By David Robie on World Press Freedom Day 2025
I ask you now: Do not stop speaking about Gaza.
Do not let the world look away.
Keep fighting, keep telling our stories – until Palestine is free.
These are not my words, although I believe and support them absolutely. They are the words of Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat in his final message left behind when he was killed by an Israeli air strike on March 24.
His message is a poignant one today, especially today which is May 3 — World Press Freedom Day.
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It is a message that I have been carrying in my heart since even earlier, since the assassination of another Palestinian journalist, the adored Shireen Abu Akleh, who was murdered by Israeli sharpshooters six days after Media Freedom Day in 2022 while reporting in Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.
It was her blatant killing in plain view on live video with impunity that signalled how the rogue state Israel was flaunting all international laws and accountability with contempt. And it was a hint of how it would it conduct itself in this disaster.
According to the United Nations Human Rights Office in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OHCHR), since October 2023, Israeli occupation forces have killed 211 Palestinian journalists, including 28 women reporters reporting on Gaza. At least 47 journalists have been killed while on duty, and at least 49 media people are languishing in Israeli detention or hidden in prisons, mostly without charge.
Why? To silence the journalists.
To silence their storytelling, as Hossam Shabat indicated in his final message.
And for more than 18 months Israel has refused access to Gaza by international journalists.
Why? To kill the truth. To stop the world’s media from exposing the Israeli lies and their controlled narrative.
But it hasn’t worked. The Zionists are losing control of the narrative — and they know it. As Amnesty International called it this week, the mass atrocity is a “livestreamed genocide” thanks due to the courage and dedication of the Gazan reporters and citizen journalists.
A year ago — on this very day — the Gazan journalists were honoured with the UNESCO Guillermo Cano Prize in Santiago, Chile, in recognition of their “unique suffering and fearless reporting”.
Who would have thought this grotesque war, this obscene war would still be causing such terrible suffering more than year later?
And we can’t even really call it a war at all because it is continuous massacres carried out by one of the most advanced and powerful military machines in the world, supplied and aided by the United States, on one side, with a relatively tiny resistance force armed with small arms on the other.
Gaza is a “killing field – and civilians are in an endless death loop”, as the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, said the other day. Horrendous!
And since the Cano award for the Gazan journalists, a further 111 media workers have been killed by Israel.
In the latest survey by Reporters Without Borders 2025 World Press Freedom Index released yesterday, global zones have been flagged where press freedom is “entirely absent and practising journalism is particularly dangerous”.
“This is the case in Palestine, where the Israeli army has been annihilating journalism for more than 18 months, killing more than 200 media professionals — including at least 43 murdered while working — and imposing a blackout on the besieged strip.”
Just a couple of weeks ago, a group of French and international journalists staged a “die-in” in Paris. They lay down on the steps of the Opera-Bastille as a street theatre representation of the unprecedented scale of the killing of journalists.
“Journalists are not targets.” @amnesty @AmnestyNZ #JournalismIsNotACrime https://t.co/gYvYE1gf21
— David Robie (@DavidRobie) May 3, 2025
It was organised by Reporters Without Borders, and secretary-general Thibaut Bruttin said:
“The difficulty of making the cause of Palestinian journalists heard is proof that the insidious poison of the Israel armed forces has sometimes even penetrated our own narrative.
“I have never seen a war in which, when a journalist is killed, you are told that they were really a terrorist.”
Bruttin also reflected: “I think it must be said that solidarity is a form of strength. It is a source of strength, I hope, for Palestinian journalists to whom we send these images and to whom we express our solidarity through words and action.
“And I also think that is an appeal to the media profession, and it’s true that this demonstration is happening late, perhaps too late. It must be recognised.
“In the 10 years that I have been working at Reporters Without Borders, this is the first time that I have been asked if the journalist was really a journalist when they were killed. This had never happened. Never.
“And I think we must salute all those who have been marching and all those professionals who have come and who say: ‘Yes, we must continue to report what is happening but we must also protest and do more. Journalists are being targeted. And they are also being defamed after their deaths.'”
In January 2024, I wrote an article for Declassified Australia headlined: “Silencing the messenger: Israel kills journalists, while the West merely censors them.”
I declared then that reporting Israel’s war on Gaza had become the greatest credibility challenge for journalists and media of our times.
“Covering the conflict has opened divisions among media groups about fairness and balance that have become the most bitter since the climate change and covid pandemic debates when media ‘deniers’ and ‘bothsideism’ threatened to undermine the science.”
It shocks me that so many journalists have remained silent. They should also be on the streets like us and reporting the truth. To me, the deafening silence is a betrayal of the 50 years of truth to power journalism that I have grown up with.
Silence is complicity.
Finally, I would like to quote from PSNA’s co-chair John Minto in the letter that we are taking today to Television New Zealand appealing for an independent review of 1News reporting on Palestine/Israel.
Minto says: “Over the past 18 months of industrial scale killing of Palestinians by the Israeli military in Gaza we have been regularly appalled at the blatantly-biased reporting on the Middle East by Television New Zealand.
“TVNZ’s reporting has been relentlessly and virulently pro-Israel . . .
“The damage to human rights, justice and freedom in the Middle East by Western media such as TVNZ is incalculable.”
I endorse and support these comments and call a halt to Israel deliberately targeting of Palestinian journalists. Let the truth be told, as Hossam told us, over and over again and prevent this blatant Western attempt to “normalise” genocide.
Dr David Robie is editor of Asia Pacific Report and convenor of Pacific Media Watch. He gave this address at the World Press Freedom Day rally in “Palestine Corner” in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland’s Te Komititanga Square on 3 May 2025.
