Israel Killed Nearly 300 Journalists and Then Attacked the Woman Who Counted

Francesca Albanese's new report says Israel is killing the witnesses, cutting the lines and buying the narrative, while Western newsrooms do the rest. Israel and the US answered with insults.

Watch: Albanese, Israel and the United States at the UN Third Committee, 26 October 2026. Footage: UN Web TV.

On Monday afternoon at the United Nations, Francesca Albanese presented a report on how Israel has destroyed the press in Gaza and how Western newsrooms helped it look acceptable. Israel’s ambassador answered by calling her “a fraud,” “a liar” and “a stain on the United Nations,” then held up a mock letter of resignation he had written in her name. The US representative called her “a moral fugitive” and “a liar and a lunatic” and told the room “Albanese must go.” Between the two, the chair of the Third Committee had to remind delegates to focus on the substance and not on individuals.

The substance is a 29-page UN document, A/81/249, titled Truth under the rubble: media in the time of genocide. Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, gives what she documents a name: mediacide, the systematic destruction of the media’s public function. By the report’s count, Israeli forces have killed nearly 300 journalists since October 2023, in what she calls the deadliest conflict for journalists ever recorded. They have also killed around 710 of those journalists’ relatives, 436 of them in the first four months.

The report’s central claim is the one the ambassadors stepped around. Killing the people who document a genocide, and destroying the means to document it, is itself evidence of the intent to commit one. “Accountability depends on the survival of the record,” she writes, and the record is what Israel has spent three years trying to bury.

The press vest became a target marker. Journalists in vests and helmets, in marked cars and marked tents, were identified and then struck. In October 2023 the Israeli military reportedly set up a “legitimization cell” to recast Gaza’s journalists as Hamas operatives, a pretext before each strike and an excuse after it. In October 2024 the army accused six journalists of being “operatives in Hamas’ military wing.” Two of them were later killed. Hossam Shabat left a statement published after his death: “If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed – most likely targeted – by the Israeli occupation forces.” Anas Al-Sharif was killed with five colleagues in a drone strike on a journalists’ tent near Al-Shifa hospital on 10 August 2025. At Nasser hospital that same month, a first strike killed a Reuters cameraman and a second killed four more journalists who ran to help. Israel said it had targeted a “Hamas camera.” It was Reuters’.

The Israeli ambassador accused Albanese of ignoring evidence that Hamas uses press credentials. Her report answers that directly, with the law. Journalists are civilians. They lose protection only when they take a direct part in hostilities, and the attacker has to prove it. Working for Al Jazeera, holding political views or being labelled a terrorist by the army that kills you changes none of that.

The witnesses who survived the strikes lost the means to be heard. The Palestine Tower, home to seven media outlets, was destroyed on the first day. By the report’s count, Israel has completely destroyed 81 percent of Gaza’s information and communications infrastructure. On 10 June 2025 it struck the last working cable serving central and southern Gaza. Independent foreign journalists have been barred from the Strip since October 2023, and the ban has outlived the so-called ceasefire.

Then Israel paid to fill the silence. In May 2025 it renewed the aid blockade that helped produce famine, and it signed roughly $50 million in advertising contracts, including with Google and X, to tell the world in many languages: “There is food in Gaza. Any other claim is a lie.” On Israeli television, Channel 14 broadcast a singer calling to “erase Gaza, don’t leave a single person there.” The International Court of Justice ordered Israel in January 2024 to prevent and punish incitement to genocide. Albanese finds it did neither, and that the outlets doing the inciting were rewarded with access.

The part of the report Western readers most need is about their own news. Albanese set aside the openly partisan outlets and examined twelve of the most trusted names in Western journalism, the ones policymakers treat as authoritative. Only three answered her requests for comment. She found a New York Times instruction to use “Palestine” only “in very rare cases,” and a CNN directive to “remind our audiences” that Hamas caused the conflict. She found that BBC headlines omitted or softened Israeli responsibility 83 percent of the time, and the Times’ 65 percent of the time. The BBC’s headline on Hind Rajab, the six-year-old killed by Israeli forces, still says she was “found dead in Gaza.” Palestinian children were about 99.7 percent of child fatalities, yet they appeared in just over half of CNN’s personal stories about child victims.

The platforms did the rest. Leaked Meta data shows around 38.8 million Facebook and Instagram posts removed, banned or suppressed since late 2023. TikTok complied with 99.2 percent of Israeli takedown requests and Meta with 94 percent. Albanese calls requests that win near-total compliance what they are: removal orders that skip any legal process.

Her legal findings climb in steps. Killing identified journalists and bombing media and telecom infrastructure are war crimes. Done at this scale against Gaza’s civilians, they are crimes against humanity. Killing the witnesses is evidence of genocidal intent. Calls on national television to wipe out Gaza meet the bar for direct and public incitement to genocide, a crime complete the moment it is broadcast. Newsrooms that print one side’s unverified claims as fact share responsibility for the harm, and platforms that took money to run famine denial contributed to it.

That is the report the ambassadors faced, and they answered it with insults and a prop. Albanese answered them when the floor came back to her. The Israeli ambassador, she said, is so good at writing letters of repentance that he should write one for his prime minister, wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity. To the United States, whose representative called her a lunatic, she said she takes it very seriously, “given the experience of the country with the lunacy.” Then she read the Israeli ambassador a passage on colonization that, she said, came from Ze’ev Jabotinsky, one of Israel’s founding fathers, and suggested he refresh his history.

The United States and Israel had nothing to say about nearly 300 dead journalists, about a famine denied in paid ads, or about newsrooms that wrote Israeli forces out of a six-year-old’s death. They spent their time on the woman who counted. That choice is part of the pattern her report describes, carried out in the General Assembly itself.

What she asks for is concrete. She wants the General Assembly to set up an independent mechanism to collect and preserve evidence of crimes against journalists. She wants Israel to free detained journalists, account for the two who disappeared on 7 October 2023, and let foreign reporters into Gaza. She wants the ICC prosecutor to investigate Israeli officials and media figures for incitement to genocide. And she tells newsrooms and platforms they must stop laundering propaganda through the journalistic form, starting with verifying a warring party’s claims before they print them and running corrections as prominently as the error. Every one of those demands is about keeping the record alive. The people still filming in Gaza are doing that work today, with less protection than anyone in that room.