Azmat Khan:
So there’s a great deal of evidence of Anas’ work as a journalist. And in this case, you can see that he was working as a journalist, and Israel targeted him.
That is targeting a journalist. They claim he has had prior affiliations. But by that same logic, that would make anyone, if true, right, which this evidence, we have yet to see it for ourselves — they also made new claims about promoting Hamas rockets, again, evidence we have yet to see.
But if this is the logic that we are supposed to be using in how people are targeted, by that same logic, you could target somebody who had previously worked for or had previously been in a military and became a journalist. And I think that’s a really, really dangerous precedent to set. it endangers all of us.
More than that, I think it’s really important to know the very savvy network that Israel has relied upon. It includes its own so-called legitimization cell, a cell that’s intentionally been created to contrive allegations against journalists and deflect from its killing of journalists and, in essence, its killing of truths.
Now, there are cases where — there are at least 26 cases that CPJ has tracked where it has identified instances in which it believes that journalists were explicitly targeted. We have seen cases where journalists who were flying drones, an essential part of their operations, were targeted for that very reason, for using drones to capture video footage.
All of this really, really requires us to ask ourselves, how did we get to a place where such numbers have become acceptable? It is no longer surprising. How did we get to a place where allegations about links to Hamas are able to circulate so effectively that they make the entire conversation about an unprecedented number of journalists and journalists who work for outlets that we rely upon for news coverage that we use every day, how is that not the story?
And we really need to ensure that killing journalists doesn’t kill the story.
