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SOS: Migrants Awaiting Deportation Use Their Bodies to Cry for Help
The 31 men were nearly deported earlier this month before the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to return them to a detention facility in Texas.
Apr 30, 2025
Ten days after a U.S. Supreme Court order forced buses carrying dozens of Venezuelan migrants to an airport in Texas to immediately turn around and return them to Bluebonnet Detention Facility in the small city of Anson, 31 of the men formed the letters SOS by standing in the detention center's dirt yard.
As Reuters reported, the families of several of the men have denied that they are members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, contrary to the Trump administration's claims.
Immigration enforcement agents have detained and expelled numerous people with no criminal records, basing accusations that they're members of Tren de Aragua and MS-13 solely on the fact that they have tattoos in some cases.
After the reprieve from the Supreme Court earlier this month, with the justices ordering the government "not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court," the migrants still face potential deportation to El Salvador's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center under the Alien Enemies Act.
Reuters flew a drone over Bluebonnet in recent days to capture images of the migrants, after being denied access to the facility. One flight captured the men forming the letters—the internationally used distress signal.
Reuters spoke to one of the men, 19-year-old Jeferson Escalona, after identifying him with the drone images.
He was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in January and initially sent to the U.S. migrant detention center at Guantánamo Bay before being transferred to Bluebonnet. A Department of Homeland Security official said, without providing evidence, that he was a "self-admitted" member of Tren de Aragua, but Escalona vehemently denied the claim and told Reuters he had trained to be a police officer in Venezuela before coming to the United States.
"They're making false accusations about me. I don't belong to any gang," he told Reuters, adding that he has asked to return to his home country but has been denied.
"I fear for my life here," he told the outlet. "I want to go to Venezuela."
Earlier this month in a separate decision, the Supreme Court ruled that migrants being deported under the Alien Enemies Act must be provided with due process to challenge their removal.
"Remember," said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, "the Trump administration refuses to give these men a chance to day in court, despite the Supreme Court telling them that they must give people a chance to take their case in front of a judge!"
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DOGE Is Reportedly Spying on Federal Workers With AI Technology
"We have been told they are looking for anti-Trump or anti-Musk language," an anonymous source said of potential surveillance at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Apr 10, 2025
Staff with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency fear that billionaire and presidential adviser Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency is spying on them using artificial intelligence, according to reporting from Reuters, The Guardian, and Crooked Media's newsletter What a Day.
According to Reuters reporting published Tuesday, Trump administration officials told some managers at the EPA that DOGE is rolling out AI to monitor for communications that may be perceived as hostile to U.S. President Donald Trump or Musk, citing two unnamed sources with knowledge of the situation.
According to those two sources, who relayed comments made by Trump-appointed officials in posts at the EPA, DOGE was using AI to monitor communication apps such as Microsoft Teams. "Be careful what you say, what you type, and what you do," an EPA manager said, according to one of the sources.
"We have been told they are looking for anti-Trump or anti-Musk language," a third source told Reuters.
The outlet, however, could not independently confirm whether AI was being implemented.
After the story was published, the EPA told Reuters in a statement that it was "looking at AI to better optimize agency functions and administrative efficiencies." However, the agency said it was not using AI "as it makes personnel decisions in concert with DOGE." The EPA also did not directly address whether it was using AI to snoop on employees.
In response to Reuters' reporting, the government accountability group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington wrote on X, "Let's be clear: the career civil servants who work in the government serve the American people, not Donald Trump."
According to Thursday reporting from The Guardian and Reuters, EPA managers told employees during a Wednesday morning meeting that DOGE is "using AI to scan through agency communications to find any anti-Musk, anti-Doge, or anti-Trump statements," according to an employee who was quoted anonymously.
Since returning to power, Trump has launched an all-out assault on environmental protection, including through cuts to programs and personnel at the EPA. According to The New York Times, the EPA has already undergone a 3% staff reduction so far, but the agency also plans to eliminate its scientific research arm, which would mean dismissing as many as 1,155 scientists, according to reporting from last month. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has also said he would like to cut 65% of the agency's budget.
The Guardian and What a Day also reviewed an email from a manager at the Association of Clean Water Administrators, a group of state and interstate bodies that works with the EPA on water quality and management, which warned workers that meetings with EPA employees might be monitored by AI.
