The times have changed since 1948. Back then, information was relayed to the public via a handful of news media who toed the line behind the Zionist narrative. Israel's "birth" - a gigantic campaign of killings, terrorism and ethnic cleansing against the indigenous Palestinian popuplation by illegal armed European migrants - was celebrated as some sort of accomplishment.
The Zionist terror campaign was hailed as a "war of independence". Remember, a largely Fascist West had itself murdered 6 million European Jews and colonialism was still in vogue, but in its last throes. Britain was partitioning India and losing many of its colonies, France would soon be defeated in Indochina and Algeria... but these colonial "empires" tried as best as they could to hold on to whatever patch of land they had brutalized and pilfered for centuries. So, the colonial "victory" of the foreign European colonial settlers, a.k.a. Zionists, in Palestine over the indigenous Palestinians was seen by the West with a fin-de-siecle nostalgia, a victory easily achieved by well-armed wealthy and sophisticated Europeans who were trained in Fascist violence during WWII and with the collusion of the prefidious British colonizers. The indigenous Palestinians, for their part, were rural villagers and townspeople surrounding the large Palestinians cities, and were just emerging from 400 years of Turkish Ottoman occupation. They had no weapons, no money, were less sophisticated than their invaders, and were entrusting their national future to the British colonial hypocrite.
I remember growing up reading books like "Exodus" - television was still a few years coming, and the only news that was disseminated to newspapers was that conveyed by Zionist-friendly western newspapers. There was little to no coverage of the "other side". The "Arabs" (as the Palestinians were referred to) were a haggard and insignificant mass of semi-humans with no persona. That is how the French colonial portrayed the indigenous Algerians. Even today, we know the names and every detail about one Israeli victim of violence, while tens of thousands of Palestinian victims have no human attributes and are simply ignored. We count their numbers but we don't know who they are.
Lies and fabrications were rampant: Slogans like "a land without people for a people without land" was the most absurd as it occulted the existence of a vast majority of indigenous Palestinians who were resisting as best as they could against a much smaller number of invading European Zionists. Zionist terror was hailed as a war of liberation. Palestinians were not even named as Palestinians, their identity was also occulted and were labeled as "Arabs", which fed the charade blurted by Golda Meir's infamous "there was no such thing as a Palestinian people". As "Arabs", the Palestinians could be from anywhere between Iraq and Morocco even though they had lived in Palestine for thousands of years, whereas their conquering Zionists had just arrived from Europe, mostly illegally and supposedly against a feigned British opposition.
The Zionists won the information war. But times have now changed. The world now has access to all the archives and the raw information unfiltered by Zionist mouthpieces. The latest war on Gaza showed the world exactly how the zionists "won" their war of independence in 1948: Killing children, bombing schools and hospitals, expelling people from their villages, demolishing their homes, uprooting their millennial olive orchards, replacing the names of villages and towns with Hebrew names, completely erasing some 600 Palestinian villages whose populations ended up in the hundreds of refugee camps that still exist both inside Palestine and in the neighboring countries...
This was the time when social darwinism was in vogue, racism was still entrenched in the global conscience, and the brutality with which one group could undertake to exterminate and erase another people had become an acceptable norm. In sum, the scope and expanse of the Zionist takeover of Palestine mirrored the contemporaneous Nazi and Fascist European practices of exterminating undesirable peoples and erasing them out of existence.
The mask has fallen. The lies have been debunked. People around the world now know the truth. Yet, Israel's erroneous belief that it can continue with the same patterns of conduct has now earned it the qualifiers of apartheid, genocider, ethnic cleanser, colonial... These are not outlandish acccusations, these are based on the entire international community watching on social media - a more democratic and less vertical information dissemination - facts, not made up myths.
As the civilized world is also moving away from religious barbarism, rejecting what Islamic barbarity has been doing over the last few decades, it cannot stand the double standard of rejecting Islamic barbarism based on interpretations of the Koran while tolerating the equally abject religious barbarity of Zionism claiming another people's land based on some Bronze Age religious garbage from 2700 years ago.
Israel has murdered more journalists in two years than all the conflicts around the world have for past decades. https://cpj.org/2025/02/deadliest-year-on-record-for-journalists-70-killed-by-israel/
It thinks it can continue to monopolize the information. It thinks it can uproot and move an entire people from its native ancestral land to some other foreign land (Somaliland, Rwanda, Uganda...)
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Israel attacks press as ‘silencing’ policy: Palestinian journalists union
Elis Gjevori
Fri, December 26, 2025
Israel’s systematic campaign of violence against Palestinian journalists since October 2023 has peaked in 2025 with the targeting of dozens of members of the press, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate says.
In a statement released on Friday, the Freedoms Committee of the syndicate said Israel is implementing a policy of “silencing the press through killing, injury and permanent disability”.
“The Israeli occupation shifted from a policy of restricting journalistic work to a policy of neutralising the press through deadly force, with the aim of silencing witnesses, preventing the documentation of crimes, and undermining the Palestinian narrative on the ground,” the statement said.
By the end of November 2025, at least 76 Palestinian journalists had been killed and wounded by Israel, a figure the committee described as a “dangerous indicator of the escalating targeting policy” pursued by Israeli authorities. “Journalists are no longer merely ‘potential targets’, but rather confirmed and frequent targets,” the committee said.
Over the past year, Israel killed several journalists in Gaza in targeted assassinations – most notably Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif – falsely claiming that they are members of Hamas.
Press freedom groups have been condemning the Israeli attacks on journalists, but the killings have proceeded with impunity. Israel has never arrested or charged any of its troops for killing journalists.
