Israel kills journalist in Gaza hospital bombing, and its media debates whether that’s OK

Israel has murdered journalist Hassan Eslaih in an airstrike on the Nasser Medical Complex in Gaza. But as is the norm with war crimes against Palestinians, Israeli media is essentially suggesting it was acceptable.

The murder of a journalist in a hospital bed is a double war crime that ought really to be a news story – and of particular concern to journalists.

As far as I can see – not a squeak in western media. https://t.co/p0xn4C468C

— Richard Sanders (@PulaRJS) May 13, 2025

Israel is concealing and silencing the truth, with Western support

Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza since at least October 2023. For many years before that, the apartheid state had been isolating the occupied Palestinian territory’s highly concentrated population with a brutal blockade that turned it into “the world’s largest open-air prison”. And because Israel wanted to minimise international outrage, it stopped journalists from outside Gaza going in to document its crimes. Meanwhile, the occupation forces have murdered between 160 and 232 local journalists and tried to smear them as ‘terrorists’ to pre-emptively justify their assassination.

Western media outlets, meanwhile, have participated in the whitewashing of Israeli attacks on hospitals and health workers in Gaza. They’ve also allowed genocide apologists to silence Palestinian voices in Gaza simply by uttering the name ‘Hamas’. But unlike Israel, Hamas has not advanced an illegal occupation and settler-colonial practices for decades. Palestinian people have the right to resist occupation, but Israel does not have the right to decimate occupied territory. Hamas is neither a progressive champion nor the picture of evil that Israel paints. And it has committed just a tiny fraction of Israel’s international crimes.

The further deteriorating of an apparently hopeless situation for Palestinians in the 21st century and the lack of a meaningful peace process very much led to 7 October 2023. On that day, crimes undoubtedly took place, but Hamas attacked an Israeli military base with the aim of taking hostages in order to negotiate “the release of thousands of Palestinians in Israeli prisons”. Israel responded by killing its own citizens and launching a genocidal assault on Gaza, in which it has killed at least one Palestinian child every hour, murdering around 17,492 children (including about 825 babies, 895 one-year-olds, 3,266 preschoolers, and 4,032 six-to-10-year-olds).

‘Is it ok to kill a journalist?’

Upon the murder of journalist Hassan Eslaih, Israeli propagandists sought to downplay the crime of attacking an unarmed person in a hospital. They did this by mentioning Eslaih’s reporting on the events of 7 October and his supposed civilian connection to Hamas.

Eslaih was in hospital. He was unarmed. And Israel murdered him. That’s the story. The rest is an insight into Israel’s barbaric, noxious logic.

Let’s apply the ‘eye for an eye’ principle to what Israel is saying with its assassination of Eslaih and those like him. Because it’s basically asserting that anyone in the apartheid state who has ever had a connection to its war criminal government, military, or illegal occupation is a legitimate target for people resisting the occupation. Israeli politicians, however, know they have the backing of the US and other Western governments. So they know there’s absolutely no way Palestinians would ever be able to do to people in Israel what the occupation forces have done to people in Gaza.

The question isn’t what connection Eslaih or anyone else in Gaza had with Hamas as a political organisation. It’s whether we accept that people who are not currently fighting in or directing an armed conflict are legitimate targets for assassination. And if we want a world of peace and reason, we absolutely mustn’t accept that.

Featured image via the Canary