The Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, in a statement on its website on November 3, slammed global and western mainstream media organizations for biased coverage of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. The journalists’ union accused global news media, particularly Western media, of being a “facilitator” and enabler of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, by providing the state with journalistic cover and justification to commit its atrocities and war crimes in Gaza.
“When, for example, the Israeli and US governments suggested—with no evidence whatsoever—that the Palestinian Health Ministry had inflated the number of Palestinians registered as killed in Gaza, many news agencies uncritically adopted this talking point,” the statement read. “By engaging in such unfounded speculation—driven by the propaganda of the Israeli war machine—media organizations are facilitating the mass death of Palestinians and laying the groundwork for a genocide.”
It noted that “much of the global media, particularly Western media outlets, have mindlessly repeated Israeli government talking points and used dehumanizing language when referring to Palestinians. In so doing, these media organizations have utterly failed to adhere to fundamental journalistic principles of objectivity and integrity.”
In regards to the ongoing war on Gaza, the union’s statement noted that so far since October 7, Israeli forces have killed 25 Palestinian journalists and 9 other media workers. The Israeli airstrikes have directly targeted at least 35 journalists and their homes, killing a slew of family members and relatives of the journalists, with the union concluding that the homes of 20 of the 25 journalists were likely deliberately attacked. According to the union, this was not surprising at all, as the Israeli security forces have a history of targeting journalists in occupied Palestine, having killed 55 Palestinian journalists between 2000 to 2022.
Israel has repeatedly cut off all telecommunication services in Gaza, including telephone, mobile and internet services, along with also heavily restricting and disrupting satellite communication services. It has done so in order to hinder Palestinians in Gaza from contacting the outside world and from using social media to document and expose Israeli atrocities and war crimes. So far, Israeli security forces have killed more than 10,000 Palestinians. Close to 26,000 Palestinians have been wounded.
The syndicate calls upon journalists, trade unions and news agencies around the world to “publicly condemn the targeting of Palestinian journalists and take all possible measures to support Palestinian journalists.” It further implores journalists to stay committed to their journalistic ethics while pursuing “truth and objectivity” and to adhere to “the standards established in IFJ Declaration of Principles on the Conduct of Journalists” as well as of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA) in the context of covering Palestine and Israel.
The statement also called on journalists to “consider the track record of parties providing information before reporting that information as fact,” and to “verify the claims of unreliable sources before reporting those claims as fact.” Importantly, the union urged news media globally to immediately stop engaging in dehumanizing and genocide-enabling language against Palestinians.
The union’s statement has previously been echoed by others as well, with 250 prominent journalism, media and communications scholars last month denouncing the biased and discriminatory media coverage against Palestinians in the British media. Additionally, 800 legal scholars around the world have recently released a statement warning of the “possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,” and the Center for Constitutional Rights has issued a detailed legal and factual analysis describing “Israel’s unfolding crime of genocide.”
