences from the "international community" is it any wonder that soldiers feel emboldened to pull the trigger on a press tent? The rhetoric isn't just talk. It is operational doctrine dressed up as political speech.

467 Violations in Six Months And Counting

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate documented 467 crimes and violations against journalists and media workers between January and June 2026 alone. That breaks down as follows:

• 8 journalists killed
• 27 arrested
• 29 incidents of live fire specifically targeting journalists
• 78 cases of tear gas or stun grenades used against press
• 14 physical assaults
• 2 gunshot injuries
• 16 threats involving weapons

All in a six-month window.

Since October 2023, the IDF has carried out roughly 220 arrests and detentions of journalists and media workers. 40 remain in custody. Over 260 have been killed. The CPJ has described 26 of those killings as deliberate targeted assassinations not collateral damage, not accidents, not "regrettable incidents." Assassinations. Gaza remains the deadliest place for journalists in the world.

The numbers are staggering on their own. But the system behind them is what should keep you up at night.

1. Israel kills the journalist.
2. The legitimisation cell smears them posthumously.
3. The politicians provide the rhetorical cover.
4. The Western media dutifully reports Israel's unverified claims as "Israel says..." as if the word of a state committing genocide carries the same weight as the testimony of the person it just murdered.

And the world moves on to the next headline.

Meanwhile, in Gaza, someone picks up the dead man's camera and keeps filming. Because the alternative silence is exactly what Israel wants.

If killing 260 journalists hasn't stopped the coverage, that should tell you something about the strength of the people holding those cameras. It should also tell you something about the desperation of the state trying to destroy them.

We at UnTelevised will keep naming them. We will keep telling their stories. And we will keep calling this what it is a war on truth, waged by a state that knows the truth is the one weapon it cannot defeat.