For two years we were told that Israel was waging a war on journalists. The statistics were recited at the UN, quoted in human rights reports, and repeated earnestly by presenters keen to prove their virtue from the safety of far-off studios and podcast sets. Gaza, we heard, had become the deadliest place on earth to be a reporter, and the dominant explanation offered was that Israel was deliberately silencing the press by mercilessly targeting those brave people who were simply serving the cause of objective truth.
This week, the IDF published what it calls the Press Files: the names, photographs and roles of 170 of those people killed during the war who were presented to the world as journalists and media workers, and who were also operatives in terrorist organisations. 118 belonged to Hamas’s military wing, 49 to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the rest to smaller factions. Seventeen of them actually crossed into Israel on 7 October 2023. The deaths of more than 40 of them drew formal condemnation of Israel from the UN. Some, according to the IDF, had worked for Reuters, CNN, the BBC, AP, AFP, Le Monde and ABC Australia. But we were never told exactly who they were and who they really worked for.
If this list comes late in the day, that is because it took time to compile. It was built over months, painstakingly, from documents and rosters recovered by troops inside Gaza, many of them produced by the terrorist groups themselves, alongside other intelligence. In many cases the evidence came from Hamas and Islamic Jihad directly, which quietly claimed these men as their own martyrs once the international outrage had already done its work. By then the narrative was set, and the corrections never travelled as far as the accusations. Telling real truth takes time. Spreading propaganda is much quicker.
Anas al-Sharif was Al Jazeera’s best-known face in northern Gaza. When he was killed in August 2025, his death was condemned by the UN, press freedom groups and much of the western commentariat. The IDF has now published documents recovered by its troops in Gaza listing him as a company-level officer in the artillery company of Hamas’s Northern Gaza Brigade, complete with a Hamas military ID number. Hossam Shabat, whose posthumous ‘if you are reading this’ message went viral across the world, appears in recovered Hamas documents as an anti-tank operative in the Beit Hanoun Battalion. Ismail al-Ghoul, another Al Jazeera correspondent mourned as a martyr of the free press, is named in a captured roster of Hamas’s Gaza Brigade. Hamza al-Dahdouh, son of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, whose death prompted public sorrow from America’s secretary of state, is listed in a recovered Islamic Jihad document as an operative in its electronic engineering unit.
Then there is Hassan Aslih, whose work appeared through AP and CNN. Both outlets eventually described him as no more than a freelancer, and cut ties with him in November 2023. A captured roster of Hamas’s Khan Younis Brigade lists him as a military operative, and the IDF says he infiltrated Israel on 7 October. Is it possible he was not merely covering the massacre, but was in fact playing a part in it, with advance notice and preparation? It seems so.
These revelations are largely drawn from the terrorist organisations’ own paperwork, with unit names, battalions and service numbers recovered from the ground and published for anyone who cares to look. Not every profile carries the same weight of evidence, and each case deserves scrutiny. But the pattern is undeniable. None of this means every journalist killed in Gaza was a combatant. Some were not, and each of those deaths deserves honest examination of how it came to happen. But even that does not indicate deliberate targeting of innocent press operatives. Good people also die in wars, sometimes for bad reasons. But the scale of the deception should embarrass every outlet and institution that relayed the figures without asking a single question about who these people were. Even more so for those who published their ‘journalism’ unquestioningly.
This deception has long been part of the Palestinian military strategy. Hamas understands western audiences far better than those audiences understand Hamas. It knows that the word ‘journalist’ carries a moral charge in our culture. We picture a brave reporter in a flak jacket, speaking truth to power, risking everything so the world can see. Blur the line between that image and a man who carries a camera by day and a rifle by night, or someone who uses his video camera to collect intelligence on Israeli military movements as well as to record news footage, and you get a perfect shield. Every strike on him becomes an attack on press freedom, and every question about his affiliations is denounced as a smear. The audience rests on its comfortable assumptions about a free press, and those assumptions do Hamas’s work for it.
But there was never a free press in Gaza. There was a press operating under a totalitarian terrorist regime, and we now have an unusually candid account of what that meant from one of its most celebrated figures. Motaz Azaiza was feted in the West as the ‘voice of Gaza’. Time named him one of the world’s most influential people. He collected the Liberty Prize in Caen during the 80th anniversary commemorations of D-Day, and appeared alongside celebrities, among them the children’s YouTuber Ms Rachel, who introduced him as a friend. Last month he gave a three-hour interview, in Arabic, to the podcast Taqarob. He presumably assumed few in the English-speaking world would ever hear it.
