In response to Israel’s increasing attacks on journalists, siege of northern Gaza and indiscriminate bombing in Lebanon, yesterday dozens of media workers organized by Writers Against the War on Gaza protested on the steps of the New York Public Library in Bryant Park, marched through Midtown and ended their action in front of The New York Times building. 

Foreign journalists haven’t been allowed into Gaza since the beginning of the genocide; only local reporters and those from Al Jazeera are present — and they are enduring the deadliest conflict for journalists in recorded history. On Oct. 23 Israel claimed without evidence that six Al Jazeera reporters are involved in Palestinian resistance fighting in what many are calling assassination threats. The Committee to Protect Journalists says the Israeli accusation amounts to a preemptive justification for murder. (In July Israel killed Al Jazeera correspondent Ismail al-Ghoul and later released documents claiming to prove al-Ghoul had received a Hamas military ranking when he was just 10 years old.)

Acclaimed Palestinian-American writer Sarah Aziza expounded on these issues in a speech at yesterday’s protest:

In the past year the Zionist entity has murdered over two hundred of my relatives in Gaza.

For a year hundreds of thousands of us have protested, marched, picketed, spoken out and spent countless hours spreading the word about the ongoing genocide in Palestine. 

Our actions have only been possible because in Gaza scores of Palestinian journalists have daily risked their lives, and their families’, to report Zionist crimes. Even as they’ve endured unthinkable atrocities — deliberate starvation, indiscriminate and targeted violence, the utter destruction of their homes and worlds, and the abandonment of the so-called international community — they have refused to be silenced. 

For over 12 months they’ve continued to bear the staggering burden of recording the daily onslaught on their people. All this while Israel has continued to perpetrate a campaign of deliberate assassination against them, murdering at least 123 according to the conservative estimate by the Committee to Protect Journalists, or over 175 according to other sources — amounting to the deadliest year the CPJ has ever recorded in its history.

The horrors we have witnessed in Gaza have repeatedly defied our comprehension — only to exceed themselves in depravity, descending into ever-more extreme forms of cruelty and extermination. For the past three weeks, we’ve witnessed further, unthinkable atrocities coming out of northern Gaza as the IOF has surrounded battered cities and refugee camps, blockading all food and water, bombing tents and residential buildings, incinerating men, women and children, and rounding up hundreds of civilians in a modern-day, live-streamed pogrom. 

Now the IOF has publicly declared six journalists in Gaza — including some of the very last remaining journalists in the north — to be terrorist militants. This type of announcement is a tactic used by the Zionist state in the past to justify the murder of civilians reporting on Israel’s war crimes. The men on this list (Anas al-Sharif, Alaa Salameh, Hossam Shabat, Ashraf al-Sarraj, Ismail Abu Omar and Talal al-Arrouqi) have almost single-handedly been the world’s window to North Gaza in the past weeks during the escalating extermination campaign there. This IOF kill list is nothing less than an attempt to annihilate the profession of journalism in Gaza entirely, and it must not stand.

We all know the Zionist state would be nothing without its American backers and apologists. We call on the legacy media, and especially The New York Times — which has unfailingly whitewashed and justified Israel’s genocide in Gaza, rampage in Lebanon and warmongering with Iran — to take a stand on behalf of their colleagues. Condemn the targeted killing of journalists. Call the massacres in Gaza for what they are: the systematic elimination of an indigenous population, a genocide. 

Just hours ago, Hossam Shabat, the 21-year-old reporter who has been an unwavering witness for his people for the last year, wrote, “Despite these dangerous and untrue threats made against us, we remain committed to our profession and will continue to report the facts on the ground as the genocide regretfully continues unabated.”

We must not abandon Hossam. We must not abandon Gaza. We demand an end to media complicity and end to arms for Israel. 

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