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journalists
Israel Admits It ‘Photoshopped’ Image to Portray Assassinated Lebanese Journalist as Hezbollah Operative
The Committee to Protect Journalists regional director called the killing part of “a disturbing pattern” of “Israel accusing journalists of being active combatants and terrorists without providing credible evidence.”
Mar 30, 2026
An Israel Defense Forces spokesperson has admitted that the military posted a "photoshopped" image of a Lebanese journalist killed in an airstrike in order to portray him as a Hezbollah operative.
On Saturday, three journalists—Ali Shuaib, a veteran correspondent for Al-Manar TV; Fatima Ftouni of the Al Mayadeen channel; and her brother, cameraman Mohammad Ftouni—were killed when four precision missiles hit their car on the Jezzine Road in Southern Lebanon. Several other reporters were injured in the attack.
According to Al Jazeera, the vehicle was clearly marked "press."
In the following hours, the IDF's official social media account posted that it had "ELIMINATED" Shuaib in the attack.
"For years, Ali Hassan Shuaib operated as a Hezbollah Radwan Force terrorist under the guise of a journalist," the post read. "Turns out the 'press vest' was just a cover for terror."
The post, which has more than 2.1 million views on X as of Monday, featured a split image showing Shuaib in a press outfit on one side and in a Hezbollah military uniform on the other.
But according to Fox News' chief foreign correspondent, Trey Yingst, the network later asked the IDF about the photo's source. They were told: "Unfortunately, there isn't really a picture of it. It was photoshopped."
On Monday, Israel issued another statement claiming that Mohammad Ftouni was "an additional terrorist in Hezbollah's military wing, who also operated under the guise of a journalist."
But when asked for evidence to confirm this by the Agence France-Presse, it provided none, with a spokesperson saying, "What we have is what we can state."
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) regional director Sara Qudah called the killings part of "a disturbing pattern in this war and in the decades prior [of] Israel accusing journalists of being active combatants and terrorists without providing credible evidence."
Israel accused Shuaib of "consistently working to expose the locations of IDF troops operating in southern Lebanon and along the border, and maintain[ing] continuous contact with other terrorists in the Radwan Force unit in particular, and within the terror organization in general.”
American journalist Ryan Grim, the co-founder of Drop Site News, said: "The Israeli statement itself says that his 'crime' was reporting on troop locations and communicating with sources in Hezbollah. That is called war reporting."
According to a report last month by CPJ, a record 129 journalists were killed in 2025, and Israel was responsible for two-thirds of the worldwide total.
The vast majority of those killed have been Palestinian journalists in Gaza—at least 261 of whom have been killed since October 7, 2023—according to a running tally by the International Federation of Journalists. At least 11 journalists have also been killed in Lebanon since 2023.
In addition to Shuaib and the Ftounis, two others have been killed since Israel's latest onslaught in Lebanon after Hezbollah retaliated against US-Israeli attacks on Iran. Israeli attacks have also resulted in the deaths of photojournalist Hussain Hamood and journalist Mohammed Sherri this month.
An investigation last year by +972 and the Israeli outlet Local Call revealed that the IDF has an informal unit known as the "Legitimization Cell,” which seeks to find tenuous links between journalists and militant groups to justify assassinating them.
As one source explained, the cell's members seek out reporters they believe are “smearing [Israel’s] name in front of the world" by reporting evidence of the country's conduct.
While Al-Manar is the official news outlet for Hezbollah and Al Mayadeen is considered to be closely tied with the militia, Qudah noted that under international law, "journalists are not legitimate targets, regardless of the outlet they work for.”
In less than a month, Israeli attacks in Lebanon have killed more than 1,100 people, including at least 121 children, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
Many pieces of civilian infrastructure—including hospitals, schools, and residential buildings—have been attacked, and Israel has issued forced evacuation orders that have led more than 1 million people to be displaced from their homes.
On the same day that the three journalists were attacked, the World Health Organization reported that nine paramedics were killed across southern Lebanon in a series of attacks on healthcare infrastructure.
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said that by attacking civilian workers carrying out their professional duties, Israel has violated “the most basic rules of international law."
He called it “a blatant crime that violates all norms and treaties under which journalists are granted international protection during armed conflicts."
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Israel Responsible for Two-Thirds of Journalist Deaths in 2025: Press Freedom Group
The number of journalists killed by Israel is remarkably high even when compared to the number of journalists killed in other conflict zones.
Feb 26, 2026
A new report from a major press freedom group has found that a record 129 journalists were killed in 2025, and that Israel was responsible for two-thirds of the worldwide total.
The Tuesday report from the Committee to Protect Journalists says that the Israeli military has cumulatively killed more journalists than any other government since CPJ started tracking reporter deaths in 1992, with the vast majority being Palestinian media workers in Gaza.
The report also finds an increase in the use of drones to attack journalists, with Israel accounting for more than 70% of the 39 documented instances of reporters killed by drone strikes.
