The Israeli military has published an investigation saying that 170 people killed in the war in Gaza who had presented themselves as journalists were actually militants, rebutting accusations that it targeted journalists in violation of international law.
Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, the Israeli military spokesman, said Thursday that Israel had found more than 100 members of Hamas and dozens of operatives from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as well as other militant groups, who had been labeled members of the media were actually combatants.
“Soldiers were criticized before the facts were checked,” General Defrin said.
The military published a graphic with the faces of men it said had duped the international community, along with a website with some findings about all those it said were “exposed.” Some of the entries in the Israeli report have photos, social media posts or records said to have been found in Gaza purporting to show membership in a militant group, while others are based on intelligence the Israeli military says it cannot share.
The Committee to Protect Journalists lists 190 deaths of Palestinian reporters and media workers that it has documented during the war. It attributes one to a Palestinian militant group, making Israeli forces “responsible for the vast majority of killings of journalists and media workers worldwide since 2023” it says.
About 78 people appear on both the Israeli military’s list and C.P.J.’s, meaning they disagree about whether the people were really journalists or militants. But for the most part, the two lists do not overlap — more than half of the people Israel says used journalism as mere cover are not claimed by C.P.J. as killed media workers, and more than half of the media workers C.P.J. says were killed were not disputed by Israel.
Neither list has been independently verified by The New York Times.
Journalist groups like C.P.J., the United Nations and news organizations have accused Israel of deliberately targeting journalists in Gaza. Israel has mostly blocked reporters and outside investigators from entering the enclave, making what happens there opaque to the world.
The C.P.J. list has been a source of friction between Israeli leaders and many in the international community, and in a social media post, the Israeli military called on the group to update its records.
Last month the group removed 19 men from its list that its own investigations had found were combatants; nearly all of them are on the list of 170 named by Israel. C.P.J. also removed several others from its list because it concluded that they were not in the media. Since the war began, the organization has removed a total of 27 people who were militants from its list, it says.
C.P.J. reviews new data when it arises, Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive of C.P.J., said in an interview on Friday. It will treat the Israeli military’s report like any other source, independently assessing the credibility of the evidence and verifying it according to its established methods, which are painstaking and complex, she said.
“We will need to go through the evidence they have produced in detail.”
Mass displacement during the war and the high death toll have made it difficult to track down people with credible knowledge on the ground, she said, and communications are spotty. More than 74,000 people have died in the war, according to the ministry of health in Gaza, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Israel has often viewed workers for media affiliated with militant groups as targets. Some of the people named by Israel appear to fall into that category, described for example as “military operative in the combat information unit.”
The Israeli military says that all 170 people named in its investigation were active military wing operatives at the time of their deaths, and that much of the evidence was publicly available but has been ignored.
Israeli military officials say the investigation not only shows that Israel has been falsely accused of targeting journalists, but also should raise questions about whether other accusations have been inflated.
“It has to make you think what other misinformation has been put out throughout the war,” said Ben Cohen, a deputy international spokesman who worked on the Israeli military investigation, said in an interview on Thursday.
Confirmation of the identities and roles of those killed, and comparison of the Israeli database to the C.P.J. list, is complicated by variations in spelling and transliteration, the use of commonplace names and other factors. But there appear to be 78 people on both lists.
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