If Killing Journalists Is a War Crime, Why Isn’t Anyone Stopping It? | The Walrus

On April 22, Amal Khalil, a journalist for Lebanese outlet Al-Akhbar, was killed after an Israeli airstrike targeted a house in which she and freelance photojournalist Zeinab Faraj had sought cover. According to details released by the Lebanese health ministry, while rescuers were able to reach Faraj, who suffered a head injury, a stun grenade and gunfire prevented them from getting to Khalil. She was later found dead under the rubble.

Israel denies targeting the journalists and blocking aid from reaching them and has said the matter is under review.

But the details are all too familiar. Khalil was the ninth journalist killed in Lebanon this year, according to Lebanese officials. The toll adds to the unprecedented number of media workers who have been killed in Israel’s genocidal retaliation against Palestinians in Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, and the taking of hostages. In 2025 alone, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) recorded 129 killings of journalists around the world, the highest number since the organization began its tracking in 1992. Israeli forces were responsible for two-thirds of those deaths.

Many of those killed on the job were Palestinian. And they’re not the only targets: according to a 2025 report by the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, more than 700 family members of journalists have been killed by the Israeli military since October 2023. Yet Israeli officials routinely deny targeting journalists or claim that those killed are militants posing as media workers.

Journalists are broadly treated as civilians under international law and international humanitarian law. Targeting them militarily is a war crime. Despite outcry from organizations such as the United Nations and the CPJ, no one has been held responsible for journalists’ killings.

Sonya Fatah, an associate professor of journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University and co-lead of the Canada Press Freedom Project, is among those agitating for greater accountability, including more news coverage. I spoke with her about what it means for potential war crimes to go underreported and how that reflects on the state of press freedom around the world—including in Canada.

Let’s start with the news coverage. There’s been some reporting on journalists’ targeted killings in Gaza and beyond. Why do you consider it to be insufficient?

Typically speaking, when you have an extreme press freedom violation issue, there is a huge response to it. I always think about the case of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist who was brutally assassinated by Saudi authorities in 2018. When that happened, there was a huge outcry. News organizations wrote editorials. Journalism associations went up in arms. There were lots of signed letters. There was active conversation in television broadcasts.

And that’s not happening now, at least not to the same extent. Why do you think that is?

I think what it raises is the challenge of free and fair journalism and how much foreign policy and cultural knowledge production influences journalism organizations’ capacity to do their work.

Canada, for example, did not recognize Palestine until recently. It has been very closely allied with Israel. How much did this kind of relationship influence the capacity of journalism organizations to not just cover the story but then also to be critical when an ally is responsible for conducting acts of harm?

Unless you’re having conscious debates and conversations in the newsroom, I think the result is that people default to the status quo.

The Jamal Khashoggi case was easy. Saudi Arabia is known for extreme human rights violations. The reporter was affiliated with the Washington Post, so there were all these allyships that determined who you were going to go to bat for.

When it comes to Palestinians, there’s always been an erasure of their narrative, an erasure of their voices, in the news media. None of that is surprising.

Some might say that covering a conflict zone comes with known dangers. What makes this war so much more deadly?

After October 7, 2023, Israel blocked Gaza and did not allow foreign journalists to go in. There were plenty of journalists on the ground already, but many other civilians became journalists over the course of this period because they felt they had to report out the story. They were the only ones seeing it.

We could talk about Sudan in this context as well. People who are experiencing genocide on the ground feel they have no choice but to take up the proverbial pen and to tell the story of what is happening on the ground, because no one else is.

Gaza is tiny. And it’s being bombarded from every direction by a very sophisticated military with incredibly invasive weaponry that surveils, attacks, kills, maims people. There are bombings and attacks that could affect all kinds of people who happen to be there. But with journalists, in many cases, these are targeted assassinations—drone attacks that were based on very sophisticated weaponry that went out and took out journalists.

And there are several journalists—Hossam Shabat, for example, Anas al-Sharif, and Fatma Hassouna, the photojournalist who was killed along with her family. If you look at the data that’s been collected, you can see how a lot of those attacks were targeted.

This predates even this situation. Shireen Abu Akleh, a journalist for Al Jazeera, was shot by a sniper in 2022.

What do you say to the allegations that some journalists are militants?

This is a classic disinformation campaign that Israel puts out. This is a tactic to confuse the public and prevent people from taking seriously attacks on journalists by sowing doubts in their minds.

I think that also speaks to the lack of understanding of colonialism and colonial movements among our public, to not be able to understand both the history of this region and also how organizations come up to resist colonialism. After all we talk about telling truth to power, it’s not hard to understand movements like Hamas and Hezbollah in the context of their births decades after the Nakba.

If you look at the African National Congress in South Africa, they were also called a terrorist organization at the time because that is how the South African government viewed them.

You mentioned drones being used to target journalists. As I understand it, that’s a fairly recent development.

Drones have become an unfortunate but regular part of conflict and warfare. They’ve been used in such a range of different ways: as surveillance tools, intimidation tools, psychological warfare. They’re outfitted with cameras, with weapons, with missiles and so on.