The number of journalists killed by Israel is remarkably high even when compared to the number of journalists killed in other conflict zones.
Only nine journalists were killed in Sudan, for example, while just four journalists were killed in Ukraine, despite both countries being in the midst of brutal conflicts that have collectively killed hundreds of thousands of people.
A report issued in December by Reporters Without Borders similarly found that Israel was responsible for the most journalists deaths in 2025, the third consecutive year that the country had held that distinction.
The CPJ report also points the finger at governments for not taking their responsibilities to protect journalists seriously.
"The rising number of journalist deaths globally is fueled by a persistent culture of impunity," the report states. "Very few transparent investigations have been conducted into the 47 cases of targeted killings (classified as 'murder' in CPJ’s longstanding methodology) documented by CPJ in 2025—the highest number of journalists deliberately killed for their work in the past decade—and no one has been held accountable in any of the cases."
CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg said that attacks on the media are "a leading indicator of attacks on other freedoms, and much more needs to be done to prevent these killings and punish the perpetrators," adding that "we are all at risk when journalists are killed for reporting the news.”
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Beware: They Are Coming for the Journalists
Suppressing the Free Press won’t be easy, but that doesn't mean they won't try.
Jan 20, 2026
‘First they came for the journalists and then we don’t know what happened’ is an ironic take on a chilling post- World War II German minister’s confessional, only a bit less amusing today. Last Wednesday, the FBI, under the control of Trump loyalist Kash Patel, raided the home of Washington Post journalist Hannah Natanson seeking to identify her sources. She’s been the Post’s lead reporter covering the Administration’s approach to government workers. Among the items they seized were her cell phone and personal and Washington Post issued laptops.
I remember years ago leading a journalism training in Turkey for colleagues from around the Black Sea and going over some of the basics of investigative reporting including always keeping good notes and tapes stored and dated including by year as some stories become beats that can continue over a lifetime. Sergei Kiselyov, a Ukrainian colleague, offered an addendum, “I’d just suggest you also keep your notes and files somewhere other than your home or office so that when the police come to look for them, they won’t be there.” This tip should now be seriously considered by working reporters across the U.S.
While the Washington Post editorial board immediately identified the FBI raid as an attempt to suppress freedom of the press the billionaire owner of the newspaper—Amazon’s Jeff Bezos—who’s increasingly allied himself and his business interests with President Trump—has failed to comment on the raid. This is in stark contrast to a former owner Katherine Graham, who famously stood up to President’ Nixon’s attempts to silence the Post’s coverage of the Watergate Scandal.
As attempts at intimidation of the press increase, including physical intimidation while covering citizen protests, I’m reminded of another journalistic technique we might need to employ to circumvent the growing threat of censorship. During the years I covered wars in Central America my local colleagues were more likely to be killed or have their offices blown up for what they reported. They found it was safer for them to reprint stories from the foreign press and so many provided their stories to their overseas colleagues to be printed elsewhere so that they could then run them at home. Something similar happened with the Pentagon Papers in 1971when after a court injunction stopped the New York Times from continuing to print them the Washington Post and then other newspapers around the nation begin disseminating the unpublished portions until the Supreme Court (a very different Supreme Court from today’s) ruled that the government could not stop the press from publishing classified papers. Interestingly the raid on reporter Natanson’s home is being justified as a search for the source of classified papers.
While in today’s media environment, most reporters are more likely to be laid off than jailed, social media still offers a convenient means to disseminate news that the government (or media owners and their minions aligned with the government) might attempt to suppress.
Despite some of the billionaire allies of Donald Trump now controlling media outlets including the Washington Post, New York Post, CBS News, Fox News and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, plus the willingness of others to settle the President’s frivolous lawsuits to win his favor, most of the so-called “media elite” or “corporate media” is made up of working journalists.
The average salary of a full-time journalist is $86,000 a year while freelancers, who make up a third of what the Department of Labor says are 45,000 working US journalists, average $61,000 a year, this according to the job recruitment company Zippia. So, much like school teachers, people who choose journalism as a career path are more likely to be dedicated to their calling than to getting rich. In this case, their vocation is the free and accurate dissemination of truth and holding of power accountable as envisioned by the founders of the United States 250 years ago. They even made press freedom explicit in the First Amendment of the Constitution.
And while the commitment to a free press now comes with growing risks, it’s unlikely to be fatally shaken by those who would seek to undermine that freedom, send agents of the state to disrupt journalists’ work, gas or pepper spray them, sue or jail reporters or slander the working press assigned to cover them as ‘fake news’ ‘enemies of the people’, ‘stupid’ or ‘piggie.’
Reporters, whether being killed in Gaza and Ukraine or simply being excluded from the White House and Pentagon Press rooms, will continue to fight for their cause which is neither liberal nor conservative but simply the public’s right to know.
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