People mourn next to the body of freelance Palestinian journalist Mahmoud Wadi, who was killed in an Israeli strike in the southern Gaza Strip on December 2, 2025 [Haseeb Alwazeer/Reuter]
The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate says Israel is using collective punishment to crush reporting of its genocidal war in Gaza.
Originally published in Al Jazeera.
Israel has killed at least 706 family members of Palestinian journalists since the start of its genocidal war in Gaza in October 2023, according to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate.
The syndicate’s Freedoms Committee said in a report released late on Saturday that Israeli forces are systematically targeting the families of journalists as part of what it called a war aimed at silencing Palestinian reporting.
The report said the attacks represent a deliberate strategy rather than deaths as a result of war.
Israeli violence against journalists has “evolved to take on a more dangerous and brutal dimension, represented by targeting the families and relatives of journalists, in a clear attempt to turn journalistic work into an existential burden for which sons, wives, fathers, and mothers pay the price”, the union said.
Muhammad al-Lahham, head of the Freedoms Committee, said the pattern of attacks from 2023 to 2025 exposes Israel’s intent to crush independent reporting in Gaza.
Targeting journalists’ families, he said, “reveals that the Israeli occupation is waging a comprehensive war on the truth, making no distinction between the camera and the child, nor between the pen and the home”.
“The blood of the journalists’ families will remain a living witness to the crime of trying to silence the Palestinian voice,” al-Lahham added.
Witnesses to family killings
The committee said Israeli forces killed 436 relatives of journalists in 2023, 203 in 2024 and at least 67 this year. The deaths continued even after many families were forcibly displaced and sought shelter in tents and makeshift camps, it said.
The syndicate cited a recent case near Khan Younis, where the bodies of journalist Hiba al-Abadla, her mother and about 15 members of the al-Astal family were recovered nearly two years after Israeli aircraft bombed their home west of the city.
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“Hundreds of children, women and the elderly were killed because of a family member’s professional connection to journalism, in flagrant violation of all humanitarian and legal norms,” the committee said.
According to the findings, Israeli attacks have repeatedly struck journalists’ homes, places of displacement and areas known to house media workers and their relatives. In some cases, entire families have been wiped out, leaving journalists alive to bear witness to their annihilation.
The committee described this as a “qualitative shift” in Israel’s behaviour, moving from individual targeting to collective punishment. By turning families into targets, it said, Israel aims to intimidate society itself and “dry up the environment that nurtures the media”.
(Al Jazeera)
Almost 300 journalists killed
Beyond the death toll, the syndicate warned of severe psychological harm. Journalists who survived after losing children, partners or parents now face trauma, family breakdowns and crushing guilt, and many have been forced to flee or suspend their work under the weight of Israel’s continuing violence.
Over the past year, Israel killed several journalists in Gaza in targeted assassinations – most notably Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif – falsely claiming that they are members of Hamas.
They are among nearly 300 journalists and media workers killed in Gaza during the war over 26 months – an average of about 12 journalists a month – according to Shireen.ps, a monitoring website named after Al Jazeera’s veteran correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh. who was killed in the occupied West Bank in 2022.
Media freedom groups have condemned the Israeli attacks on journalists, but the killings have proceeded with impunity. Israel has never arrested or charged any of its soldiers for killing journalists.
While the targeting of the news media has intensified during the war in Gaza, Israel has killed dozens of Arab journalists over the past two decades. In December, a report by Reporters Without Borders found that Israel killed more journalists in 2025 than any other country.
Elis Gjevori is a journalist based in Istanbul. He focuses on the Balkans, Turkey and the Middle East.
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“The reason for these military operations was, and still is, to tell the Israeli occupation that we defy it and are willing to resist and go anywhere to express our defiance.”
