Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. Following Hamas's October 7th attack, American TV networks rushed their star anchors and correspondence to Israel to report on the aftermath.

Micah Loewinger: You can see that we're approaching the gate now to the kibbutz. What's been left behind here is simply horrifying. Hosts like Lester Holt, Nora O'Donnell, and Anderson Cooper presented the nightly news from Israeli balconies where on occasion, action came to them.

Anderson Cooper: That sounded like Iron Dome intercept. That was a rather large explosion. That is something we have not heard very much here in Tel Aviv.

Micah Loewinger: Others went searching for danger like CNN's Clarissa Ward, who delivered a standup while lying down in a ditch near Gaza.

Clarissa Ward: Hi, John. Forgive me, I have a slightly inelegant position but we have just had a massive barrage of rockets coming in here, not too far from us so we have had to take shelter here.

Micah Loewinger: When it comes to documenting the death and destruction caused by Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza, the world is relying on journalists who live there.

Adnan El-Bursh: This is my local hospital. Inside are my friends, my neighbors. This is my community. Today has been one of the most difficult days in my career.

Micah Loewinger: Adnan El-Bursh, a BBC Arabic journalist filed this report after visiting the Shifa Hospital last Friday.

Adnan El-Bursh: Among the dead and wounded, my cameraman, Mahmud has seen his friend Malik. Malik has managed to survive but his family have not.

Sherif Mansour: Well, journalism and Gaza are mostly local journalists.

Micah Loewinger: Sherif Mansour is the Middle East and North Africa program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Sherif Mansour: There hasn't been a lot of international journalists inside Gaza for a while. There is a dwindling number because of the high risk and the calculation made covering that conflict over the years. What we saw is that the risks have gone exponential for people who are in Gaza. Many of them lost their media facilities. Dozens of them who were in high towers bombed in the airstrikes and many of them lost their homes and airstrikes and had to flee south.

Micah Loewinger: But we need journalists in Northern Gaza to bear witness to independently verify accounts. The ones who've remained in Northern Gaza, what working conditions are they operating under?

Sherif Mansour: There is an electricity, sometimes there is an internet. There are a lot of them who are continue to act as eyewitness in many ways by sending photos and video live. There are some who said publicly, there is nowhere to be safe to do this job and said they will stop covering because they would rather be with their families if they die.

Anas Baba: I was forced to leave my job, leave my my work to go to my family in order to evacuate them.

Micah Loewinger: This is a dispatch from Anas Baba, a writer and producer based in Gaza. He explained to NPR last week how he struggled to balance reporting and his family's safety.

Anas Baba: I started just to think where am I going to take them? Where am I going to hide them? Is there any safe place in Gaza?

Mohammed Mhawish: Even if I were to be paid for that, I cannot even go to down the streets and have my money.

Micah Loewinger: Mohammed R Mhawish is another Gazan resident and journalist speaking here on Brian Stelter podcast.

Mohammed R Mhawish: Knowing that I can be a target in any moment, it's just very horrific, but we still continue reporting and running from one area to another, just to be able to speak the voice of the people who are being killed.

Micah Loewinger: Have there been any reporters who you think that are doing a particularly standout job at this moment?

Sherif Mansour: There was a CNN local journalist who took his cell phone and a car and went around to see and tell people why exactly there is not a place where he can be safe.

Micah Loewinger: I saw this. This was a reporter on Christiane Amanpour show, driving around with his family. It was absolutely horrifying to see the expression of his children in the backseat as he was playing the role of a father and a reporter and a member of his community all at once.

Sherif Mansour: Those journalists are choosing to continue to do the best they can and otherwise, we end up with misinformation and disinformation that fuels the conflict.

Micah Loewinger: Then there's the crop of young Palestinian social media journalists unaffiliated with traditional newsrooms.

Plestia Alaqad: Right now, I'm with Dr. Ghassan. He was there, he witnessed everything that happened.

Dr Ghassan: The massacre that ensued, there were scenes of absolute carnage. There were scene of absolute carnage, there were there were amputated limbs and flesh

Micah Loewinger: We're listening to a report by Plestia Alaqad who shares her reporting with just under 1 million followers on Instagram. She and other Palestinian journalists have faced questions of credibility. Thanassis Cambanis, the director of the Foreign Policy Think Tank Century International, told the Washington Post this week that, "There is a systemic effort to discredit the very idea that there is such a thing as an independent Palestinian journalist."

Sherif Mansour: If you talk about the broader context of the conflict-

Micah Loewinger: Sherif Mansour.

Sherif Mansour: -there are a lot of journalists who are trying to cover this also in the West Bank and in Israel. We have seen unprecedented rise in assaults that we haven't seen in the past. We have documented, and I've seen a lot of reporters being assaulted verbally and physically, some of them were detained and hold on a gunpoint like a BBC journalist in the West Bank. Others like the Al-Araby TV reporting that while they are live on air, Israeli police came to threaten them and asked them to stop reporting.

Speaker 20: [Foreign language]

Micah Loewinger: Sherif Mansour and his colleagues at the Committee to Protect Journalists have observed a sharp rise in cases of violence against news professionals throughout the region. At time of recording, CPJ has counted at least 21 journalists killed since October 7th.

Sherif Mansour: Over the course of now, close to two weeks, we have seen more journalists killed than a number we've documented over the past war from 2001 until October 6.

Micah Loewinger: Can you tell me about some of the journalists who've been killed so far?

