Fifteen journalists, eleven of them Palestinians, have died in the ten days of conflict between Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), according to a count by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ, in English), which demanded that parties respect the safety of reporters.
CPJ is also aware of three journalists missing or detained, two of them Palestinian and one Israeli, and eight more injured, after collecting information from Palestinian, Israeli or third-country media that have raised alarms about the circumstances of their workers.
The committee clarifies that it has not been able to confirm that all those included on the list died or disappeared while carrying out their work, and that it continues to investigate the circumstances of their deaths in a list that is necessarily open given that the war continues on the ground.
The day that most journalists fell was October 7, when Hamas launched a series of surprise attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians: that day, three Israeli reporters were killed by Hamas gunfire and another three Palestinians by Israeli fire.
In the following days, there was a trickle of dead reporters, all of them Palestinians, except for one Lebanese; Almost all of them worked for Palestinian or Arab channels, except for the most notorious case of Issam Abdallah, a Reuters videographer killed on the Lebanese border by an artifact coming from Israeli soil, according to witnesses cited by the agency.
Fatal explosion suffered by Issam Abdalla.
That same bombing left two colleagues injured, one of them a journalist from the AFP agency and another from the Al Jazeera television channel.
Sherif Mansour, CPJ’s coordinator in the Arab region, noted.
Journalists are civilians who do important work in times of crisis and should not be targeted by parties to the conflict. Journalists in the area are making great sacrifices to cover this heartbreaking conflict.
Of the missing reporters, CPJ believes it knows that two are detained: Israeli photographer Roee Idan, taken hostage with his 3-year-old daughter by Hamas, according to his own family, and Palestinian photographer Nidal al-Walidi, detained by the Israeli Army, while a third Palestinian photographer is missing.
For its part, Reuters has demanded that the Government of Israel carry out ‘a rapid, complete and transparent investigation’, in a statement read by the agency’s editor-in-chief, Alessandra Galloni.
(With information from EFE )
