At just after 10 am on Monday, August 25, standing on a balcony at Nasser Hospital in near 30-degree heat, Hussam al-Masri panned his camera right across the landscape of Khan Yunis in a livestream for Reuters.

The cameraman shifted his gear slightly to the right of a large wooden support beam to zoom in on a column of smoke in the distance, the result of one of the many daily Israeli strikes to hit the strip.

Within minutes, around 10.09 am, with the camera locked on the now dissipating smoke, the feed went black. While trying to document another blast in the distance, al-Masri himself was hit and killed in a direct Israeli strike. Another person was also killed. 

Reporters, first responders, and civil defence workers in the vicinity of the hospital rushed up the stairwell to both document the attack and to try to save lives. 

Minutes later, at 10.17 am, they would be among 20 more souls gone, disappearing into a cloud of dust and debris, as two rapid, precision Israeli strikes, likely from a nearby tank unit, hit the balcony again. 

We know exactly what happened because the Arabic-language station Al Ghad TV was broadcasting live with its camera trained directly on the stairwell as the second wave of the double-tap attack hit, a widely used method according to a recent joint investigation by Israeli magazines +972 and Local Call.

Among the 20 killed were four more journalists, all of whom, like al-Masri, worked for or contributed to international news agencies.

They were Mariam Abu Dagga, who worked with the Associated Press; NBC News contributor Moath Abu Taha; Mohammad Salama, who contributed video and written articles for both Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye; and Ahmed Abu Aziz, who also wrote for Middle East Eye.

They join over 250 journalists and media workers, including support personnel such as translators, drivers and fixers, killed over the past 22 months in the “news graveyard” which Gaza has become.

As has become all too common now, Mariam Abu Dagga left behind messages in case she was targeted, one for her colleagues and one for her 13-year-old, “the heart and soul” of his mother, as she put it. “When I die, pray for me, not cry for me,” she wrote, “and when you grow, when you marry, and when you have a daughter, name her Mariam, after me.”

Abu Aziz was remembered by colleagues in Middle East Eye as an “exceptional” reporter who, like all Palestinian reporters, reported through pain and loss, including losing 14 kilograms in weight in the four months prior to his killing as the enforced starvation set in. 

Tributes have poured in for the other reporters too from colleagues and other professionals in Gaza. They worked tirelessly and bravely to bring us the images and the stories of the devastation of Israel’s assault, most recently the impacts of starvation – now declared a man-made famine. 

In the weeks leading up to his killing on Monday, Mohammad Salama used his Instagram page to document the impacts of Israel’s campaign, posting raw images of children reduced to skeletal hubs, malnourished babies, and civilians killed in bombings. He, like his slain colleagues, did not want to give the world an excuse for looking away. 

Yet another “tragic mishap”

Immediately following the attack, there was near instant international outcry. With the live footage of the attack everywhere within hours, there was no hiding for Israel. Especially so with international media contributors among the dead.  

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister wanted on war crime charges by the International Criminal Court, quickly took to social media to call the double-tap attack a “tragic mishap”. 

This attempt to wave away the incident as a mistake has been used on countless occasions by Israeli authorities over the last 22 months. There are numerous incidents where the killing of civilians, aid workers, journalists, and medical staff has been described as tragic accidents. 

The airstrike on the Maghazi refugee camp on Christmas Eve 2023 killing 86 people was a “regrettable mistake”. In April 2024 clearly marked World Central Kitchen vehicles were hit, killing international aid workers. This, Netanyahu said, was a “tragic incident”. 

A refugee camp in Rafah was struck in May 2024, setting tents on fire and killing 45 people. Another “tragic mistake”, according to Netanyahu.

When first responders were killed and buried in a mass grave in March 2025, the Israeli army claimed it mistakenly identified their convoy as a threat. A forensic doctor who examined the bodies told The Guardian he found evidence of close-range execution-style killing. 

This list of “tragic” mistakes, errors and mishaps could go on. Yet, every time there is a new “tragic” event, the media continues to give these empty statements prominence without this context or greater scrutiny. 

Netanyahu’s excuse is also easily and quickly refuted by examining reporting from within Israel. Within hours of his statement on Monday, the Channel 14 national Israeli news station reported on discontent within the unit which carried out the attack. Soldiers informed reporters at the station that the strike was approved by senior command, and called for an apology from the Israeli government.

Sensing that the weight of the international consensus was still against it, Israeli authorities announced that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) will carry out an investigation into the approval process for the strike, the chain of command decision-making, and details on the timing of the attack and the types of weaponry used to carry it out.

Anyone closely watching won’t be holding their breath. As an Action on Armed Violence report released in recent weeks shows, such internal investigations rarely, if ever, result in any clear findings or sanctions.

