SCOOP: Committee to Protect Journalists undercounts journalists "murdered" by Israel, is it by design?
CPJ classified 85% of journalists killed by Israel as “dangerous assignment” deaths, including scores killed in their homes alongside their families, as if by accident. Why?
Tal al-Hawa, Gaza, Palestine—Shrouq Al Aila and Roshdi Sarraj, two married Palestinian journalists, and their infant daughter sat down to breakfast. An hour late, Sarraj was trying to hurry for his assignment, filming medics transferring the injured to hospitals, but had insisted on having breakfast with his family. “Maybe because he felt that this is the last meal together, the last family gathering,” said Al Aila.
In an instant, one explosion and then another rocked their home, injuring Al Aila and her child. Sarraj wouldn’t make it.
On Oct. 22, 2023, Sarraj was the 23rd journalist killed in the first two weeks of Israel’s genocidal siege. Israel killed more than one journalist a day, on average, for the last few months of 2023—killing nearly eight percent of all journalists in Gaza by late-December.
“They targeted us before going to this job, to this assignment,” said Al Aila. Two rockets and near-certain death. “I don’t know how to tell you, but there is no escaping this attack.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), renowned in the West for its press freedom advocacy, classified his ‘type of death,’ confusingly, as “dangerous assignment.” But he was eating breakfast at home, not out on assignment. After two years of tracking Israel’s journalist killings, this was CPJ’s rule, not the exception: 85-88% of journalists killed in Gaza are classified as “dangerous assignment” deaths1.
This includes over 60 journalists killed in their homes alongside their families. And despite Israel’s killing of hundreds of journalists, CPJ has only classified 21 journalist deaths as “murder,” or targeted killings.
“They differentiate between the types of killing and they refuse to call it murder when Israel targets a journalist in their home, which is how most of the journalists were targeted in Gaza,” said ZO (pseudonym for Zionist Observer), founder of Databases for Palestine, which also tracks journalist killings by Israel.
Palestinian journalists and journalist advocates have raised frustration and alarm over CPJ’s methods for collecting and classifying data on journalists killed by Israel, and discounting their desperate assertions that the Zionist regime is deliberately killing hundreds of their colleagues.
“For at least the first year and a half of the genocide, for CPJ to consider a journalist to be murdered, Israel has to come out and smear them, and say they targeted them for this reason or in that context,” said Anan Quzmar, a former volunteer with Palestine Journalist Syndicate (PJS), a trade union based in Gaza that was in frequent contact with CPJ. “In any other case, CPJ chooses to ignore the reports of their journalist colleagues in Gaza.”
The American and European media establishment has placed the Committee on a pedestal as the final word on press freedom worldwide. Yet, CPJ’s “meticulous research” and “reliable data” have helped minimize the full scope of Israel’s campaign to kill Palestinian journalists rather than expose it.
Recently, No Frontiers broke revelatory data from Databases for Palestine (D4P): Out of 312 journalists and media workers killed by Israel in Gaza, 154 journalists were killed at home, making up 49.4% or roughly half. Findings from the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate (PJS) and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) support this, which found evidence of Israel’s “systematic pattern” of targeting journalists at home. D4P says this pattern of targeting by mostly aerial bombings suggests a strong possible link to Israel’s infamous AI-assisted military targeting systems.
In contrast, a program coordinator at the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) found CPJ’s in-house devised ‘type of death’ classifications “aren’t very useful.” And as Palestinian journalists are painfully aware, Israel’s journalist targeting strategy goes far beyond bombing those they smear. Databases for Palestine, one of CPJ’s sharpest critics, calls their efforts a “cover-up.”
Words, terms, and contextual framing matter deeply in press coverage, especially when newsroom giants like The New York Times favor Israeli narratives and explicitly suppress words like “Palestine,” “refugee camp,” “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and more in their reporting. Data is no different.
Data tells a story, and CPJ’s data on Israel’s killing of journalists in Gaza is continuously distributed worldwide, informing world leaders and international organizations, used in national and international courts by human rights advocates, and echoed across all major Western news outlets, those who ‘manufactured consent’2 for Israel’s genocide: BBC, CNN, The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and beyond.
