Protect Palestinian reporters and end media complicity in genocide: A call to all journalists and media workers
“Awareness is Israel’s most hated and feared foe.”
– Refaat Alareer, Palestinian writer, poet, educator. Deliberately targeted and murdered by Israel in December 2023.
According to a new report from the Cost of War, Israel’s genocide has killed at least 232 reporters as of March 2025. It surpasses the combined toll of journalist casualties in the U.S. Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the U.S.’s assaults on Cambodia and Laos), the Yugoslav Wars, the War in Afghanistan, and the ongoing Ukraine War.
Since October 7, 2023, Israel has refused to allow foreign journalists access to Gaza. Thanks to the remarkable work of Palestinian journalists on the ground—all of whom Israel has displaced, injured, starved, and surveilled—much of the world has seen Israel’s brutality and genocidal violence despite the attempts by Israel and the West to block and kill the truth.
To be sure, this is nothing new. Israel has a long history of targeting Palestinian journalists across occupied Palestine, from Gaza to Jerusalem to the West Bank. And Palestinian journalists have always fought back simply by doing their job. The willful laundering of Israel’s propaganda by Western corporate media not only endorses and normalizes the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, it manufactures consent for genocide and further silences the voices of Palestinian journalists who are documenting the slaughter and ethnic cleansing of their own people.
As movement journalists and media makers in the imperial core, the settler-colonial nation-state that funds and supports the genocide, we bear a profound moral and professional responsibility. We must push our colleagues in newsrooms across the nation to reject the misguided notion of objectivity that legitimizes Zionist and Israeli military voices as credible and abides by censorship. Many of our colleagues have ushered in the unrelenting state repression we are currently facing, and the context that allows for over 50,000 Palestinians to be killed without the world coming to a standstill. As noted in a Truthout and Prism op-ed in October of 2024, “systems of oppression are maintained by silence, the obfuscation of information, and the amplification of voices of occupation and imperialism.”
As additionally described in the op-ed:
“Press embed with the Israeli military as they attack everywhere from Gaza to Yemen, in pitiful displays of access journalism. Debunked claims about babies beheaded on Oct. 7 are never corrected for the world to see, while real videos of decapitated Palestinian children in Gaza get little to no mention. The disingenuous Israeli claims about Hamas using “human shields” are repeated to no end, but when Israel is on the other end of a missile, reporters are quick to point out the military infrastructure located in densely populated Tel Aviv without a whiff of irony. The longstanding disregard for Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim life has never been so visible, open, and normalized.”
Just as the work of the Movement Media Alliance is to collaborate and amplify each other’s work in independent, grassroots media, our mandate right now must be to stand in solidarity with Palestinian journalists—as our colleagues and as fellow human beings—by wielding our media tools in direct resistance to Israel’s campaign of violent erasure. This means using our platforms not to overwrite their voices, but to amplify them; not to validate their work, but to demand justice for it. It means pushing for Palestinian narratives in the face of the dehumanizing lies and propaganda perpetuated by most Western corporate outlets.
On March 24, Israel targeted and murdered Hossam Shabat as he traveled on a horse cart in Beit Lahia, Gaza. On the same day, barely an hour earlier, Israel targeted and murdered journalist Mohammed Mansour in his home. As Hossam wrote in a post in June 2024: “Language is important. Language makes genocide justifiable. A reason why we are still being bombed after 243 days is because of The New York Times and most Western media. They continue to spread misinformation and are willing to jump many hoops instead of stating that Israel is committing genocide or that Israel is killing Palestinians daily. The New York Times is complicit in this genocide. The New York Times has the blood of 15,000 Palestinian children on their hands.”
As Western movement journalists, we have an obligation and an existential need to decry the dangerous failings of corporate media and to be better. We must separate ourselves from those who are stenographers for the State Department, from those who toast the ideals of press freedom while censoring journalists here at home and murdering journalists in Gaza. We must see the attacks on journalists in Gaza as inextricably linked to the attacks on our press freedoms here in the U.S., as they are unilateral attacks on the truth, access, awareness, and humanity. Our rights to free speech and free press, for the few of us who ever had them, mean nothing if they can be taken away simply for amplifying and reporting the truth. We must work creatively to combat the shadowbanning, censorship, and targeting of voices that speak for Palestine here at home while we combat the murder of Palestinian journalists in occupied Palestine. In short, we must act like journalists, like the journalists of Palestine.
We, the undersigned, demand the protection of Palestinian journalists. We demand that Western media recognize the fact-checked, investigated, and undeniable evidence that Israel, as backed by the U.S. and other colonial powers, is perpetrating genocide against Palestinians and that the baseline of journalistic integrity requires us to show that truth. We demand, alongside the calls from Palestinian reporters, that Western media end its unquestioned platforming of the Israeli military while treating Palestinian journalists and sources as non-credible about their own extermination. As Palestinian journalist Ibrahim Ibrahim said in a press conference outside of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza, on March 26, the international community must “uphold its responsibility toward Palestinian journalists and impose the maximum penalties on these criminals who target us and our families day and night.”