"We recently learned that all EPA phones (landline/mobile), all Teams/Zoom virtual meetings, and calendar entries are being transcribed/monitored," the email states. The recorded information is then fed into an "AI tool" which analyzes and scrutinizes what has been recorded. "I do not know if DOGE is doing the analysis or … the agency itself," according to the author of the email, per The Guardian and What a Day.
The EPA denied that it's recording meetings, but it did not address the question of an AI tool, according to the outlets.
According to The Guardian and What a Day, employees at other agencies also fear they are being surveilled. For example, a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs official warned employees that virtual meetings are being recorded in secret, according to an email reviewed by the two outlets. In February, managers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned some workers to be careful about what they say on calls, per an employee there.
"It's like being in a horror film where you know something out there [wants] to kill you but you never know when or how or who it is," one anonymously quoted employee from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development told The Guardian and What a Day, evoking the climate of fear that is rife among government workers.
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Entities Behind Trump Crypto Coin Made Up to $100 Million in Trading Fees in Under 2 Weeks
"Trump and his cronies get rich while the little guy gets fucked," said one critic.
Feb 03, 2025
Reuters reported Monday that the entities behind U.S. President Donald Trump's cryptocurrency token "generated between $86 million and $100 million in trading fees" from the mid-January launch to the end of the month, sparking a fresh flood of criticism and accusations of grift.
Trump announced the $TRUMP meme coin on the Friday night of the first-ever Crypto Ball in Washington, D.C., ahead of his Monday inauguration. Its market value swiftly soared that weekend, but has since dropped dramatically. Reuters had Chainalysis, Merkle Science, and a third blockchain analytics firm whose founder requested that it not be identified review the blockchain, a public ledger that shows transactions involving the coin.
Merkle Science estimated that three crypto wallets earned $86 million in trading fees from January 17 to January 30, while Chainalysis put it at about $94 million for the same period. The third firm found that by January 29, it was roughly $100 million.
According to Reuters:
One of the entities behind the crypto coin is a company owned by Trump, called CIC Digital. The official website for $TRUMP says CIC Digital will "receive trading revenue derived from trading activities" of the meme coin. Reuters could not determine what portion of the fees so far, if any, had accrued to Trump personally, nor the ownership of the other entities behind the coin.
The creators of the meme coin receive a share of the trading fees from Meteora, a little-known crypto exchange where the $TRUMP coins were first sold, the blockchain analyses showed.
At least 50 of the largest investors in the coin have made profits in excess of $10 million each on the $Trump coin, according to Chainalysis. At the same time, some 200,000 crypto wallets, most with small holdings, lost money on $Trump on the exchange, it said.
Responding to the reporting on the social media platform Bluesky, an account called Trumpflation Tracker declared that "Trump and his cronies get rich while the little guy gets fucked, same story different year."
Software engineer Jonathan McHugh similarly said, "His entire life is one giant grift, most often of people who can least afford it."
Rodrigo Fernandez, a senior researcher at the Amsterdam-based Center for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO), said that "the conflict of interest if obvious—but he managed to flood the zone to such an extend that this detail will go unnoticed."
The White House did not address Reuters' questions about the trading fees; instead, it sent a fact sheet about Trump's executive order on digital financial technology. The news agency noted that the president "has pledged to put his assets in a trust managed by his children on entering the White House" and his son Eric Trump did respond on behalf of the Trump Organization.
Eric Trump told Reuters that he is proud of what "we continue to accomplish in crypto. $TRUMP is currently the hottest digital meme on Earth." Echoing his previous comments on the coin, the president's son added that "we are just getting started."
Late last month, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Reich wrote about the $TRUMP coin—as well as the first lady's $MELANIA coin that soon followed—and tied both to the president's related executive order "protecting and promoting" the crypto industry.
"In effect, Trump is writing the rules for a business venture from which he and his family are personally profiting. It could earn them hundreds of billions of dollars," he stressed. "The real significance of such blatant profiteering off the highest office in the land is what it reveals—not just about Trump but about the entire oligarchic enterprise he fronts for. It is likely to contribute to a vast wave of public alarm and disgust."
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The NYT Finds US Complicity in Genocide Unremarkable
By refusing to cover a new U.S. shipment of vast quantities of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, the Times gave a boost to the process of normalizing the slaughter in Gaza, as if this was unnewsworthy.
