While genocide and Holocaust scholars, international and Israel-based human rights groups, and a United Nations expert panel have declared that Israel has been carrying out a genocide in Gaza since October 2023—with violence continuing in the exclave and the West Bank despite a ceasefire—the signatories said that "the United States has operated as a key partner in Israel’s war, providing the weapons that enabled the genocide to continue."
The US government's continued support for Israel, they suggested, would likely not have been possible without the Times.
"There is no American media institution more influential than the New York Times," reads the letter unveiled Monday. "Editors and producers in newsrooms across the West take cues from its coverage, it uniquely shapes political consensus on US foreign policy, and it is widely considered the 'paper of record' in the United States. The politicians who vote to ship 500-pound bombs to Israel do not read emails from their constituents. They read the Times."
But before Israel began its assault on Gaza in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack, killing at least 68,527 Palestinians and engineering a famine that was declared in August in parts of the exclave, the Times "has revised, elided, and whitewashed the history of Zionism since even before 1948," the signatories said.
"The politicians who vote to ship 500-pound bombs to Israel do not read emails from their constituents. They read the Times."
Since 2023, the Times has "routinely collaborated with Israel," they said, including by publishing a "widely debunked investigation titled "Screams Without Words" shortly after Hamas' attack on southern Israel. The article was written with the substantial involvement of two inexperienced freelancers based in Israel, and the family members of a woman whose story was central to the reporting called into question allegations that she'd been sexually assaulted during the attack. The lead reporter, Jeffrey Gettleman, also made comments after the story was published, saying he did not describe the story as containing "evidence." The Times also later reported that video evidence "undercut" some other details in the investigation, but never published a retraction or correction.
The signatories also wrote that the Times has "reprinted outright lies from Israeli officials while withholding or amending coverage at the behest of the Israeli consulate and pro-Israel lobby groups," and has directed journalists to avoid terms like "slaughter" and "ethnic cleansing" when referring to the attacks on Gaza, as well as avoiding identifying targets as "refugee camps."
"We demand that the Times take accountability, update its editorial standards, and mitigate the harm done to the Palestinian people," reads the letter. "The paper’s editors must do their jobs and tell the truth about Israel’s genocide."
Saeed said in a social media post that the Times has an "aura of authority that has allowed it to remain complicit in crime after crime, with near impunity."
"It should be shameful to be a part of and uphold this institution that intentionally has manufactured justifications and propaganda for the extermination of the Palestinian nation," Saeed said.
The signatories made specific demands, calling on the Times editorial board to:
- Conduct a formal review of anti-Palestinian bias in its reporting, develop new editorial standards for its coverage of Palestine, and bar journalists who have served in the Israel Defense Forces from reporting on its wars;
- Retract "Screams Without Words" due to its inclusion of "unevidenced claims" of sexual assault that were central to the story; and
- Call for a US arms embargo on Israel.
"Since the editorial board finally backed a ceasefire in January of 2025—after more than a year of genocide—that position was adopted by a number of lawmakers and finally implemented this October," reads the letter. "The US must cut off the arms shipments that make Israel’s crimes possible, and the Times editorial board should use its significant influence to call for the end of American weapons transfers to Israel."
In a statement accompanying the letter, the signatories quoted the Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat—one of at least 248 journalists who have been killed in Gaza since October 2023.
“Language makes genocide justifiable. A reason why we are still being bombed after 243 days is because of the New York Times and most Western media,” Shabat wrote.
The signatories said that "as Palestinians in Gaza return to their homes and take stock of the destruction Israel has wrought with two years of airstrikes, massacres, and starvation, it is our responsibility in the West to hold complicit institutions to account for these crimes."
"As much as any weapons manufacturer," they wrote, "the media is part of the machinery of war, producing the impunity and bigotry that enables and sustains it."
