In the midst of the horror show that is Gaza, it becomes difficult to raise up one act of brutality among all the others as somehow more alarming or worthy of condemnation. The pile of offenses only seems to grow higher with each passing week: hostage-taking and murder; the escalating death toll among noncombatants (now more than 64,000); the destruction of civilian infrastructure, homes and hospitals, places of worship and learning; the use of hunger as a weapon of war. All have been aspects of the Gaza conflict.

But among this banquet of suffering, the targeting and assassination of journalists in Gaza remains worth calling out. Israeli authorities have denied independent access to Gaza to journalists from the international community. That means the strip’s homegrown journalists and media workers—camera and audio operators, editors and more—are the only people left who can capture the day-to-day carnage in Gaza.

Famine now threatens virtually the entire Palestinian community; there is no way out and no force in the world apparently interested in saving them. The Gaza journalists and media workers are among the final witnesses distributing images of their plight to the outside world. Is that why they are being targeted?

Though journalists have been killed since the beginning of this latest conflict in Gaza, the deliberate targeting of reporters and media workers made international headlines on Aug. 10, when Israel Defense Forces killed Anas al-Sharif, a reporter for the Al Jazeera news service of Qatar. He was well-known and well-regarded across the Arabic-speaking world and was among a Pulitzer Prize-winning team reporting for Reuters in 2024.

Collateral damage

Mr. al-Sharif did not perish alone. Five colleagues who worked for Al Jazeera and other media outlets working together in a tent near Al-Shifa Hospital were also killed. The Israeli military claimed that Mr. al-Sharif, like other journalists targeted for death by the I.D.F., was a Hamas operative, “advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and [Israeli] troops.”

His employer and colleagues say the Israeli claims are false, that his effectiveness as a reporter was the reason he had become a target. Just days before his death, Mr. al-Sharif had broken down on camera while reporting on hunger in Gaza.

Just two weeks later, the phenomenon was repeated. On Aug. 25, more than 20 people at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis were killed after a so-called double-tap, or in this case triple-tap, strike occurred.

The “first tap” took out a Reuters camera setup, killing a Reuters camera operator. The balcony site where he was working has long been used by Palestinian journalists to capture images of the devastation of Khan Yunis.

When other journalists, rescue workers and medical teams responded, the I.D.F. struck again, killing even more people. In the end five journalists and 15 others were killed. The incident was captured live, and Palestinian journalists, rescue workers and medical staff could be clearly seen attempting to remove the dead and wounded and debris from the hospital stairwell as the second and third projectiles struck.

Thameen Al-Kheetan, a spokesperson for the United Nations’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, called the I.D.F. strike at the hospital “unacceptable.”

“These journalists are the eyes and the ears of the whole world and they must be protected,” he said. “This raises many, many questions about the targeting of journalists and all of these incidents must absolutely be investigated and those responsible must be held accountable.”

According to Mr. Al-Kheeran, 247 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since the conflict began in October 2023. The Committee to Protect Journalists has stated that Israel has killed a record number of Palestinian journalists since the Gaza war began.

The committee has documented 197 journalists’ and media workers’ deaths during the latest fighting in the Holy Land, 189 of them Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza. Gaza has become the deadliest conflict for journalists in history, according to the C.P.J., with an annual toll that exceeds other conflicts that had spanned decades.

Some comparisons put the C.P.J. accounting into perspective. Just 29 journalists have been killed covering Russia’s attack on Ukraine going back to 2014. During World War II, 67 journalists died covering the conflict, and 63 were killed between 1955 and 1975 covering the Vietnam War.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed some regret for the incident at Nasser Hospital, describing it as a “tragic mishap,” but a spokesperson for the I.D.F. claimed the Israeli forces were targeting a “Hamas camera” on the roof of the hospital that its troops believed was tracking their movements. The I.D.F. also claimed without providing evidence that six “terrorists…were eliminated during the strike.”

An apparent war crime?

