Israel tops the list of journalists’ killers in 2025

The committee indicated in the report issued today, Wednesday, that the Zionist regime’s occupation authorities bear responsibility for more than two thirds of the total number, a new indicator of the escalation in targeting the press, particularly in Palestine.

According to the report, this record figure comes for the 2nd consecutive year, amid a shift that has turned journalists into direct targets in armed conflicts, with the Zionist regime’s occupation authorities registering a number of deliberate martyring of journalists that exceeds what any other governmental military force has ever committed, according to the committee’s characterization.

The committee’s chief executive, Jodie Ginsberg, said that journalists are being martyred “in unprecedented numbers at a time when access to information has become more important than ever”, considering that attacks on the media are an indicator of broader violations of freedoms, and that impunity exacerbates the circle of danger that affects everyone when journalists are killed for doing their work.

This report confirms what human rights reports have consistently documented in recent years, that the targeting of Palestinian journalists does not occur in the context of “field errors”, but within a systematic conduct that views Palestinian media as part of the “enemy”, and treats the journalist as a witness whose voice must be silenced, not as a civilian protected under international law.

The Committee to Protect Journalists indicated that more than three quarters of the killings in 2025 occurred in contexts of Israeli aggression.

Despite a slight increase in the number of killed journalists in Ukraine and Sudan compared with the previous year, these figures remain very limited when measured against the Palestinian case, where the Israeli occupation authorities emerged as a stark exception in terms of the scale and intensity of targeting.

Among the most dangerous findings documented by the report is the notable rise in the use of drones to kill journalists, as the committee recorded 39 killings by this means during the year, 28 of them directly attributed to the occupation army in the Gaza Strip, a development that reflects a shift from a general risk environment to precise and intentional killing.

This finding brings the discussion back to the core of Israeli policy toward Palestinian media, whether through direct killing, banning media platforms, or criminalizing journalistic work and linking it to “terrorism”, as in the recent decision to ban the work of Palestinian media platforms in Jerusalem, in an attempt to impose a single narrative and suppress any independent documentation of crimes and violations, especially in Jerusalem and Gaza.

At the global level, the committee attributed the rise in the number of killed journalists to a culture of impunity, noting that transparent investigations were conducted in only a very limited number of the 47 cases of deliberate killing it documented in 2025, the highest figure in the past 10 years, without holding any responsible party accountable.

The committee warned that the continued failure of governments to protect journalists or pursue their killers opens the door to more crimes, even in countries not experiencing open wars, such as Mexico, India, and the Philippines, calling for a radical reform of investigation mechanisms, including the establishment of an independent international investigative team and the imposition of targeted sanctions on those responsible for killing journalists.

In the Palestinian case, these calls do not appear separate from a broader context in which the genocide of Palestinians intersects with the war on their narrative, where the Palestinian journalist becomes a double target, killed physically, and their testimony targeted as a threat to the occupation’s official narrative.