Amid the systematic killing of Palestinian and Lebanese journalists, one organisation has been quietly bringing British media workers to Israel.

Journalist Amal Khalil reporting in Lebanon last month (Photo: Mohammed Zaatari/Alamy)

Lobby group taking journalists on propaganda tours of Israel

JOHN McEVOY
23 April 2026

On Wednesday, journalist Amal Khalil and photographer Zeinab Faraj were reporting from southern Lebanon when an Israeli airstrike reportedly hit a car in front of them. 

The two journalists, working for the Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar, were then targeted as they sought shelter in a nearby home. Khalil was killed and Faraj was seriously injured.

Khalil is one of over 259 Palestinian and Lebanese journalists to be killed by Israel since 2023, with the IDF responsible for two-thirds of all journalist killings globally in 2025.

While systematically killing Palestinian journalists, the Israeli government blocked entry of foreign media workers to Gaza, in an effort to create a blackout of its genocidal campaign.

At the same time, an influential lobby group named ELNET has been quietly taking UK journalists on propaganda tours of Israel, Declassified can reveal.

ELNET was created in 2007 to “counter the widespread criticism of Israel in Europe”, and is increasingly seen as the AIPAC of Europe.

The journalists who participated in ELNET delegations to Israel have written for some of Britain’s largest news organisations including the Telegraph, Spectator, and Mail on Sunday.

ELNET has also taken former British military officers to Israel, with many of them returning to Britain and putting a positive spin on the IDF’s operations in Gaza.

Des Freedman, professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, told Declassified: “Journalists can try to claim that these are fact-finding visits but, in reality, they are junkets specifically deigned to generate pro-Israel coverage.

“Embedded journalism like this is dodgy in peacetime but utterly scandalous during a genocide when the rest of the world’s media have been locked out of Gaza. 

“At the very least, just as the UK competition regulator insists that paid-for content must be ‘clearly labelled’, the same should apply to news stories that are made possible by well-funded supporters of the Israeli regime”.

ELNET...    

READ MORE   https://www.declassifieduk.org/lobby-group-taking-journalists-on-propaganda-tours-of-israel/

Know Her Name: Shireen Abu Akleh [a prominent Palestinian-American Journalist] spent 25 years making sure people could not claim they did not know what was happening. Then she was killed by Israeli military fire doing exactly that.

Know Her Name

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On the morning of May 11 2022, Shireen Abu Akleh put on her press vest, marked clearly with the word PRESS, and went to cover an Israeli military raid in Jenin. She was shot in the head within minutes of arriving.

She was one of the most recognisable journalists in the Arab world, a face millions trusted for over two decades on Al Jazeera. The bullet that killed her came from Israeli military fire. Multiple investigations, including one by the United States government, confirmed it. Israel called it unintentional. No one was charged.

Abu Akleh had reported from Palestinian territories since 1997, covering the second intifada, the siege of Ramallah and the daily reality of life under occupation when few Western outlets were present. Her death triggered a global outcry. At her funeral in Jerusalem, Israeli police beat mourners carrying her coffin. The images circled the world before her body reached the ground.

She spent 25 years making sure people could not claim they did not know what was happening. Then she was killed doing exactly that.

Follow Know Her Name — a new name every day.

#KnowHerName #WomensHistory #PressFreedom

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"Are the crimes of the Israeli state representative of all Jewish people? I personally refuse to believe that is the case." Statement from Pulitzer Prize-winning Palestinian writer and poet from Gaza, Mosab Abu Toha, in response to LeMoyne College's President's email

"As scholars of genocide, we must state plainly that “genocide” is a legal, historical, and analytical concept. Its application may be debated, but the term is not in itself hateful speech. It is especially troubling to suggest so in the present case, where questions concerning genocidal acts are the subject of ongoing international legal proceedings and the destruction of Gaza continues." 

Letter from the Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network to Le Moyne College in support of Mosab Abu Toha ... READ MORE 

https://substack.com/@mosababutoha/note/c-252340025 

 

Mosab Abu Toha 

@mosababutoha

Pulitzer Prize-winning Palestinian writer and poet from Gaza.

 

More crimes funded by the US on the way

Mosab Abu Toha

Apr 30, 2026

---

Today, the “Israeli Defense Ministry” confirmed that 6,500 tons of U.S. military equipment just arrived at the ports of Ashdod and Haifa.

To put that in perspective, while thousands of tons of ammunition move freely, Gaza’s hospitals are running on empty. If the U.S. administration had both interest and power to save human lives in Gaza, here is what they could address:

🚨The Basics of Survival: Nearly half of all insulin, blood pressure, and asthma medications are gone. People are gasping for air or falling into diabetic shock without help.