For days and years to come, the Committee’s data will help shape the historical narrative of Israel’s “mediacide,” which may herald the genocide as predominantly a “dangerous assignment” for the brave journalists killed in the line of duty. But so far, CPJ hasn’t even mentioned “genocide” once on its website in relation to Israel’s endless siege, nor as a condition Palestinian reporters worked under for two years.
Madness to their method?
In December 2024, for her brave reporting and sacrifice during Israel’s first year of genocide, the Committee to Protect Journalists bestowed Shrouq Al Aila with the International Press Freedom Award at their annual award ceremony in New York City, which she could not attend.
Al Aila is appreciative of CPJ, their kind recognition of her work, professionalism in contacting her about Roshdi Sarraj’s killing, how they continued to check in on her and her daughter, their tireless work documenting journalist deaths, and their awareness campaign for Palestinian journalists. She only wished her husband were still there to share in her award.
“There’s always a place to grieve during the beautiful occasions,” Al Aila told No Frontiers. “That is because of the missing ones, so I was so devastated by not having him by my side and, you know, celebrating me.”
At first, Al Aila felt CPJ’s “dangerous assignment” classification was reasonable. Sarraj was preparing to leave after breakfast for a treacherous assignment, filming paramedics. However, CPJ’s “dangerous assignment” rules out an intended journalist killing by Israel, which Al Aila is adamant that she and Sarraj were deliberately targeted as journalists while at home.
“Having my husband killed while at his home or on assignment, it is still murder, because according to GPS, mobiles, etc., [Israel] can easily recognize where this person is,” said Al Aila. “My husband was not killed by mistake.”
“It doesn’t make sense, like, he was preparing to go on assignment, and in the previous days, he was on assignment every day,” said Al Aila. “But what happened that day is that he insisted on getting breakfast.” She wondered about his insistence on gathering everyone to eat instead of leaving for work. “He tried as much as he could to give time for our daughter, to give time for me, and also to have [breakfast together].”
CPJ knows Sarraj was eating breakfast at home and not out on assignment, but if they agreed that Israel targeted Al Aila and Sarraj, they would have classified his death as “murder.” A vast majority of journalist deaths somehow don’t meet their in-house devised standard for targeted killing:
Dangerous assignment: “deaths while covering a demonstration, riot, clashes between rival groups, mob situations; this includes assignments which are not expected to entail physical risk but turn violent unexpectedly.”
Since Oct. 7, CPJ claims at least 85% of journalists killed by Israel in Gaza died by “dangerous assignment.” By their count, CPJ declares 21 journalists in Gaza were deliberately targeted for murder, 158 killed by “dangerous assignment,” and 16 media workers’ deaths are puzzlingly unclassified.
“So, all organizations have different ways of calculating these kinds of things,” said Jodie Ginsburg, CEO of CPJ, to Newzroom Afrika in mid-August, explaining they “do our own research in-house.”
Of the 21 journalists CPJ counted as murdered, all of whom were smeared as terrorists in official Israeli statements, admitting to their targeting, and forcing a response from Western press freedom groups. But what about the hundreds of journalists killed by Israel who weren’t publicly smeared? Palestinian journalists, Gaza-based human rights groups, and Databases for Palestine have noticed a damning pattern of targeting that CPJ overlooks. By claiming 85% or more journalists died under faultless and non-targeted circumstances, CPJ vastly minimizes the true extent of Israel’s journalist assassination campaign and downplays its role in hundreds of Palestinian journalist murders.
After the deadliest period of Israel’s genocide for journalists, CPJ boasted about its data collection in a 2023 tax filing, writing, “CPJ’s meticulous research has allowed the organization to emerge as a leading authority on the plight of journalists attacked or jailed during the Israel-Gaza war.”
