New evidence suggests some ‘journalists’ and ‘medics’ were also Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives.

For almost three years, one of the most emotionally powerful stories to emerge from Gaza has been the number of journalists, doctors, nurses and paramedics killed during Israel’s war against Hamas; writes Gary Cartwright.

The numbers have been repeated so often that they have acquired an authority of their own. They appear in headlines, campaign literature, parliamentary debates and statements from international organisations. The death of a journalist becomes evidence of an assault on press freedom; the death of a medic becomes evidence of an assault on healthcare.

Sometimes that conclusion is entirely justified, however there is now an awkward complication which Western media organisations should have confronted much earlier: some of the people presented to the world as civilian journalists and healthcare workers were, according to the organisations themselves, also members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

That is not an Israeli allegation alone. In June, the Committee to Protect Journalists announced that it was reviewing its Gaza casualty database after Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad published obituaries identifying people previously recorded as journalists as combatants. CPJ subsequently removed individuals from its database where its own research indicated that they had participated in fighting.

More recently, an investigation by The Times of Israel examined Hamas and PIJ announcements and identified at least 18 people who had been described as doctors, nurses, paramedics or other healthcare employees and were subsequently identified by the organisations as members or commanders.

Some of the examples are remarkably difficult to dismiss as mere Israeli propaganda. One individual was publicly identified as a nurse but subsequently appeared in an Islamic Jihad announcement as a commander. Another was described as a healthcare worker while Islamic Jihad identified him as belonging to one of its military units. There are cases in which photographs show the same individual first in medical clothing and later in the uniform of a militant organisation.

The implications are profound. Western journalism has understandably treated journalists and medical personnel as especially vulnerable civilians. International humanitarian law gives both professions important protections. But those protections are not magic shields.

A journalist who directly participates in hostilities cannot claim immunity simply because he also carries a press card. Nor can a doctor who doubles as an armed commander become permanently immune from attack merely because he spends part of his working week in a hospital.

Whilst that distinction is fundamental, there has been remarkably little appetite in parts of the Western media to examine it.

The problem is not that journalists reported the deaths of Palestinian reporters. They absolutely should have done so. The problem is that casualty statistics were frequently treated as self-authenticating. Someone was described as a journalist because Palestinian sources said he was a journalist. Someone was described as a medical worker because a hospital, ministry or professional organisation said he was one.

The possibility that these categories might overlap with membership of Hamas or PIJ was too often relegated to the status of an Israeli talking point. This constitutes a serious error.

It is particularly revealing that Hamas and PIJ have now begun publishing names of their own dead fighters. Those obituaries provide information which was largely unavailable during the war. In several cases, they have effectively contradicted the original classification of the dead by international media and monitoring organisations.

The response should not be to conclude that every dead Palestinian journalist was a terrorist, or that every Palestinian doctor was secretly a militant. That would be very wrong. The proper conclusion is that every casualty database requires scrutiny.

There is another uncomfortable possibility that Western commentators have been reluctant to contemplate: Hamas and PIJ may have understood perfectly well the extraordinary political and emotional power of civilian status in the Western information environment.

A dead journalist generates headlines, as does a dead doctor. A dead paramedic produces photographs of ambulances, uniforms and bloodied medical equipment. A dead Hamas fighter produces none of these things.

If militant organisations deliberately blurred those categories, they were exploiting precisely the protections that democratic societies have painstakingly established for civilians and humanitarian workers, and that would be a particularly cynical form of information warfare.

But there is an equally important warning for Israel. The discovery of genuine Hamas or PIJ members among journalists and medical personnel does not give the Israeli military a licence to regard every journalist, doctor or paramedic as a terrorist. Nor does it eliminate Israel’s obligation to establish, before an attack where feasible, that a legitimate military target actually exists.

Indeed, recent events demonstrate why that distinction matters. An investigation published this week into the 2024 killing of World Central Kitchen workers has raised serious questions about Israeli targeting practices and the use of guilt by association.

Similarly, the Israeli military has recently opened criminal investigations into the deaths of five-year-old Hind Rajab and 15 Palestinian paramedics, after previously denying or disputing aspects of what happened.

So there are two truths which ought to be capable of existing simultaneously. Hamas and PIJ may have exploited civilian professions for military and propaganda purposes, and Israel can still be responsible for unlawful or reckless attacks against genuine civilians.

The refusal to acknowledge the first truth because it complicates the second is propaganda. The refusal to acknowledge the second because it complicates the first is propaganda too. What is most troubling is the intellectual laziness of the Western debate.

For years, journalists and politicians have demanded that Israel substantiate allegations about Hamas operating from civilian infrastructure. That demand is legitimate, but the same standard should now be applied in the opposite direction.

When an individual appears in hospital photographs wearing medical clothing and subsequently appears in militant imagery carrying a weapon, journalists should investigate, and when the evidence does not stand up, that should be reported too.

That is what journalism is supposed to mean.

The greatest danger is not discovering that Hamas sometimes lied about its dead, it is in discovering that Western media organisations were so invested in a particular leftist narrative that they stopped asking whether it was true.

Gaza has produced enough suffering without adding another casualty to the list: the credibility of journalism itself.

This article was originally published by EU Today.  https://eutoday.net/gaza-casualty-figures/

Gary Cartwright is the publisher and editor of EU Today.