How Israel Used AI to Relentlessly Murder Palestinian Journalists and Their Families in Their Homes

Reprinted from Andy Worthington’s website . A composite image via the CPJ website featuring some of the journalists killed from October 2023 to early January 2024: Clockwise from top left: Hamza Al-Dahdouh, mourned by his father, Al Jazeera’s Wael Al-Dahdouh, Mohammed Sobh and Saeed Al-Taweel, Hassouneh Salim and Sari Mansour, Mohammed Abu Hatab, and Al-Jazeera’s Samer Abu Daqqa. It’s worse than we thought. In research that I have undertaken over the last few weeks based on information compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) about Palestinian journalists killed by Israel since October 2023, I’ve discovered that, of the 68 Palestinian journalists killed by Israel in the first three months of their genocidal campaign, the majority were targeted and killed while at home with their families. My research provides startling confirmation, never unearthed before, of the widespread use of Israel’s AI program, dubbed “Where’s Daddy?”, specifically for journalists, relentlessly targeting them when they were at home, with a complete disregard both for their required protection as civilians under international humanitarian law, and for the often extensive “collateral damage” inflicted on their families. There is no doubt that Israel’s sustained genocidal assault on the largely civilian population of the Gaza Strip, now in its fourth year, has been the deadliest military conflict for journalists in human history. As the journalist Nick Turse reported for Brown University’s “Costs of War” project in April 2025, “The war in Gaza has, since October 7, 2023, killed more journalists than the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined.” Under international humanitarian law , as most noticeably enshrined in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977, “Civilian journalists engaged in professional missions in areas of armed conflict must be respected and protected as long as they are not taking a direct part in hostilities .” (emphasis added). The State of Israel, however, has nothing but contempt for international humanitarian law. As far as they are concerned, everyone who works for a media outlet that is, in any way, aligned with the military wing of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or any other militant faction in Gaza, is a terrorist, and can be targeted and killed, and anyone who works as a journalist but has previously had any suspected involvement with any of these military factions in any kind of capacity can also be targeted and killed. Israel doesn’t recognize that, by the same application of its lawless logic, almost every journalist in Israel could be regarded similarly by the Palestinians, because military service is mandatory in Israel. Most crucially, however, it fails to recognize that, if an individual has, in the past, been a part of a Palestinian military faction in any way, that doesn’t apply endlessly as a justification for their targeted killing. If they don a press vest and begin reporting, international humanitarian law makes it clear, as noted above, that they cannot be regarded as a legitimate military target unless they are specifically “taking a direct part in hostilities.” In a cynical, devious and sustained effort to erase these distinctions, Israel has targeted and killed journalists for what it regards as “suspicious activity” — using drones to secure footage or photos, for example, or using vantage points on buildings, both for the overview they provide, but also, often, to secure transmission signals in an environment in which internet and mobile phone signals are often notoriously unreliable. It has also, increasingly, resorted to black propaganda, alleging, almost entirely without providing evidence, that the journalists it has killed were not journalists at all, but were military operatives masquerading as journalists, and it has sometimes targeted these journalists directly, texting or calling them to tell them to stop their work or threatening them that, if they don’t stop, they or their families will be targeted and killed. One reason why Israel feels empowered to so comprehensively erase the distinctions between combatants and civilians is because, since the 1990s, western governments (including the US in 1997, the EU in 2003, and the UK in 2021) have obligingly designed the whole of Hamas as a terrorist organization — not just its military wing, but also the whole of the civilian administrative government in Gaza. Since October 7, 2023, this has allowed to Israel to claim that, for example, doctors and medical staff can — if a devious enough excuse can be invented — be regarded as terrorists because they work for the Ministry of Health. This is a western-approved betrayal of the absolute prohibition on targeting doctors or hospitals, which Israel has thoroughly embraced, making risible and never-proven claims that the hospitals were Hamas control and command centres, and that the doctors, like the journalists, were not actually doctors at all, but were military operatives pretending to be doctors. Israel’s “war” on journalists For the west, Israel’s “war” on journalists largely flew under the radar in the early months of the genocide, because those killed were mostly broadcasting in Arabic. However, it began to gain international attention on December 15, 2023, when Wael Al-Dahdouh, the avuncular man-mountain who was Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, was wounded in a missile strike in Khan Younis in which his cameraman, Samer Abu Daqqa, was killed , as they were reporting on an overnight strike on a former UN school sheltering displaced people. 