“Now the situation is Gaza is far more complicated, and because of the intensity of the attacks and the rapid killings of journalists, you just find yourself at several points that you are really unable to collect enough data and enough information,” said Monir Zaarour, MENA programs director for the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), a global trade union that keeps in close contact with its local Gaza-affilliate, the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate (PJS), and also closely tracks journalist killings.
Zaarour has sympathy for organizations, like CPJ, investigating journalist deaths because of the sheer enormity of Israel’s killings, especially if killings have to fit within these narrowly defined classifications as CPJ created. In these circumstances, these categories could be somewhat impractical, especially if they lack sufficient information. The situation in Gaza, he says, probably forced IFJ “to relax our methodology of how we collect and register data.”
However, Zaarour is firm on this fact: “We know Israel targeted journalists at their homes and killed them with their families, there’s no doubt about that. We know these killings were targeted killings.”
“I assume some organization didn’t want to say this because they say, ‘We don’t have enough information to substantiate if we want to make this claim,’ said Zaarour. “Now, we don’t have the information ourselves. We don’t have documents from the Israeli army saying, ‘Yeah, go and kill them,’ but we know this is happening and it’s enough from our point [of view].”
In a January 2024 interview with David Remnick, editor-in-chief of The New Yorker and CPJ board member, CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg acknowledged the killing of journalists in their homes and emphasized the lack of evidence for their targeting by Israel.
“There have been cases where journalists have also been killed in their homes, or their homes have been attacked after they’ve received warnings to stop reporting or to leave,” said Ginsberg. “Those are the cases where it’s still unclear whether they were deliberately targeted for being journalists or they happen to be in a place that was under bombardment. Those are things that we are looking into to try to understand.”
To compensate for the lack of certainty on individual cases, says Anan Quzmar, it’s necessary to draw patterns. “It’s what you should be doing anyway, you know,” said Quzmar. “So, have there been patterns that can be highlighted while at the same time maintaining the documentation standards? For sure.”
Five months before Oct. 7, CPJ published a damning report highlighting the Israeli military’s systematic impunity for killing 20 journalists over 22 years, entitled “Deadly Pattern,” a title that Quzmar said is “not pulling any punches.”
Now, to Quzmar, CPJ appeared to ignore these basic patterns and focus too much on the lack of certainty, so he stopped paying attention to their data.
“Lack of evidence” over Palestinian journalists
In an April 2024 letter from Palestinian Journalist Syndicate (PJS) president Naser Abu Baker to CPJ, Baker pointed to the Western media’s routine obfuscation of Israel’s role in killing journalists by downplaying the deliberate nature of their targeting and the number of reporters killed. Instead, outlets focus on “lack of evidence” and call for “independent investigations.” By taking a hard stance on Israel’s expansive pattern of targeted killings, Baker hoped that CPJ could set a standard for the Western media to follow suit.
CPJ’s acknowledgement of this targeting, Quzmar argued, could have saved lives. Now, Israel may have upended all norms of protecting journalists. “If a regime wants to kill journalists,” says Quzmar, “They should do like Israel and get the Israel treatment—just don’t let us investigate and we’ll call for investigations from abroad in this story.”
Acting as the West’s de facto ombudsman for press freedom, CPJ effectively sidelined publicizing Israel’s expansive pattern of journalist killings, a pattern Palestinian journalists have been clamoring to get recognized across the West.
In a statement to No Frontiers, CPJ disclosed its use of the “dangerous assignment” classification. “This is our default classification, given the difficulties of confirming information when a war is raging, we work on the assumption that any journalist killed in an area of hostilities during the Israel-Gaza war was involved in trying to provide some form of coverage.”
In September, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) released the “Assassination of Truth: Killing of Journalists amid Genocide in Gaza,” a report detailing an extraordinary breadth of Israeli military targeting of Palestinian journalists. PCHR documented 42 deliberate killings of journalists by Israel, both in the field, at home, and in civilian settings, twice as many as CPJ has counted.
