‘Israel killing journalists in Gaza to cover up genocide’

She said the latest United Nations figure showed that at least 252 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza since the war was triggered by militant group Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

That makes it “the deadliest conflict ever for journalists”, Khan said, warning that the number “is of course likely to go up, because every week we hear news of more killings”.

Already, “more journalists have been killed in Gaza than in both World Wars, Vietnam War, wars in Yugoslavia and the war in Afghanistan combined”, she said.

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By comparison, she said 14 journalists had been killed in Ukraine since Russia began its full-scale invasion in early 2022, while the number of journalists killed over two decades of conflict in Afghanistan was in “the dozens”.

Khan, who is an independent expert mandated by the UN Human Rights Council but who does not speak on behalf of the United Nations, maintained that many of the journalists killed in Gaza had been “targeted”.

They are being “deliberately picked out and killed because of the work that they are doing to expose the atrocities, the crimes, the genocide on the ground”, she said.

The expert slammed Israeli “smear campaigns”, accusing many of the journalists killed in its strikes of being “terrorist supporters or terrorists themselves” in a bid to “delegitimise and discredit” them and their work.

“So it is not just killing journalists, but (an) attempt is being very clearly made here to kill the story,” she charged.