15 members of Al-Wahdouh’s extended family of 45 — including his wife, Amna, his 15-year-old son Mahmoud, his seven year-old daughter Sham, and his 18 month-old grandson Adam — had already been killed on October 25 , after they had obeyed an evacuation order and had moved to a relative’s home in the Nuseirat refugee camp on October 13, where they were subsequently targeted. There was more heartbreak to come. Three weeks after Wael Al-Dahdouh was wounded, on January 7, 2024, his eldest son, Hamza, also working for Al Jazeera, was targeted and murdered , with Mustafa Thuraya, a freelance video journalist, in an Israeli drone strike as they were returning from an assignment. Journalist casualties continued to mount throughout 2024, although, as in the first three months of the genocide, most were working for Arabic-speaking broadcasters, and western concerns only spiked when those broadcasting in English, or who had developed a following on social media appealing to both Arabic- and English-speaking audiences, were killed — Al Jazeera journalists Ismail Al-Ghou l and his cameraman, Rami Al-Rifi, on July 31, 2024, and Ahmed Al-Louh on December 15. In addition, on October 8 and 9, two other Al Jazeera cameraman, Ali Al-Attar and Fadi Al-Wahidi, were severely wounded , with Al-Wahidi ending up paralyzed after he was shot in the neck by a sniper. 2025 was, however, the year that Israel threw all caution to the winds, as, in March, it deliberately broke a six-week ceasefire to resume military action in a savagely depraved manner. On March 24, the luminous Hossam Shabat , just 23 years old, was targeted and murdered, and, on August 11, the most tenacious reporter of all, Anas al-Sharif , was targeted and murdered with six others, including three of his Al Jazeera colleagues, in a deliberate attack on a clearly-marked and well-known media tent outside the main gate of Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital. Israel had been pursuing these journalists with threats and lies since its genocidal assault on Gaza began. In November 2023, as CPJ described it, Al-Sharif “received multiple calls from Israeli army officers instructing him to cease coverage and leave northern Gaza, as well as voice notes disclosing his location”, and on December 11, 2023, an Israeli airstrike hit his family home, killing his 90 year-old father. On October 23, 2024, at the height of Israel’s savage “genocide within a genocide” in northern Gaza, which the world only knew about because of the journalists’ incredible bravery, he, Hossam Shabat and four other Al Jazeera journalists were smeared as “Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists” in a farcical post on X by the IDF. As the threats to Al-Sharif from November 2023 show, however, Israeli forces always knew where the journalists were, and waited to kill them until, presumably, they thought it would have the maximum impact. In another atrocity, on August 25, 2025, just two weeks after the killing of Anas Al-Sharif and his colleagues, five more journalists — including Al Jazeera’s Mohammad Salama, Reuters cameraman Hussam al-Masri, and Mariam Abu Daqqa, a freelance journalist working for the Associated Press at the time — were killed by Israel in a “double-tap” attack on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in which at least 21 people in total were killed. Israel’s risible excuses for the attack were thoroughly dismantled in a searing Reuters report published a month later. This was a low point for Israel, from which, I believe it will never recover, because some of these journalists — Hossam Shabat and Anas Al-Sharif in particular — were so beloved internationally that their memories are impervious to Israel’s depraved and risible black propaganda, which has sought — and still seeks — to portray them as military operatives who were only masquerading as journalists. In the cases of Hossam Shabat and Anas Al-Sharif, who indefatigably covered every atrocity in Gaza that they could find, and who never stopped reporting, even during the “genocide within a genocide” in northern Gaza, from October 2024 to January 2025, when Israel ordered everyone to evacuate, and declared that everyone who remained could be summarily executed as “enemy combatants”, they refused to comply, and clearly had no time whatsoever to be engaged in any kind of military activity, as they risked their lives on a daily basis in the most tireless acts of frontline journalism imaginable. Israel’s desperate and risible attempts to reclaim the narrative Undeterred, however, Israel capitalized on posts made by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, in May and June this year, “announcing the deaths of its fighters during the war”, as the Times of Israel explained on June 22, to launch a renewed media onslaught on the Palestinian journalists it had murdered. Obligingly, the Israeli newspaper declared that it had undertaken a review “of many of the hundreds of names of operatives published on official Hamas and PIJ military-wing Telegram channels and affiliated accounts”, and had “found several people who had previously been identified as journalists, or other civilians.” The disclosures prompted a huge backlash, mainly aimed at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which, since 1981, has been assiduously monitoring journalists who are killed or imprisoned while doing their jobs, or while seeking to uphold press freedom. In the wake of the furore, the CPJ conducted a thorough review of its list of Palestinian journalists killed since October 7, 2023, removing 19 individuals who it judged to have been “engaged in combat” rather than working as journalists. Nevertheless, CPJ still listed 189 journalists as having been killed by Israel in Gaza since October 2023, a number that still dwarfs the numbers of those killed in any other conflict in human history, and declared , on September 24, “Israel has now killed more journalists and media workers than any other government since CPJ began collecting data in 1992. More press members have died in the combined Israel-Gaza and related regional conflicts than in any other war that CPJ has documented.” As if in retaliation, on October 1 the IDF released “ The Press Files ”, an alleged database of 170 Individuals who, it claimed, while “presented as innocent journalists were, in fact, militants in the military wings of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and other terrorist organizations”, adding, “They presented themselves as legitimate media professionals while serving terrorist organizations that regularly use propaganda and psychological warfare.” The list is, of course, derisory, as the Palestinian political analyst Muhammad Shehada ably verified in an article for Israel’s +972 Magazine , entitled, “Debunking Israel’s latest list of ‘terrorist’