The Al Jazeera Media Network logo is seen on its headquarters building in Doha, Qatar, June 8, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Naseem Zeitoon

Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has been tracking journalist casualties in Gaza.

Yet many of those casualties listed were not journalists at all — they were terrorists. And it has taken the CPJ two-and-a-half years, and terrorist organizations publishing obituaries for their operatives, to begin admitting it.

Through June 25, 2026, the CPJ has removed 20 names from its database, including eight who were directly affiliated with Hamas or Islamic Jihad.

The CPJ announced on Thursday that it is undertaking a review of its own list of casualties of Gazan journalists.

The timing is not coincidental.

In the past several weeks, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been publishing obituaries identifying their dead fighters, many of whom have been living double lives. The most prominent of these double lives are terrorists posing as journalists.

However, none of this information is new.

Since the CPJ started recording journalists killed in Gaza, HonestReporting has similarly been tracking the many cases in which these journalists were directly affiliated with terrorist organizations.

As of June 23, 2026, more than half of the journalists listed by the CPJ as being killed in Gaza were either members or affiliates of an anti-Israel terrorist group.

Most recently, Ahmad Washah, a Hamas sniper who also worked for Al Jazeera, was killed in a targeted air strike in Gaza.

CPJ quickly came to his defense, expressing “alarm” at his death.

This has been a pattern at the CPJ, particularly with terrorists affiliated with Al Jazeera. The Qatar-backed outlet has consistently aligned itself with Hamas, frequently publishing the terrorist organization’s talking points.

Still, on four other occasions, the CPJ has expressed concern or condemned the deaths of Al Jazeera journalists, even when there is overwhelming evidence of their affiliation with Hamas.

The CPJ has exerted great effort to suggest that the IDF has been purposefully targeting journalists throughout the war. This effort has led the organization to include in its casualty list the names of any media workers killed in a war zone.

The CPJ’s own criteria state that it excludes journalists who were “directly participating as combatants in armed conflict at the time of their deaths.”

Yet the organization has on countless occasions done exactly that, and thus redefined international law to paint an inflammatory and false accusation against Israel.

For the past two years, the CPJ has found that Israel has been responsible for the majority of the killed media workers.

In both 2024 and 2025, when the data was broken down, an entirely different story emerged — revealing that Israel was not targeting journalists, but rather terrorists who posed a threat to national security and hid under the guise of a press vest.

Israel has been releasing evidence of terrorists posing as journalists for the past two-and-a-half years. Why did it take terrorist organizations publishing their own obituaries for the CPJ to recognize what has been public information all along?

CPJ expects the full review of journalists to be done in July. HonestReporting will be ready to remind them, once again, that shielding terrorists from scrutiny for more than two years is not an oversight — it is a moral failure.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.