The London-based conflict monitoring group found that 46 of 52 publicly claimed probes by the IDF into alleged war crimes in Gaza and the occupied West Bank are either still under review or have been closed without any finding of wrongdoing. 

The foundations for a similar decision in this case already appears to have been laid with preliminary findings within 24 hours of the double-tap attack pointing to the targeting of a Hamas surveillance camera.

Holds no water

This should not hold any water with editors and reporters. There is no evidence presented that there was any camera in place apart from the Reuters one on Monday.

However, there is evidence, compiled by Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi, that the balcony and stairwell were used by reporters in Gaza to record footage and get stable internet connection for months. 

The findings have since been verified by investigative and visual journalism units in The New York Times and Sky News, among other publications. But, evidence was readily accessible to anyone with an Instagram account where several of the killed reporters regularly posted photos and videos of themselves resting or recording from the balcony and stairwell. Reuters has also confirmed that it ran a live feed from the balcony area on and off over the last 18 months.

The Israeli army has now also claimed that six of the people killed in the double-tap attack were Hamas or Islamic Jihad members. This has also already been largely refuted.

A Sky News investigation found evidence that one of the six was a combatant but had died while fighting east of Khan Yunis in the days prior to the strike, with a Hamas obituary for him posted in recent days.  Gaza’s health ministry said that it had not received his body in any of its hospitals, with the IDF telling Sky News that it was examining if this individual was killed in a separate incident.

Ramy Abdu of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based NGO tracking casualties in Gaza, also pointed out on Monday that the monitor’s records indicate that a second person on the list was killed a day before the Nasser attack in a bombing on tents in Mawasi Al-Qarara. Another person on the list appears to have been a civil defense firefighter killed in the second balcony strike.

Yet, for many leading western publications, and despite the clear weight of evidence countering Israeli statements, the justification for the Nasser Hospital attack carried enough weight to warrant headline space. 

As has happened so often over the past two years, western media has repeated Israeli claims, made without any evidence, with prominence in their reporting. 

In a report from its contributor in Jerusalem, The Irish Times gave prominence in one of its first articles on the attack to the Israeli claims, writing in its sub-heading that “military sources say” the target was a surveillance camera on the balcony. 

A broadcast piece from Virgin Media on Wednesday led with the Israeli claims about the camera and that “it killed six terrorists”. The “so-called” double-tap attack caught live on air was, as the reporter put it, “especially contentious”. It was not just contentious. It was a war crime writ large, a clear indiscriminate military strike on a hospital, medical workers, frontline responders and journalists.

Even Reuters, whose own contributors were killed, made the choice to give prominence to the Israeli claims even though, as NBC News reported this week, it has recently stopped sharing the locations of its Gazan teams as Israel has killed so many journalists to date. 

One report from Reuters on Tuesday ran with a headline that the initial inquiry “says Hamas camera was target of Israeli strike”. The main photo underneath the headline is an image of camera gear belonging to Hussam al-Masri lying on the bloodstained stairwell to the balcony.

Cognitive dissonance does not even come close to explaining away these choices. And they are choices.  

Stenographers or purveyors of truth?

Yes, it takes more time to compile this information than just regurgitating a press release from the IDF or quoting from a social media post from the country’s leader, a man wanted in The Hague.

But that is the job. Journalists are not stenographers but purveyors of truth. We are supposed to get our nails dirty and dig for the evidence before we inform the public so that what we report back to them is as close to the truth as we can get. 

Still, western media continue to cite Israeli claims without challenge. Giving them the oxygen of publicity to repeatedly air dubious claims is a poor editorial choice. 

The key here, again, is that it is a choice. Editors and producers have a choice over who they bring on their shows or put in their papers, and reporters have a choice in the words that they use. 

As journalists, we are trained, and hope too, that each and every word we broadcast or put to paper has weight and can make a difference. This also means that the microphone and the pen come with great responsibility to impart the truth. 

Our industry should support every effort to show solidarity with journalists in Gaza – be it through vigils, marches, or signing the Freedom of Report petition for international media access to Gaza to stand shoulder to shoulder with our Palestinian colleagues.

But it is all for nought if we don’t call out dangerously inaccurate reporting when we see it and speak up within our own newsroom when our publications parrot propaganda of an entity our leaders, international experts and human rights groups say is committing genocide. 

As the respected US investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill told Al Jazeera on Wednesday, many major western media platforms are acting as “conveyor belts” for Israeli propaganda against Palestinian journalists, “the greatest journalistic heroes of our lifetime”.

The disdain in Scahill’s voice during the interview for his own profession is palpable. This feeling should be palpable in any journalist who cut their teeth in the profession on the understanding that our role is to be adversarial – to hold truth to power. 

Israel is silencing the truth. We should not be doing the same by allowing ourselves to be conveyor belts for its lies. The public deserves better. Our Palestinian colleagues in Gaza certainly do.