23-year-old German-Israeli Shani Louk, who was murdered by Hamas on October 7, 2023. (Photo: Instagram)

Calling a terror operative a journalist doesn’t make him one.

Just ask the Associated Press (AP). The vaunted news agency’s rough schooling in this lesson began with a mundane correspondence, progressed to the most devastating slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, and continued with a hugely embarrassing court case. 

The first chapter of the unfortunate saga dates to 2018. At the time, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America questioned the AP’s reliance on photographer Hassan Eslaiah, identified in the wire service coverage as a “local journalist” who corroborated a Hamas accusation that Israel was responsible for the death of a child at the Gaza border fence.

When CAMERA requested specifics regarding Eslaiah’s journalistic credentials, an AP official declined to identify the Palestinian’s professional affiliation. The editor insisted that he “is independent and reliable and not Hamas.”

CAMERA did its own research, and in very short order discovered an Electronic Intifada article revealing that the “not Hamas” source was, at the time, a camera operator with the very much Hamas-affiliated Quds TV. 

CAMERA shared this information with the AP. But the news agency, which says it its “advancing the power of facts,” failed to amend its coverage to acknowledge that the supposedly independent and reliable local journalist, who ostensibly substantiated an unverified Hamas claim, was himself working with Hamas.

Later, in 2020, CAMERA tweeted a photograph of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar kissing and embracing Eslaiah, and tagged the AP.

Fast forward to Oct. 7, 2023. By then, Eslaiah’s status at the AP had advanced. He was no longer a “local journalist” trotted out to verify Hamas’ questionable claims. He was now the wire service’s freelance photographer at the forefront of Hamas’ horrific massacre, earning cash for his images of the unspeakable terror carried out by his Hamas colleagues. 

“Not Hamas” Eslaiah was among the freelance photographers from the Gaza Strip who crossed the border into Israel alongside thousands of Hamas-led terrorists who came to murder, rape, kidnap, torture, maim, and loot.

The most recent chapter of the AP’s hard knocks education in the mutually exclusive professions of journalism and terror moves from the killing fields of southern Israel to the Federal court of the Southern District of Florida.

As reported in The Times of Israel, terror victims sued the Associated Press in February 2024 for publishing Eslaiah’s Oct. 7 photographs, charging: “AP has long been on notice of their freelancer’s Hamas connections, and chose to ignore those connections.”

A recap: the AP was on notice because of CAMERA’s 2018 correspondence. The CAMERA-AP exchange stands at the foundation of the terror victim’s lawsuit against the leading news agency.

In those 2018 emails, dusted off in 2024 by studious lawyers who did their homework, CAMERA also documented that Eslaiah’s social media was a veritable reader’s guide to ideological identification with Hamas, glorification of terrorism, and anti-Jewish statements.

Even following Oct. 7, Eslaiah’s social media was as open as a textbook. A November 2023 CAMERA report documented Eslaiah’s celebration of the Oct. 7 atrocities, including praise for the Hamas “warriors” and reflections on how “storming the settlements” is a “beautiful thing.”

But Eslaiah’s identification with Hamas didn’t stop at lyrical posts. Last April, when Eslaiah was injured in an Israeli airstrike, the Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet reported that Eslaiah was a member of Hamas’ Khan Younis Brigade and was operating “under the guise of a journalist and owner of a press company.”

When Hassan Eslaiah was killed in an Israeli air strike this week, Hamas rushed to claim that a journalist was among the three fatalities.

As the lawsuit against the AP is still ongoing, the final chapter of the AP’s Eslaiah Hamas-not-journalist curriculum has yet to be written. Nevertheless, the enduring lesson should be clear: a terror operative is not a journalist.

And yet, the slow learners are nothing if not consistent: “Gaza journalist Hassan Aslih killed in Israeli strike,” BBC blared. “Israeli strike on Gaza hospital kills wounded journalist,” Reuters misled.

Tamar Sternthal is director of the Israel office of CAMERA.