IDF's List of 170 'Militant' Journalists Relies on Blank Files, Researcher's Review Finds

Last week the Israel Defense Forces published a database of 170 Palestinians killed in Gaza, insisting they were not journalists but members of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad or other armed groups despite having worked in media. The IDF calls the list its "Press Files" and says it answers claims that Israel has killed reporters on an unprecedented scale.

Muhammad Shehada, a Palestinian political analyst and visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, read every entry. In a social media thread posted October 4, he summarized what he found.

"I checked every single name on Israel's list of 170 Gazan 'terrorist' journalists. It's the most sloppy shameless fraud possible... In the overwhelming majority of those listed, the IDF presents ZERO credible evidence. In most of them, their pages are literally blank."

According to Shehada's count, 59 of the entries carry no evidence beyond the phrase "based on multiple intelligence sources," a formulation he compared to "trust me, bro." Another 42 entries contain only fragments of files, which he described as undated and unspecified, the kind of material that could come from any period or any person. Shehada noted that Israeli authorities have previously circulated supposed intelligence that later turned out to be fabricated or misleadingly presented, and that the military has been caught giving false public accounts before, including its initial denial of responsibility for the 2024 killing of five-year-old Hind Rajab.

Two cases in the database involve journalists whose deaths drew international attention. The IDF killed Al Jazeera correspondent Ismail al-Ghoul in July 2024 and later released a document it said proved he was an operative in Hamas's Nukhba unit. Reporters Without Borders has examined that document and found it states al-Ghoul, born in 1997, received a military rank in 2007, when he would have been ten years old, while a separate part of the same file says he joined in 2014. The document also lists his occupation as engineer, at odds with the IDF's own description of him as a Nukhba fighter. Months before he was killed, Israeli troops detained al-Ghoul during a raid on al-Shifa hospital and released him after twelve hours.

The second case is Al Jazeera's Anas al-Sharif, killed in 2025. Shehada documented for +972 Magazine last year that Israeli military records describe al-Sharif as seriously injured in 2017, place him in a military context in 2019, and by 2023 list him as "suspended" and "unassigned," even as a separate IDF document portrays him as an elite Nukhba fighter. Al-Sharif, like al-Ghoul, was detained and released by Israeli forces during the 2024 al-Shifa raid.

The International Federation of Journalists has called the Gaza war the deadliest period in the history of journalism, documenting at least 240 journalists and media workers killed. Reporters Without Borders has identified dozens of cases it believes involved deliberate targeting of reporters and has filed complaints with the International Criminal Court alleging war crimes against the press. The IDF's database is the military's most extensive public attempt to rebut those findings. Shehada's review indicates that attempt does not hold up entry by entry.