James Stout

And I think part of that is because there were no foreign journalists in Gaza during that period.

So it was killing of Palestinians.

Until now, there has been at least one foreign journalist who was wounded in that initial attack.

Since then, most of the attacks have targeted Lebanese journalists, and particularly Lebanese journalists working with outlets who have some sort of, we can call it, line that supports or is differential to Hezbollah.

I mean, of course, this is not an excuse, right?

They're still journalists, they're still working in the media, regardless of what their political affiliation is, these are people who are there to assess information.

Recently, in this latest intensification, there have been more killings of journalists, of course, and these are typically journalists who are working on the front lines and in the South.

You know, we can't know what's in the minds of the Israeli military, but based on my conversations with media professionals and media watchdogs in the recent years, I wrote a piece for Al Jazeera back in 2021.

Four, I believe it was about the killing of journalists in Gaza.

And, you know, people at outlets like Reporters Without Borders were telling me that at that point, we're talking, you know, a year and a half ago, it was already systematic.

There was a systematic means of trying to control the narrative through the killing of journalists.

And this is a big thing for these groups that are, you know, work really hard to share only things that they've backed up with data.

They're not bombastic spokespeople who have some sort of political lean, you can say.

These are people who really have to and organizations that really have to be careful with the language that they pick and choose.

So I thought that was like a really interesting framing.

So what they had told me at the time, and I think this is inevitably still true if you subscribe to this idea, is that the goal was to prevent the information from getting out from the front lines, to stop people from knowing what was happening.

And this has been clear as lately we've seen journalists targeted.

And, you know, this isn't a case whereby journalists were killed.

And I'm speaking specifically in Lebanon.

This also happened in Gaza, but specifically in Lebanon in the last few weeks, we've seen cases where there were double tap strikes on journalists that had targeted journalists.