While the targeting of the press intensified during the genocidal war in Gaza, Israel has killed dozens of Arab journalists over the past two decades, including Al Jazeera’s veteran correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh in the occupied West Bank in 2022.
Muhammad al-Lahham, head of the Committee for Freedoms at the syndicate, said the scale and consistency of the attacks amount to international crimes.
The events of the past year, he said, “constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity, and represent a systematic targeting of a protected group, journalists, within the framework of an official policy to silence the media by force”.
Al-Lahham rejected claims that journalists had been caught accidentally in hostilities, describing instead a deliberate operational logic. What Israel was enforcing, he said, was a “field doctrine based on the principle of ‘no witnesses, no narrative, no image'”.
In December, a report by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) found that Israel killed more journalists in 2025 than any other country.
Silencing witnesses
The report described 2025 as “a year of repeated mass targeting, particularly in tents, hospitals, and press gatherings”, warning that Palestine had become one of the most dangerous places in the world to practise journalism.
Several Al Jazeera journalists have been among those killed, in some cases alongside members of their families.
In August, Israeli attacks killed al-Sharif and three other Al Jazeera journalists. They are among nearly 300 journalists and media workers killed in Gaza during the war over 26 months – an average of about 12 journalists a month – according to Shireen.ps, a monitoring website named after Abu Akleh.
Beyond fatalities, the committee documented a sharp rise in life-altering injuries. Many journalists suffered amputations, paralysis or blindness after strikes to the head, neck, chest and abdomen. The dangers did not come solely from the Israeli army, the report said, but also from settlers.
Al Jazeera journalists killed by Israel earlier this year: From left, Anas al-Sharif, Mohammed Noufal, Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Qreiqeh [Al Jazeera]
April and May marked what the committee called a phase of deliberate media massacres. On April 7 and 8, Israeli strikes hit a journalists’ tent at Nasser Hospital, wounding nine reporters and destroying equipment. Several died of their injuries later.
This documented and recurring incident occurred and involved the use of heavy weaponry, “amounting to a complex war crime and a collective targeting of the press”, the committee said.
By mid-2025, patterns of permanent disability had emerged. Journalist Akram Dalloul lost his sight, Jamal Badah had his leg amputated, and Muhammad Fayeq was left paralysed.
The committee stressed that most attacks occurred while journalists were clearly identifiable, wearing protective gear and press badges, and working in locations long recognised as media gathering points. Many were targeted repeatedly, it added, underscoring what it described as Israel’s sustained assault on the Palestinian press.
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Israel kills over 700 relatives of Palestinian journalists in Gaza: Report
Elis Gjevori
Sun, December 28, 2025
Israel has killed at least 706 family members of Palestinian journalists since the start of its genocidal war in Gaza in October 2023, according to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate.
The syndicate’s Freedoms Committee said in a report released late on Saturday that Israeli forces are systematically targeting the families of journalists as part of what it called a war aimed at silencing Palestinian reporting.
The report said the attacks represent a deliberate strategy rather than deaths as a result of war.
Israeli violence against journalists has “evolved to take on a more dangerous and brutal dimension, represented by targeting the families and relatives of journalists, in a clear attempt to turn journalistic work into an existential burden for which sons, wives, fathers, and mothers pay the price”, the union said.
Muhammad al-Lahham, head of the Freedoms Committee, said the pattern of attacks from 2023 to 2025 exposes Israel’s intent to crush independent reporting in Gaza.
Targeting journalists’ families, he said, “reveals that the Israeli occupation is waging a comprehensive war on the truth, making no distinction between the camera and the child, nor between the pen and the home”.
“The blood of the journalists’ families will remain a living witness to the crime of trying to silence the Palestinian voice,” al-Lahham added.
Witnesses to family killings
The committee said Israeli forces killed 436 relatives of journalists in 2023, 203 in 2024 and at least 67 this year. The deaths continued even after many families were forcibly displaced and sought shelter in tents and makeshift camps, it said.
The syndicate cited a recent case near Khan Younis, where the bodies of journalist Hiba al-Abadla, her mother and about 15 members of the al-Astal family were recovered nearly two years after Israeli aircraft bombed their home west of the city.
“Hundreds of children, women and the elderly were killed because of a family member’s professional connection to journalism, in flagrant violation of all humanitarian and legal norms,” the committee said.
According to the findings, Israeli attacks have repeatedly struck journalists’ homes, places of displacement and areas known to house media workers and their relatives. In some cases, entire families have been wiped out, leaving journalists alive to bear witness to their annihilation.
The committee described this as a “qualitative shift” in Israel’s behaviour, moving from individual targeting to collective punishment. By turning families into targets, it said, Israel aims to intimidate society itself and “dry up the environment that nurtures the media”.
(Al Jazeera)
Almost 300 journalists killed
Beyond the death toll, the syndicate warned of severe psychological harm. Journalists who survived after losing children, partners or parents now face trauma, family breakdowns and crushing guilt, and many have been forced to flee or suspend their work under the weight of Israel’s continuing violence.
Over the past year, Israel killed several journalists in Gaza in targeted assassinations – most notably Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif – falsely claiming that they are members of Hamas.
They are among nearly 300 journalists and media workers killed in Gaza during the war over 26 months – an average of about 12 journalists a month – according to Shireen.ps, a monitoring website named after Al Jazeera’s veteran correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh. who was killed in the occupied West Bank in 2022.
Media freedom groups have condemned the Israeli attacks on journalists, but the killings have proceeded with impunity. Israel has never arrested or charged any of its soldiers for killing journalists.
While the targeting of the news media has intensified during the war in Gaza, Israel has killed dozens of Arab journalists over the past two decades. In December, a report by Reporters Without Borders found that Israel killed more journalists in 2025 than any other country.
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