For at-home killings, the PJS helped PCHR establish that the IOF engaged in “systematic pattern rather than random targeting, aimed at eliminating those reporting on Gaza to the world and sending a broader message of intimidation to all journalists in the field: that no place within the Gaza Strip is safe for them or their families.” PJS found that between October 2023 and April 2025, the IOF bombed 152 houses linked to journalists, resulting in the death of a total of 665 family members and relatives.
“I believe the most consistent pattern is the targeting of Palestinian journalists alongside whole families, not by coincidence, but by design,” said Quzmar. “To choose the moment and place where they are surrounded by their families in order to eliminate the whole family as a form of collective punishment.”
The Committee isn’t the only Western press freedom organization whose database has minimized Israel’s journalist assassination campaign. In mid-December 2023, PJS accused the Paris-headquartered Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans frontières or RSF) of “whitewashing the image of the occupation” of “shielding Israel from any responsibility before international justice”, of “bias in favour of the occupation” and of “lack of professionalism” by publishing a low count of 56 journalists killed by Israel in its annual RSF 2023 Round-Up report.
In a letter to PJS, the RSF’s secretary-general explained it was their “methodology,” including lack of information, that created the vast gulf between their tallies of killed journalists. As RSF noted, PJS counts all journalists killed in Gaza by Israel and “does not distinguish between the number killed in the line of duty and the overall number killed,” distinctions that RSF does make.
“These accusations indicate, at best, a misunderstanding of RSF positions,” wrote RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire. “These attempts to impugn our motives and these quarrels over numbers make no sense.”
What CPJ and RSF’s rigid data collection methodologies expose is the inflexibility of these press freedom organizations, as well as their inability to accept and adjust to critical feedback from local Palestinian journalists on the ground, whose deaths make up these “numbers.”
“CPJ strongly rejects any suggestion that its documentation or advocacy is designed to minimize, obscure, or justify Israel’s killing of journalists and media workers,” wrote Ginsberg in a statement to No Frontiers. “Our organization does not dismiss or disregard the reports of Palestinian journalists, human rights organizations, or local press-freedom groups; quite the opposite, their testimony and documentation are primary sources for our investigations.”
She continues, “Attempts to portray CPJ’s process as a ‘cover-up’ or as aligned with any state’s narrative fundamentally misrepresents both our work and our track record of confronting the perpetrators and parties—including Israel—responsible for killing, harming or obstructing journalists.”
CPJ declined an interview. In response, Ginsberg sent No Frontiers a statement. Read CPJ’s complete statement here.
In just the last three months of 2023, Roshdi Sarraj was killed during the deadliest period for journalists in history, more than any previous armed conflict. Throughout that period, CPJ hasn’t counted a single murder of journalists killed in Gaza.
But that can change, if only the group would acknowledge Israel’s deadly pattern of at-home aerial bombings and set aside its rigid classification system. Otherwise, “dangerous assignment” doesn’t begin to account for the sacrifice that hundreds of Palestinian journalists have made to report under the shadow of a belligerent and genocidal Zionist regime.
In her heart, Shrouq Al Aila knows the IOF meant to kill two journalists that morning. Two rockets, one after another. Their high-tech surveillance, low-altitude drones hovering overhead. No one was meant to escape the attack.
“The issue that the CPJ classified what happened as [dangerous assignment] is that he was not on duty,” said Al Aila. “He was preparing himself to go on assignment, but he was not on duty.”
“But still, it is murder. It is a crime.” Acknowledgement or not, Al Aila continues to report—a journalist and mother with a target on her back. [*]
While updating their FAQ and Data methodology pages, CPJ recently created a whole new ‘type of death’ category, “Unknown,” and changed five journalists’ classifications from “dangerous assignment” to “unknown” to investigate if it meets their standard for “murder.”
“Manufactured consent,” a political theory of the media, describes the management of public opinion. In a nutshell, it explains how Mainstream Media filters information consumed by the public to subtly shape their views, legitimize power structures and powers’ interests, like self-enrichment, warfare, demonizing political enemies, or colonizing Indigenous lands. (For more, download Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s book “Manufacturing Consent” here.)
Link to Manufacturing Consent doesn’t work, but excited to read this in full!