The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) recently concluded in The Hague one of its most significant sessions on the impunity of the murder of journalists and media workers. The session highlighted how one of the most notorious crimes in international law, that of the “elimination” (this non-legal term reflects the concrete reality) of the guarantors of independent and verifiable information on the violation of fundamental, individual and collective rights has been relegated to impotence. The cases examined by the PPT were exemplary of the permanent, widespread and structural warfare of non-democratic and/or explicitly dictatorial State-governments (and powers) upon journalists and media workers around the globe.
Information is under attack in Gaza today.
The offensive ordered by the Benjamin Netanyahu government and launched by Israel’s armed forces against the Palestinian enclave of the Gaza Strip, in response to the Hamas attack which left 1,139 dead on Israeli territory on 7 October, has left more than 24,000 Palestinians dead, almost all of them civilians, mostly women and children. Along with them, dozens of journalists, photojournalists and other media workers have been killed.
As of January17 the Committee to Protect Journalists has verified that 83 journalists have been killed while doing their job, 76 of them Palestinians, 4 Israelis and 3 Lebanese. Others are injured or missing, still others have been arrested by the Israeli authorities. Many more names remain to be verified. Several sources, including the Gaza Media Centre speak of more than 115 journalists and media workers killed.
Many of them were shot deliberately: by snipers or drones, precisely targeted. In an instance, rescue workers were prevented to reach an injured reporter for several hours until he bleeded to death. The organisation Reporters Sans Frontières has documented numerous cases in two different complaints submitted to the International Criminal Court (ICC). The office of Prosecutor Karim Khan has stated that these cases will be included in the ICC’s Palestine investigation.
We emphasise that journalists are civilians doing work in the public interest and, as such, cannot be targeted legally under international law. Instead, in Gaza as in the Occupied Palestinian Territory of the West Bank or on the Lebanese-Israeli border, media workers are paying a heavy price. In the Gaza Strip in particular, journalists and other media workers carry out their work in prohibitive conditions, risking their lives. Many have lost family members and colleagues. All could be killed at any time. As many observers have noted, there is no safe place in Gaza.
Targeting journalists means trying to impose silence on the ongoing bloody war. Since the beginning of hostilities the Gaza Strip has been off limits to international reporters, except for rare tours embedded with the Israeli Defence Forces. The journalists present in the territory today are reporters from Palestinian media and the few international news agencies and TV stations that had an office in Gaza before 7 October, as well as independent journalists who are documenting the horrors and sharing on social media, all of them residents of Gaza.
It is they who are recounting the ongoing tragedy through the videos, images, and news that they manage, amidst a thousand difficulties, to transmit to the outside world. Thanks to them we see the destruction, the collapse of civilian life, the sacrifice of more than 100 doctors, nurses, and medical workers, the daily struggle for survival of two million displaced people: war told from the ground.
The freedom to inform and be informed is the basis of justice and democracy, and is all the more precious in contexts of war, when one-way narratives, propaganda and censorship tend to prevail.
Attacking journalists is a war crime.
The spectacle of horror in Gaza – which has widely provoked exceptional declarations even from authorities often too neutral such as the United Nations, and the urgent summoning of the International Court of Justice at the request of South Africa with a case against Israel for committing genocide – changes the frame of reference. Under Israeli control, independent information is now declared a de facto crime, to be prohibited, no matter what the cost: just like medical treatment, even anaesthesia for children and women giving birth, and those with limbs being amputated. Israel has now “normalised” this crime as a product of a war that is erasing even the last traces of an international law that has respect for the right to life of peoples and individuals in opposition to the concept of the absolute decision-making autonomy of States as an inviolable priority.
On behalf of the judges of the session on Impunity for the murder of journalists:
Gill Boehringer (Australia)
Marina Forti (Italy)
Helen Jarvis (Australia-Cambodia)
Kalpana Sharma (India)
Philippe Texier (France)
Marcela Turati (Mexico)
