Azra Hoosen | ah@radioislam.co.za
15 August 2025 | 10:30 CAT
2 min read

On 10 August, six media professionals in Gaza, including Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif, were killed in what Reporters Without Borders (RSF) says was a targeted Israeli strike near al-Shifa Hospital. The attack forms part of what the press freedom organisation calls a “troubling pattern” of deliberate assaults on journalists in the region.

RSF has now called for an emergency United Nations Security Council meeting, warning that more than 200 media professionals have been killed since the start of the war. Martin Roux, Head of RSF’s Crisis Desk, told Radio Islam that criticism is understandable as Israel has thus far acted with “total impunity”.

An emergency meeting of the UN Security Council has not been held yet. “This is a new tool for leverage that has not been used. It would be based on a resolution on the protection of journalists in armed conflict, and that’s why we call for this meeting following the killing of Anas al-Sharif and five other journalists in the Gaza Strip on Sunday night,” explained Roux.

He noted that Israel’s military often justifies killings by labelling journalists as terrorists. “We see again this pattern repeated in order to justify the targeted assassination of a journalist. The Israeli army is acting this way in order to cover for its crimes,” he added.

Roux stressed that such claims are “not founded, not credible, and not independently verified. It’s just a way to divert attention from the crime itself, which is a war crime, killing a journalist in a conflict area.”

He emphasised that this is an army that has already killed over 200 journalists during 22 months of military operations in Gaza. “It is also targeted by four complaints filed by Reporters Without Borders with the ICC for war crimes committed against journalists in Gaza,” he said.

Asked whether the global journalist community has done enough to condemn the killings, Roux said there is significant coverage and coordinated action. “There are different forms of coalitions in order to be heard as the journalist community and to condemn very loudly these killings by Israel of our colleagues,” he said.

He pointed to RSF’s June initiative, which gathered over 200 news outlets around the world. “This call asked for the protection of Palestinian journalists first, and second for independent access, not the embed access the Israeli prime minister is suggesting, but independent access for the international press through the Gaza Strip,” he said.

Roux acknowledged that the scale of the killings makes any response feel inadequate. “Perhaps we haven’t heard the international journalist community enough, but that’s not because they were not vocal. The massacre of our colleagues is so horrific and unprecedented that anything we can do will never be enough,” he said.

Roux described a constant cycle of reporting on new tragedies. “Today you are interviewing me following the killing of six journalists earlier this week. Only a few weeks ago, I was interviewed because the starvation orchestrated by Israel was also affecting journalists and preventing them from covering this starvation affecting the rest of the population,” he said.

Before that, RSF condemned a strike on a well-known café in Gaza City that hosted journalists and intellectuals. He noted the list goes on from the beginning of Israeli military operations in Gaza. “Anything we do, even though we’re trying to do what we can, will never be enough compared to the scale of the massacre of our journalist colleagues in the Gaza Strip,” said Roux.

For RSF, the call for a UN Security Council meeting is not just symbolic. Roux argues it would put the protection of journalists back on the agenda at the highest level of international diplomacy, forcing member states to confront the issue head-on.

Whether such a meeting will be convened and whether it will have any real impact remains uncertain. But for those on the ground in Gaza, the urgency is clear: journalists are being killed at unprecedented rates, and without stronger protections, the toll is likely to rise.

WATCH the full interview with Ml Sulaimaan Ravat and Martin Roux, Head of RSF’s Crisis Desk, here.