What he said confirms almost everything Israel has been accused of inventing. He described how Gaza’s journalists would lower their cameras whenever a resident cursed Hamas. He said he had never seen a Gaza journalist publish such criticism. He described a WhatsApp group called ‘Smart’, run by a Hamas media official, which he said contained all of Gaza’s journalists. Sure, as a journalist, one might join all sorts of WhatsApp groups organised by terrorists, political actors, or other unsavoury figures with whom one completely disagrees. They are useful places to glean information. I regularly read through dozens of Hamas and other terrorist Telegram and WhatsApp groups every day, as part of my own work. But the members of ‘Smart’ did not behave as neutral recipients of information. They organised campaigns against anyone judged insufficiently loyal, Azaiza included. He described how stories were chosen and framed for maximum impact. Every Christmas, he said, journalists would photograph Santa Claus among the rubble or in refugee camps, because it would ‘attract attention’. He spoke of friends inside Hamas whom he could call to arrange drone flights or access to locations. And he admitted that on 7 October he filmed Israeli hostages being beaten by a crowd and chose not to publish the footage. He also said he got goosebumps that morning listening to Mohammed Deif announce the assault. Once the interview was translated and circulated, Azaiza moved quickly to explain himself on Instagram. Ms Rachel’s video with him has disappeared. The regret, such as it is, seems to concern the audience rather than the substance.
This is the context missing from almost every demand that Israel ‘let the journalists in’. Piers Morgan has made the demand something of a signature. ‘Don’t treat us like idiots,’ he told Israel’s ambassador. On another occasion he dismissed Israel’s stated safety concerns with ‘please, we’re not stupid’. He has put the same question to ambassadors, ministers, rabbis and Israel’s president. The trouble is not that he asks it. It is that he never seems to hear the answer. Each guest explains the operational risks, the danger to reporters, and the ease with which Hamas stages and steers coverage. Then the next guest arrives and the identical question is put again, as if nobody had ever answered it. It looks less like a search for understanding than the recitation of a mantra.
So here, once more, is the answer. We already know what happens when western reporters operate inside territory controlled by a terrorist group. When Israel identified a Beirut hospital it said concealed Hezbollah assets, the BBC’s Orla Guerin toured the building, presumably under Hezbollah’s supervision. She filmed ordinary wards and relayed the hospital’s denials but was not able to see the precise location Israel had identified. So her reporting, however well intentioned, might as well have been a guided tour presented as verification. Gaza under Hamas would offer the same thing on a vaster scale: minders, selective translators, permitted locations, forbidden subjects, and local fixers who, as Azaiza’s account makes plain, answer to the regime in Gaza, not the one in New Broadcasting House.
The more pressing question was never what Israel is ‘hiding’ in Gaza
Then there is the physical danger. Hamas and other Palestinian groups have a long history of using journalists and foreigners as leverage. In 2006, Fox News correspondent Steve Centanni and cameraman Olaf Wiig were kidnapped in Gaza and held for nearly two weeks. They were released only after being forced to make videotaped declarations of conversion to Islam. In 2007, the BBC’s Alan Johnston was held by the Army of Islam for 114 days, at one point paraded on video wearing an explosive belt. On 7 October, foreign nationals, including more than 30 Thai farm workers and a Nepalese agriculture student, were dragged into Gaza as hostages. A western correspondent in a tunnel-riddled city is a hostage waiting to happen. Their movements and broadcasts would reveal military positions in real time. Their presence would become something else for the IDF to protect, and something else for Hamas to exploit. I have written before that restricting access is a difficult strategic choice, less than ideal but explicable by entirely non-sinister considerations. Nothing since has changed that view. If anything, the Press Files and Azaiza’s own words make it stronger.
The more pressing question was never what Israel is ‘hiding’ in Gaza. It is what Hamas has been hiding behind the word ‘journalist’, and why so many in our own media were so incurious about the answer. Many of these men were mourned on air, dozens were cited in UN statements, and all were counted in the tallies that western news sources read out as proof of Israeli criminality. Very few of the outlets that employed them, or the presenters who invoked them, have yet asked how they came to be carrying press cards and Hamas service numbers at the same time. Until they do, their outrage at being kept out of Gaza rings hollow. The lesson of the Press Files is not that Israel should be trusted blindly – it should not. It is that in Gaza, the line between reporter and terrorist was deliberately blurred. Those in the western media who were content neither to question nor to look deeper are hardly likely to be the answer in a place where only scepticism and professional rigour could even start to cut through. And even that is no match for the most ruthless terrorists willing to use weaponise everything at any cost, including the press.
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