They’re not just being used in Gaza. They’ve been used in Ukraine, they’ve been used in Morocco, they’ve been used in China.

When Israel uses drones, they say that they are “battleground tested.” “Battleground tested” is specifically referring to Gaza. It’s the testing ground for all this technology. It’s not hard when you have that kind of weaponry to be able to follow people’s movements, to know who they have relationships with, to know when they come and go.

Not every journalist who’s been killed is killed by a drone. Some have been killed in bigger bombings and so on. But many have been targeted specifically by drones. And I think what Israel has been doing in Gaza has created a new kind of cultural norm around what armies and militaries can do with the force that they have.

Why haven’t we seen a stronger response from the international community?

International law has no enforcement mechanism. You can see how weak it is. Under the United States presidency of Donald Trump, there’s been an increased effort to make it even more toothless, particularly because he’s waging a war against the United Nations, creating his own Board of Peace nonsense, with a range of countries who also feel embittered by the United Nations.

The United Nations is a complicated institution that has its own problematic legacy. It’s worth thinking about in the context of its own history: Eleanor Roosevelt is seen as the beacon behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But keep in mind that the UDHR came into play in 1948. What was the situation around civil rights in the US? America was preaching global freedom at a time when Black people in particular did not have equal rights in the United States.

The international legal system is only helpful in the sense that we have these international covenants and laws in which press freedoms are also written in as a belief system that we agree on. These are documents that are ratified by a majority of the world’s countries. But in practice, a lot has to do with Realpolitik and what political leaders are willing to push for and make happen on the ground. So, while you might have all these press freedom organizations, if they don’t have political support from the powers that be, then they’re speaking into nothingness, into a void.

What does that mean for press freedom more broadly?

The killings are the most extreme violation of press freedoms. But press freedoms are infringed upon in such a large variety of ways—and not just in parts of the world where democracies don’t exist but also in places that have been considered thriving democracies.

We’ve been seeing this a lot in the United States, where journalists have been arrested or their equipment confiscated or broken, especially by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions.

What about in Canada?

One of the things we thought about when we were launching the Canada Press Freedom Project was, “Why does Canada need one?”

Part of our direction was informed by trying to expand people’s ideas of press freedoms. In democracies, press freedom pressures occur in a way that the public may not realize they are happening. In a way, they’re more frightening, because they are really well controlled.

You have to think about press freedoms in two ways: One, the threats which come from external actors—power brokers, governments, movements of people. And then internal pressures, which are what’s happening within the newsroom. And that’s a much harder conversation to have, because journalists are not always very good at receiving criticism. They’re good at doling it out.

What do the external pressures look like?

These include things like intimidation and harassment, chilling statements, denials of access, equipment seizure, border stops. Journalists—in particular women, trans journalists, racialized people, and people who have all of these intersectionalities—experience extreme forms of online harm.

Access to information is another major challenge in Canada. Premier Doug Ford, for example, is trying to prevent some of that access in Ontario through legislation that recently passed. There are subtle ways in which the public record is impacted.

We think we only document the tip of the iceberg on this kind of stuff in Canada, because our work is based on assessing what is publicly reported, what journalists are putting out through social media, or when we get incident reports filed to us. But oftentimes, people don’t talk about these experiences they have. Journalists will not talk about it because they don’t want to be in the limelight. What we’re hoping to do now is to build relationships with newsrooms to develop a system by which they can report press freedom violations to us.

Why should non-journalists care? What do threats like this mean for them?

There’s a reduction in trust in the media that has been an ongoing challenge. I don’t think the public always understands what it takes to do a difficult story and what the process of journalism is.

On top of all of this, we are surrounded by very effective, powerful, and well-financed disinformation systems and artificial intelligence systems that are fed partially on that disinformation. And I think journalists and journalism organizations also have to do the job of letting the public know what work they do.

I also think this idea of press freedoms is still enshrined in this era that is dated. In Western democracies, we have to look at who was in the newsroom, who were they speaking to, and are they still speaking to a university-educated elite who understand these ideas about democracy and press freedom because they’ve been fed them from a young age?

What about the communities experiencing all of the things that make them unlikely to want to vote, unlikely to want to participate in democracy? Those are very existential questions for journalism. If we genuinely shifted the lens, we might be able to see more of a public appreciation of the value of journalism and press freedoms.

So, what’s keeping journalists from doing that?

I don’t think you can have a conversation about external threats to journalism without having a conversation about the internal newsroom cultural issue. That means, in part, thinking about who is a journalist and breaking down some of the barriers around who can enter the field and who is considered an authentic journalist. Why is it that newsrooms don’t care enough about Gaza and the journalists who are killed in Gaza? I think you have to just look inside the newsroom to answer that question.

Samia Madwar is a senior editor at The Walrus.

Sonya Fatah is an associate professor of journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her research, teaching, and practice focus on newsroom culture and composition, tracking press freedoms in Canada, global reporting practices, and live/performance journalism.