The International Press Institute (IPI) held a webinar on “The Gaza Project’s Groundbreaking Investigation” with journalists from ARIJ, Forbidden Stories, IPI, and The Guardian in order to shed light on how journalists from 13 organizations collaborated to investigate attacks on Palestinian journalists.
The founder and director of Forbidden Stories, Laurent Richard, said that it would have been really hard to work on this project without collaboration because of the lack of access to Gaza and the need to have evidence to prove the targeting. “The goal of this collaboration was to gather journalists with different skills and backgrounds, but we had high levels of fact-checking and responsibility." Richard emphasized that one of the important impacts of this project was not just monitoring the attacks; “we have to observe what is happening, but the most important is to investigate it.”
The Executive Editor at ARIJ, Hoda Osman, said that the team behind the investigation decided that they had to do something because they were speaking to the journalists in Gaza every day. Some of those journalists stopped wearing their vests because they felt they were targeted because of that. Osman focused on ARIJ’s role and how crucial and important the connections it has built in Gaza are, because of the trust, the sensitivity, and the ability to speak to these journalists and connections.
Osman mentioned one of the stories in the project about the “Press House”, which was a special place created by Bilal Jadallah to develop journalists’ capacities in Gaza. The investigations showed that Bilal was killed in his car on a route that was marked safe by the Israeli forces.
Investigations correspondent at The Guardian, Dr. Manisha Ganguly, said that what is happening in Gaza is a conflict where we have a record number of journalists who have been killed more than any other war that has been covered so far, which raises questions about intentionality. “When we were looking at the very long list of casualties of Palestinian journalists, we noticed that 30% of them worked for media outlets that were affiliated with or closely tied to Hamas, while we managed to get a conversation with a senior IDF spokesperson who said that there is no difference between working for the media outlet and belonging to Hamas,"Ganguly said.
IPI Executive Board member Walid Batrawi stated that the killing of journalists in Gaza is a continuation of what was going on all over the West Bank and Jerusalem, so it's not a new policy but it has been escalated. "That’s why it was very important to do this investigation and to be part of it." Batrawi also focused on what is happening in the West Bank, saying that it is not only limited to physical harassment but also targeting. “This policy of targeting journalists has not started since October 7; it has been there even before, but no one is held accountable.”