The Committee to Protect Journalists has called for an independent investigation. “Israel’s initial report leaves many more questions than answers and does not explain why an Israeli tank fired on Reuters camera operator Hussam Al-Masri and the news agency’s visible, live-feed camera that had been filming from that location daily for several weeks,” said C.P.J. chief executive Jodie Ginsberg in a statement released on Aug. 28. “Nor does it explain why first responders—including other journalists—were targeted in an apparent so-called ‘double tap’ strike on the same location.”

She added that the “indiscriminate and disproportionate nature of the attack demand[s] that this incident be investigated as an apparent war crime.”

The I.D.F. released a statement defending its attack on the journalists at Nasser Hospital but declined to respond further to C.P.J. inquiries about the incident.

“Our experience over decades is that Israeli-led investigations into killings are neither transparent, nor independent—and in not a single case over the past 24 years has anyone in Israel ever been held accountable for the killing of a journalist,” Ms. Ginsberg said.

Last year the C.P.J. listed Haiti and Israel as “the world’s biggest offenders in letting journalists’ murderers go unpunished.” It is the first time Israel has appeared in the C.P.J.’s Global Impunity Index.

That should serve as a source of shame for the people of Israel, but more important, as a profound warning. The uninvestigated or unpunished killing of journalists is a sure sign of deeper breakdowns to come in the societies where they occur.

Commenting on the latest deaths, an I.D.F. spokesperson Avichay Adraee posted on X that “the IDF expresses regret for any injury to uninvolved personnel. It does not target journalists as such and works as much as possible to minimize harm to them, while continuing to maintain the security of its forces.”

“As such” is doing some heavy lifting in that statement. It is a war crime to target journalists—or any other noncombatant for that matter. When the I.D.F. acknowledges targeting Palestinian journalists, it first seeks to connect them somehow to Hamas, arguing that double duty as a Hamas militant makes them legitimate targets.

Critics contend that I.D.F. claims that the journalists it kills were members of Hamas are based on flimsy or contradictory evidence. They charge that the strategy represents efforts by the I.D.F. to silence witnesses to the carnage in Gaza.

The strikes also take out anyone unlucky enough to be in the vicinity of the targeted journalists, continuing an astonishingly high tolerance for noncombatant deaths in Gaza.

A joint investigation conducted by Britain’s The Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and a Hebrew-language outlet Local Call found that, according to figures recovered from a classified Israeli military intelligence database, five out of six Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza have been civilians. The report’s authors called that 83 percent rate of noncombatant death “an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare.”

All the suffering in Gaza could of course come to an abrupt end if what is left of Hamas would surrender, release those hostages who remain alive and turn over their weapons. But Hamas is led by men in Qatar who are far from the agony and by dead-enders lurking in the tunnels under Gaza. Such men cannot be reasoned with.

That does not mean Israel, a state supported and armed by American taxpayers, is free from humanitarian and legal obligations regarding the entrapped Palestinian population. A man-made famine is murdering the innocent, the killing of noncombatants remains a violation of international law and the targeting of people who are trying to tell the world about it all is repugnant.

The Trump administration has taken a hands-off approach to Gaza, allowing the Netanyahu government to prosecute the war as it sees fit. The current Israeli government is top-heavy with representatives from the most extreme components of Israeli society and led by a man who apparently believes continuing the war will keep him in power and out of a courtroom.

To date, more than 64,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Thousands more are left to count under the rubble. More than 2,300 Gazans so far have been killed while seeking humanitarian aid. Almost 400 have now perished because of hunger, including 131 children.

Some 1,200 Israelis were slain and more than 5,400 injured during the Hamas attack on southern Israeli communities that provoked the war in October 2023.

Of the 251 Israeli hostages taken by Hamas, 83 have been killed and 50 remain in captivity, though only 20 of them are believed to still be alive. Billions in U.S. weapons have scattered death and destruction across Gaza.

As Israel’s patron, the United States will be held culpable for what has happened in Gaza. Instead of chasing a fantasy of a Trump Tower on the Mediterranean that only prolongs the suffering, the administration should be pressing for a cease-fire and the end of the criminal assassination of journalists and other noncombatants.

The U.S. president has the power and the obligation to restrain a leadership in Jerusalem that has chosen to proceed so unwisely in Gaza. Let the killing of these journalists be the last crimes of this war.

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Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).