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This government is as guilty as any other
ON SUNDAY 2 November London Freelance Branch held a symposium in partnership with King’s College London’s University College Union branch to mark the annual UNESCO day calling for an end to impunity for crimes against journalists. For an overview of the event see here.
Sangita Myska holds up the name of a journalist killed in Gaza at the close of the event on 2 November
THE CHAIR opened our second panel by referencing the reply we received from the government to our letter to the Prime Minister demanding meaningful action after Israel’s targeted killing of the two Al Jazeera teams and freelances reporting from the Nasser and al Shifa Hospitals in August 2025. The unsigned letter from the Parliamentary Correspondence Team of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office concluded:
The UK government has been clear that Israel has a right to defend itself in accordance with international law. There is no moral equivalence between Israel, a democracy, and Hamas and Lebanese Hizballah [sic], which are terrorist organisations.
The situation in the region continues to evolve rapidly, but please rest assured that we will continue to do all that we can to push for peace.
The Chair pointed out that we had asked specifically about our colleagues at Al Jazeera and others who were reporting for international organisations being targeted on 11 August and on 27 August.
They were, she said, deliberately targeted. “They were targeted in the grounds of Al Shifa and Al Nasser hospitals. Now I want to throw that government response open to the panel for comment, because I think it's a shameful response and absolutely demonstrates why we see impunity everywhere for journalists being tortured and massacred.”
Sangita Myska: I've got to say, whoever wrote that response really needs to go back to PR school, because from a journalistic perspective, that was just one dead cat thrown out after another, wasn't it? It's absolutely fascinating to me that in that response, they decided to throw out a whole set of distractions.
What we're talking about here is the deliberate targeting of journalists during what has been a catastrophic conflict for Palestinians, for Palestinian civilians.
Of course, journalists are considered to be civilian: civilians under international law, and that's why we have the same protections as every other civilian. What we've seen over the last few years, of course, is the Israeli government act with complete impunity – and essentially the slow, un-resisted breakdown of every international framework we have ever had in the world since the establishment of the conventions post World War II, with literally no one doing anything about it.
It's extraordinary to me that our government chose to refer to Hezbollah and Hamas, and that is not what we were talking about.
We were talking about ordinary people going about their work, trying to do the thing that international journalists can't do at the moment, which is be the eyes and the ears of the public, in order that we can get a better understanding of what is happening as a consequence of Israel's military operations, [for which] I will use the word that has essentially gotten banned from almost every single mainstream leader organisation in this country. What we have watched is the slow unfolding – in fact not even that slow, a fairly rapid unfolding – of a genocide.
I say this from the perspective of a mainstream journalist. I have only ever worked for mainstream journalistic outlets. The scale, the veracity of the documentary and the eyewitness evidence that we have points only in one direction.
We do not need to wait another four years for the International Court of Justice to reach a conclusion. Once the United Nations Human Ri ghghts Council published its report, which was thorough and well researched and led by a very, very credible woman, Judge Navi Pillay, it should have been almost undisputed and should have delivered international condemnation of Israel's actions, including the killing of an unprecedented number of our Palestinian colleagues.
Israel's continual pushback is tosay that they aren't journalists; they're all Hamas fighters. The reality on the ground is that anyone who is a fully accredited international journalist had the privilege of getting out before they were killed, leaving Palestinians to do the work of those who in the West we might consider accredited. What we're seeing in my view, is the deliberate dismantling of the reputation of journalists of colour. That's what we're seeing.
I can tell you now, if they were white, the Israeli state would not have been able to get away with discrediting them. The most recent example was Anas al-Sharif, someone who Israel accused of being a Hamas operative, something that Al Jazeera pushed back on hard. Israel has to this day never fully explained why it did a double-tap strike to kill an entire group of journalists.
The UK media went about repeating those lies, and our government did absolutely nothing to push back. And let's just be really clear: this isn't just about the last two years. Israel has been operating with impunity for as long as I can remember.
I had the great privilege of being able to go to Palestine earlier this summer and to the occupied West Bank and to occupied East Jerusalem – which is how it should be termed in every single news report and never is, I might add. I went to the churchyard where Shireen Abu Akleh is buried.
A quick recap: Shireen was probably one of the most famous Middle East reporters in the world. She was a Palestinian American. She was shot through the head by an Israeli soldier in 2022. The FBI is still continuing its investigations. It's now been 30 months – three, zero months – of “investigation” of the targeted killing of an American citizen. Nothing has been done. No Israeli soldier has been held to account. The soldier concerned – the person we believe to be the soldier concerned – was moved out of that unit.
Recently, it was left to Zeteo News, which is an independent media outlet launched by Mehdi Hassan, to conduct an investigation that named the person they thought was most likely to be the culprit. That person was apparently killed in an explosion [in Jenin in the occupied West Bank].
The point I'm making is: once there is a pattern of behaviour, you would expect international governments to step up, and they just don't. I do believe quite a lot of it is to do with racism. I also think this government is as guilty of that as any other government. I honestly, genuinely, do not know what the answer is. I'm hoping someone on this panel might have an idea.
No to impunity our symposium to mark the UNESCO day