🚨The Impossible Choice: 70% of cancer drugs have vanished. Doctors are being forced to stop treatment and tell patients there’s nothing more they can do.

🚨Surgery Without Relief: There is a desperate shortage of anesthesia and painkillers. Surgeries are being performed without the bare essentials—no sutures, no sterile gauze, no relief.... READ MORE  https://substack.com/home/post/p-196011095

 

Mosab Abu Toha   I am so heartbroken.

Israel has just shot my 30-year-old aunt in the chest while she was sitting with her three young children in a school shelter in Jabalia Camp. She is in critical condition; the bullet pierced her chest and exited through her back, devastating her lungs and spleen.

At the moment she was hit, she was holding her one-year-old son. He fell from her lap as she collapsed and was found bleeding from one of his ears.

I just spoke with my uncle, who told me that Israel has been using subsonic bullets lately. He said his sister is the second mother in the camp to be shot in the chest today.

Please pray for her and our family. Her husband was abducted by Israel in November 2024, and we still have no word on his condition.

https://substack.com/@mosababutoha/note/c-251683200

 

Mosab Abu Toha in response to LeMoyne College's President's email to students today*****

This is deeply shameful. I cannot believe what I am reading.

How dare you tell a person who survived a genocide that they cannot speak about it?

On April 15, I had the honor of visiting and speaking at Le Moyne College. I spoke about my lived experience in Gaza, shared the family trees of those killed by Israel, and read my poems. I also played the actual recordings of Israeli airstrikes and artillery shelling that I documented myself while on the ground in Gaza.

This morning, the President of the college sent out an email condemning my use of the word GENOCIDE when describing these crimes. She claimed that using that word is "antisemitic." She stated that she recognized the "real hurt" that the word caused to Jewish students.

Seriously? Are the crimes of the Israeli state representative of all Jewish people? I personally refuse to believe that is the case.

It is utterly ridiculous to begin a letter by stating that your institution welcomes the "free exchange of ideas," only to immediately condemn a speaker, not for sharing abstract ideas, but for sharing his own life. I still carry the physical wounds of a 2009 airstrike on my neck, my forehead, and my cheek. My wife and I have lost over one hundred relatives, most of them children. Some of them have still not been buried.

Who are these students you are talking about... READ MORE 

https://substack.com/@mosababutoha/note/c-250588146 

 

Mosab Abu Toha 

@mosababutoha

Pulitzer Prize-winning Palestinian writer and poet from Gaza.

 https://substack.com/@mosababutoha

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Three journalists among 11 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. Reporters had been in car on way to new camp, says media group, as two 13-year-old boys killed in separate incidents ... Israeli forces have killed at least 466 Palestinians in Gaza since the ceasefire took effect in October, according to health authorities.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/21/three-journalists-palestinians-killed-israeli-forces-gaza 

Mourners carry the body of one of three Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza. Photograph: Haitham Imad/EPA

Hospitals in Gaza say Israeli forces killed at least 11 Palestinians on Wednesday, including two 13-year-old boys and three journalists, in the latest violence to undermine a three-month-old ceasefire.

Palestinian health officials said the Israeli airstrike killed three Palestinian journalists who were travelling in a car to film a newly established displacement camp in the Netzarim area of central Gaza.

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said in a statement that the reporters who died “were carrying out a humanitarian, journalistic mission to film and document the suffering of civilians”.

In separate incidents on the same day, two boys aged 13 were killed in different parts of Gaza. In one strike, a boy, his father and a 22-year-old man were hit by Israeli drones on the eastern edge of the Bureij refugee camp, according to officials at al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir al-Balah, which received the bodies.

In another case, a 13-year-old boy, Moatsem al-Sharafy, was shot dead by Israeli troops while collecting firewood in the eastern town of Bani Suheila, according to Nasser hospital. Footage shared online showed the boy’s father weeping over his body on a hospital bed.

The journalists killed were named as Mohammed Salah Qashta, Abdul Raouf Shaat and Anas Ghneim.

Shaat was a regular contributor to Agence France-Presse as a photo and video journalist, although the agency said he was not on assignment at the time of the strike.

Local journalists said their work was sponsored by the Egyptian Relief Committee, which oversees Egypt’s relief operations in Gaza. Mohammed Mansour, a spokesperson for the committee, said the vehicle had been known to the Israeli military.