As movement media workers in solidarity with our colleagues in Palestine, we must not only aim to elevate journalistic work that exposes injustice and colonial violence but also use our voices to ensure their safety and the well-being of all oppressed peoples.
Signed,
Da’Shaun Harrison, Co-Executive Director, Scalawag Magazine
Lara Witt, Editor-in-Chief, Prism
Tina Vasquez, Features Editor, Prism
Jared Ware, Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
Caitlin Gaffin, Publisher, Prism
Katie Hanzalik, Newsletter and Engagement Editor, Scalawag Magazine
Negin Owliaei, Editor-in-Chief, Truthout
Sharon Zhang, Truthout
Kyubin Kim, Social Media Editor, Prism
Samantha Borek, Truthout
Maya Schenwar, Truthout
Eleanor Goldfield, Project Censored & freelance journalist
Jenna Martin, Freelance
Jill Webb, Freelance
Zanna Arifa Rehalat, Freelance researcher
Saurav Sarkar
Sarah-Ji, Love & Struggle Photos
Josef Cadwell, Freelancer
Kylie Cheung, Jezebel
Cayden Mak, Convergence Magazine
Sam Carliner, Freelance
James Salanga, Co-Director, The Objective
Shabnam Banerjee-McFarland, Audience Director, Prism & Literary Agent, Odom Media Management
Sophie Hayssen, Freelance
Nicole Froio, Co-founder of The Flytrap Media and freelance journalist
Kevin Gosztola, Journalist and editor,TheDissenter.org
Neesha Powell-Ingabire, Director of Popular Education, Press On
Gracelynne West, Freelance
Neha Madhira, Freelance
Britney
Anna Lekas Miller, Freelance
Sahar Fatima, News Editor, Prism
Emily Hagstrom, Executive Director, Women AdvaNCe
Emily Nonko, Director, Empowerment Avenue
Alex Tretbar, Poet & Writer
Venus Edlin, Freelance reporter & editor
Chance Townsend, Mashable
Chip Gibbons
Jen Deerinwater, Founding Executive Director, Crushing Colonialism
Lee Camp, Host of Unredacted Tonight, former host of Redacted Tonight
Nora Barrows-Friedman, Journalist & editor
Alvin Hermans
Meenakshi Thirukode
Rikki Li, Developmental Editor, Prism
Rae Garringer, Freelance
Andrea Grimes, Co-founder, The Flytrap
Irene Romulo, Co-Founder, Cicero Independiente
Sherronda Brown, Scalawag
aja arnold, Publisher, Mainline
Leslie Anne, Frye-Thomas, Creative Director, Reel Stories Creative
Fiza Pirani, Freelance
Maximillian Alvarez, Editor-in-Chief, The Real News Network
Sabrina Beydoun, Cicero independiente
Justin Cook, Freelance Climate Journalist
Amiri Banks, Canopy Atlanta
Leor Galil, Chicago Reader
Nada Merghani, Southern Vision Alliance
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
micco caporale, Chicago Reader
Grant Sharples, Freelance
Katie Prout, Feature Writer, Chicago Reader
Miranda Reinert, Freelance
Tatiana Tenreyro, ANTICS Magazine
Lori Waselchuk, Freelance
Tea Troutman, Editor, Scalawag Magazine
Lewis Wallance, Journalism Fellow, Interrupting Criminalization
Abby Martin, Journalist, The Empire Files
Kylie Marsh, Freelance
Elena Novak, Freelance Journalist, National Writers Union
Loretta Graceffo, Truthout
Jasper Wittig
Arielle Rebekah, T&C Communications
Tom Callahan, Sensitive Visuals
Kate Abbott, Freelance writer and journalist, BTW Berkshires
Roxana Bendezú, Migrant Roots Media, Founding Director
Anson Tong, Freelance
Joseph Hancock, Editor of Labor Today International
Charlie Wong, Freelance
Arielle Tschinkel, Freelance
Sarah Lazare, Freelance
Lorri Nandrea, Freelance writer, National Writers Union
jess pinkham, freelance producer
Gunnar Vagestram, Freelance
Nicholas Russell, Freelance
Becky Little, Freelance
Mnar Adley, MintPress News
Kate Davis Jones, Freelance
greg macdougall, EquitableEducation.ca
Annia Ciezadlo, Investigations Editor, The Public Source
Grace Benfell, Freelance Solidarity Project
Christine S. Escobar, Represent Classical
Eugene Puryear, Breakthrough News
Musa Springer, Editor, Hood Communist
Alexis Gunderson, Freelance
Cyrena Touros, Freelance, National Writers Union
Laura Albast, Freelance