By David Israel • October 1, 2026
Jerusalem, 1 October, 2026 (TPS-IL) — The Israeli military said Thursday that 170 Palestinians killed during the Gaza war and identified in international reporting as journalists or media workers were in fact operatives of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other armed factions.
The IDF published a dedicated website listing the names, photographs, alleged organizational affiliations and roles of each individual, along with what it described as verified evidence, including documents and visual material produced by the groups themselves, some recovered in Gaza.
According to the IDF’s breakdown, 118 of the 170 were affiliated with Hamas’s military wing, 49 with Islamic Jihad, and the rest with smaller factions including the Mujahideen Brigades and the Popular Resistance Committees. The military said 17 of those listed took part in the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, and that strikes killing more than 40 of them drew UN condemnation at the time. Some of the names, the IDF said, had worked for or been credited to major international outlets, including Reuters, CNN, ABC Australia, the BBC, AFP, AP and Le Monde.
The military argued the claims it faced of deliberately targeting journalists shifted in recent months as Hamas and Islamic Jihad themselves began publicly honoring some of the dead as fallen fighters, acknowledgments made, the IDF said, only after the narrative of deliberate press-targeting had already taken hold internationally. It called this a pattern it says demonstrates it has not systematically attacked journalists, but rather terrorists who in some cases also held media credentials or roles.
The claim lands in the middle of a long-running and highly contested dispute. The Committee to Protect Journalists, which has tracked the deaths of media workers in Gaza throughout the war, has for years rejected Israeli military accusations of this kind as largely unsubstantiated, and outlets including Al Jazeera have called similar past claims “baseless” and “fabricated.” At the same time, CPJ and the International Federation of Journalists have each quietly removed several names from their own casualty lists in recent months after terrorist groups’ own obituaries or other evidence confirmed combat roles, a shift that press-freedom researchers and outlets critical of CPJ, such as the Washington Free Beacon and HonestReporting, have pointed to as validating at least some of Israel’s earlier claims. CPJ has said it continues to review its database but maintains that evidence it previously deemed insufficient for individual cases was correctly treated with caution.
More than 200 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since the war began, according to CPJ’s tally, the deadliest conflict for journalists the organization has recorded. The IDF has consistently said it does not deliberately target journalists as such, while press-freedom groups have documented a pattern, in their view, of insufficiently substantiated claims following strikes that killed media workers.
The IDF’s new website represents its most extensive public accounting to date of individuals it says were wrongly identified as press members, but the underlying claims, like earlier, smaller batches of similar allegations, have not been independently verified by outside investigators, and media organizations named in the report have not yet issued detailed responses to the specific new list.
