Editorial: Without journalists, wars become invisible

When those tasked with bearing witness are eliminated, wars and corruption risk becoming invisible, unrecorded, denied. That is why, at pivotal moments, the media must stand together.

We did so in Malta in 2017, after Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered, when our front page was stripped bare except for a single line affirming that fear would not silence us.

Today, we join some 250 newsrooms worldwide in a similar act of solidarity – for our fallen colleagues in Gaza, and for the universal principle that wars must not go undocumented.

Since October 7, 2023, at least 247 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza as a result of Israeli strikes, according to the UN human rights office. That is more than the total number of journalists killed in all other major wars combined, including both world wars, the Yugoslav wars and the ongoing Ukraine war. 

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that journalists are being specifically targeted. It is also the first modern conflict in which the press has been barred from an entire territory.

This explains why the vast proportion of media workers killed are Palestinians, who live and work in Gaza. Israel’s response has ranged from assertions that journalists were working for Hamas or that the deaths were being “investigated”, with conclusions never released.

Journalism often attracts ambivalence from the public. In the internet age, we are quick to discount expertise or even facts, because we believe there is always another narrative. 

We forget, at our peril, that not even the most intuitive AI tool or internet search engine can replace the men and women on the ground risking their lives filming and writing the facts. They are the witnesses. What they transmit to the outside world is what gets picked up by the internet. 

The killing of journalists by Israeli forces has a long history. In May 2022, Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Aqla, was killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank, and then Israeli police, on the pretext of being pelted with stones, attacked mourners at her funeral, almost toppling her coffin. 

It is government policy in Israel, in all but name, to reject a two-state solution and to expand settlements outside of Israel’s internationally recognised 1967 borders, while not proposing any alternative to protect the basic rights of Palestinians in the occupied territories.

In the face of irrefutable evidence of state-sanctioned criminality, the siege of Gaza thus also becomes the siege of the media. When there is no one on the ground left to witness and report to the outside world what is happening, the truth dies too. 

Israel had a recognised right to respond to the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023. Adjusted for population size, the attack’s toll would have equalled over 10,000 deaths in France or Britain, and more than 45,000 in the US.

Yet, Israel’s response has crossed the line into what B’Tselem, the most prominent human rights body in Israel, and others call ‘war crimes’.

There is famine in swathes of Gaza, a result of Israel’s suspension and subsequent disruption of food aid in March. Israel is led by an unpopular prime minister, reliant on the far right, prolonging a war his own army chief-of-staff wants to end, to remain in power. Neither the hostages nor Palestinian lives are Benjamin Netanyahu’s priority.

This is why the media matters. Awareness is the first step to justice, whether that justice be delivered by a court or the heavy hand of documented history. On this day, let us acknowledge the importance and sacrifice of those journalists and other media workers on the ground bearing witness.