Sherif Mansour: The first few were killed by Hamas fighters in the southern parts of Israel, where they captured a few journalists, but also killed three journalists at the earliest hours. The first few killed inside Gaza were Palestinian journalists with Israeli army bullets. Since then, mostly they were journalists who were killed in Israeli army airstrikes. One were killed on Israeli Lebanese border, which makes the total the majority Palestinian.

Micah Loewinger: You mentioned that there were three Israeli journalists killed by Hamas on October 7th. One was a former AP video journalist, Yaniv Zohar who was killed at his home and then there were two young journalists, one 22 and one 25, who were murdered at the Supernova Music Festival. Do we know if any of these journalists were working at the time they were killed, or were they just caught in the attack?

Sherif Mansour: We have talked to a few of the editors who were working with them, and one of them have said that, "Yes, it was Saturday holiday," but he heard that there were a text and he actually went out of his house in order to work undocumented. When he came to his house, he found that Hamas fighters already zoning in on his home. We are trying to be inclusive in terms of who we can consider a journalist working at the time. We are still investigating the link in some of the cases, but I think we wanted to highlight the casualties daily to expose where the risks are for journalists who continue to be there or are going to try and cover the conflict right now.

Micah Loewinger: Shireen Abu Akleh, a longtime American-Palestinian reporter working with Al Jazeera, was killed on May 11th, 2022 in the West Bank.

Speaker 21: The Israeli military initially said that she was killed by Palestinian gunman, and it was only months and months later that they admitted that it was likely an Israeli soldier who fired the fatal shot.

Micah Loewinger: Your organization, the Committee to Protect Journalists, named her as an example of a pattern that you have observed. Can you tell us a little bit about what your report found?

Sherif Mansour: Yes. Our report, we called it Deadly Pattern, how basically no one was held accountable in the killing of 20 journalists since 2001 by the IDF. The majority of those journalists, 18, were Palestinian journalists, 13 of them were killed in Gaza, but there were 2 other journalists, 1 Italian and 1 British, and no justice has happened. No one was held responsible, accountable. No one was charged, no criminal investigation was open, even not just for Shireen Abu Akleh.

Micah Loewinger: Historically, have we seen a comparable pattern of Hamas and other Islamist groups in the region targeting journalists?

Sherif Mansour: Well, one of the findings we've had in our report in May that there was no Israeli journalists killed in Israel's internationally recognized border because for 15 years or so, no Israeli journalist access to international journalists to Gaza has been cut. We have recorded one case in which an Israeli journalist in 1999 was killed while accompanied by an IDF operation in Lebanon, but I think the three journalists we have seen killed on October 7th are the first Israeli journalists that were killed by Hamas.

Otherwise, there are a few journalists that we have recorded since 2001 in the second and further where it seems the person behind it were affiliated with Palestinian Authority fractions, but it's not the same pattern. We are expecting from Israel as a state and as a democracy to hold its soldiers accountable.

Micah Loewinger: Even Israeli journalists are struggling to get accountability from their government.

Noga Tarnopolsky: Journalists, like many Israelis, have indulged Benjamin Netanyahu for many, many years.

Micah Loewinger: This is Israeli reporter, Noga Tarnopolsky, who we heard from earlier in the show.

Noga Tarnopolsky: He is a guy who's very loose with the truth. He, in fact, Netanyahu has called Israeli Journalists, the enemy of the state and the Israeli media basically indulged him. We're like, "Well, Bibi's a bad boy." Now, it really is erupting. The fact that no Israeli reporter in 12 days of war has been able to ask one question to the Prime Minister is enraging, and that is being expressed loud and clear on radio and newspapers, on TV.

Micah Loewinger: On Wednesday, Israel approved a new regulation that could allow the government to arrest citizens and shut down news outlets that harm national morale or serve as a basis for "enemy propaganda." CPJ believes this new authority could be used to target Al Jazeera, the news organization from Qatar.

Sherif Mansour: Al Jazeera is one of very few Arab satellite station who have physical presence in both Israel and Gaza right now. In some ways, they were one of the earliest channels to host Israeli guests on their screens, for example, and talk to them. We have also earlier in this conflict, two Al Jazeera journalists injured in the confrontation with Lebanon.

Speaker 22: Reuters journalists Issam Abdullah was filming a live shot while in southern Lebanon when Israel fired artillery into the area where he was gathered with several other journalists. The journalists were wearing jackets clearly labeled press at the time of the attack.

Sherif Mansour: One of them also injured when their office was distracted by an airstrike in Gaza. They have a presence covering this conflict and for Arab audience for decades now. It's also not the first time the Israeli government have tried to use national security measures in order to shut down Al Jazeera before. They have done it in 2017 when they were covering protests in Israel and the West Bank. You can see even Israeli journalists who have wrote for or supported Palestinian causes being assaulted in Israel. I think if you count the detentions in the West Bank, we see a hostile environment for independent critical reporting, and this is a worrisome sign in times of war.

Micah Loewinger: Can I ask you kind of a personal question?

Sherif Mansour: Of course.

Micah Loewinger: How do you do this work? How do you just log on every day?

Sherif Mansour: It's tough. We're doing our best, but of course, it's hard. It has a heartbreaking toll on all of us. We cannot look away. We're trying to do what we do by just putting our head down and focusing on documentation. That is the best we can do to show what's happening every day.

Micah Loewinger: Sherif, thank you very much.

Sherif Mansour: Thank you, Micah, for having me. Sherif Mansour is the Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, a chorus of voices called the attack on October 7th, Israel's 9/11. What does that mean for what comes next? This is On The Media