Video circulating online showed a burned-out vehicle by the roadside, with smoke still rising from the wreckage and debris scattered across the ground... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/21/three-journalists-palestinians-killed-israeli-forces-gaza

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"In July, international agencies warned of the danger he was in as the Israel Defense Forces stepped up online attacks, falsely labelling him a Hamas terrorist." It was lethal to be in Gaza this year, and deadly for those who tried to tell the world

A protester holds a photo of Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif during a march in New York, 16 August 2025. Photograph: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

The Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif was the most prominent name among so many targeted for simply bearing witness to the truth

Jane Martinson 

in The Guardian

In January this year, Anas al-Sharif was filmed being lifted into the air after taking off his helmet and flak jacket to celebrate a ceasefire that would prove all too temporary in Gaza. This summer, the Palestinian journalist broke down while reporting on starvation in his home town that is now a war zone. A bystander told him: “Persist, Anas, you are our voice”.

But al-Sharif’s popularity in Gaza made him a target. In July, international agencies warned of the danger he was in as the Israel Defense Forces stepped up online attacks, falsely labelling him a Hamas terrorist. His employer, Al Jazeera, insisted he restrict his reporting to the more protected al-Shifa hospital after his father and many colleagues were killed. In August, a few months short of his 29th birthday, al-Sharif and six others were killed in a direct attack on a media tent next to the hospital. In a posthumous post he said: “If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice.”

Anas al-Sharif is just one of 67 media professionals who were killed in 2025 while doing their jobs, identified by press freedom advocates Reporters Without Borders (RSF) in its annual report on journalists’ safety. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) goes even further – they found 111 journalists have been killed in 2025, nearly half in Gaza.

Each one of these deaths is a tragedy, an abuse of the right of journalists to bear witness. Yet it is worth remembering the story of al-Sharif, not least because he became one of the highest profile examples of the tactic of discrediting journalists by accusing them of bias.... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/22/palestinian-reporters-journalist-killings-al-jazeera-anas-al-sharif

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Young lives cut short on an unimaginable scale: the 18,457 children on Gaza’s list of war dead- Many of the children who survived attacks have life-changing wounds... More than 40,000 children have been injured in the war, according to the UN. Gaza is now home to more child amputees than any other place in the world.

The children’s names below appear on a list of victims of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, maintained by health authorities in the territory. As of the end of July it ran to 60,199 names, of whom 18,457 were under 18s. Far from comprehensive, the list does not include the thousands still buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings, as well as the war’s many indirect victims....

...  compiled using the 31 July 2025 edition of the list of names of the dead, published by Gaza’s Ministry of Health. The list records those killed as a direct result of the Israeli bombardment, not those who die as an indirect result of the war, through starvation or other causes. It does not include bodies that could not be identified or did not pass through a hospital morgue.

For the list of names in this story story we filtered the data to include only individuals under the age of 18. English transliterations of the original Arabic names were sourced from Iraq Body Count, a public database of violent civilian deaths.

Photo credit: Courtesy of the families, aside from the picture of Hind Rajab which was provided by AFP.

READ MORE   https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/oct/08/young-lives-cut-short-on-an-unimaginable-scale-the-18457-children-on-gazas-list-of-war-dead

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Israeli soldiers speak out on killings of Gaza civilians

IDF soldiers tell documentary of opening fire unprovoked and arbitrary designations of who was an enemy

Israeli soldiers have described a free-for-all in Gaza and a breakdown in norms and legal constraints, with civilians killed at the whim of individual officers, according to testimony in a TV documentary.

“If you want to shoot without restraint, you can,” Daniel, the commander of an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) tank unit, says in Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War, due to be broadcast in the UK on ITV on Monday evening.

Some of the IDF soldiers who talked to the programme requested anonymity while others spoke on the record. All pointed to the evaporation of the official code of conduct concerning civilians.

The soldiers who agreed to talk confirmed the IDF’s routine use of human shields, contradicting official denials, and gave details of Israeli troops opening fire unprovoked on civilians racing to reach food handouts at the militarised distribution points set up by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/10/israeli-soldiers-breaking-ranks-gaza-civilians-human-shields

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Foreign journalists are still not allowed in Gaza & Israeli Settlers nearly club a Palestinian woman to death in the West Bank ... Arwa Mahdawi

 ".... Foreign journalists are still not allowed in Gaza

The Foreign Press Association (FPA) has said it is disappointed in the Israeli supreme court’s decision to grant the state of Israel another delay regarding the independent entry of journalists into Gaza. It’s a shame that more journalists in the western media aren’t screaming at the top of their lungs about the murders of their colleagues in Gaza and this assault on press freedom – not to mention the fact that Israel is still not allowing adequate aid into Gaza. At the very least, the western media should be asking what it is that Israel doesn’t want reporters to see. Evidence of torture, perhaps?

Settlers nearly club a Palestinian woman to death

The United Nations office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs recorded 71 incidents of Israeli settler violence against Palestinians and their property in the occupied West Bank across just one week. These include a brutal attack on a 55-year-old woman that was caught on camera...."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/25/why-is-trump-demolishing-the-white-houses-east-wing-because-he-wants-to 

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