Apr 02, 2024
When The Washington Post revealed Friday afternoon that “the Biden administration in recent days quietly authorized the transfer of billions of dollars in bombs and fighter jets to Israel,” a lot of people cared. Readers of the story posted more than 10,000 comments on its webpage. A leading progressive site for breaking news, Common Dreams, quickly followed up with coverage under a headline that began with the word “obscene.” Responses on social media were swift and strong; a tweet about the Post scoop from our team at RootsAction received more than 600,000 views.
But at The New York Times—the nation’s purported newspaper of record—one day after another went by as the editors determined that the story about the massive new transfer of weaponry to Israel wasn’t worth reporting on at all. Yet it was solid. A Reuters dispatch said that two sources “confirmed” the Post’s report.
By omission, The New York Times gave a boost to a process of normalizing the slaughter in Gaza, as if shipping vast quantities of 2,000-pound bombs for use to take the lives of Palestinian civilians is unremarkable and unnewsworthy. Just another day at the genocide office.
The refusal of the Times to cover the story after it broke was journalistic malpractice, helping to make it little more than a fleeting one-day story instead of the subject of focused national discourse that it should have been.
The intentional failure of the Times to report the profoundly important news of the huge new shipments of armaments was a tacit signal that the flagrant willingness of Uncle Sam to talk out of both sides of his mouth—assisting with further carnage on a soul-corrupting scale—was no big deal.
At the end of the weekend, I sent an email to the Times managing editor Carolyn Ryan and asked why the newspaper wasn’t covering the story at all. She passed my question along to the Times public-relations manager, who provided only a non-answer on Monday night. Here it is in full: “The New York Times has invested more than any other U.S. newspaper over the past decade to help readers understand the complexities of the Israel-Hamas conflict. We continue to report on events as they develop, both in the region, internationally, and within the U.S. government.”
The complete evasion, laced with self-puffery, reflected the arrogance of media power from the single most influential and far-reaching news outlet in the United States. Rather than amplify the crucial story into the nation’s media echo chamber, the Times opted to quash it.
The saying that “justice delayed is justice denied” has a parallel for news media and war—journalism delayed is journalism denied. The refusal of the Times to cover the story after it broke was journalistic malpractice, helping to make it little more than a fleeting one-day story instead of the subject of focused national discourse that it should have been.
The Post article had laid bare, at a pivotal historic moment, a lethal contradiction within the behavior of top U.S. government official—directly aiding and abetting Israel’s methodical killing of civilians in Gaza while spouting facile platitudes about them.
In its lead sentence, the piece said that the White House had okayed the new shipments of bombs and jets “despite Washington’s concerns about an anticipated military offensive in southern Gaza that could threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians.” The juxtaposition showed just how phony “Washington’s concerns” actually are.
“The new arms packages include more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs, according to Pentagon and State Department officials familiar with the matter,” the Post reported. “The 2,000-pound bombs have been linked to previous mass-casualty events throughout Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.”
The piece quoted an unidentified White House official who, in effect, underscored that all the talk of President Joe Biden’s supposed distress about the ongoing massacres of civilians in Gaza has been a cruel exercise in PR smoke-blowing: “We have continued to support Israel’s right to defend itself. Conditioning aid has not been our policy.”
Translation: We continue to support, with massive military aid, Israel’s prerogative to keep slaughtering Palestinian civilians.
If the Times editors need to grasp just how significantly horrific the 2,000-pound bombs now en route to Israel really are, they could read some reporting from their own newspaper. In December, it described those bombs as “one of the most destructive munitions in Western military arsenals”—a weapon that “unleashes a blast wave and metal fragments thousands of feet in every direction.” Back then, the Times indicated that “Israel used these munitions in the area it designated safe for civilians at least 200 times,” and those 2,000-pound bombs were “a pervasive threat to civilians seeking safety across south Gaza.”
It’s a safe bet that the new transfer of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel would seem more newsworthy to the editors of The New York Times if the lives of their loved ones were at stake.
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Senators Demand Tesla Recalls After 'Alarming' Reuters Reporting
"Tesla must stop blaming customers and recall their malfunctioning vehicles," said Sen. Ed Markey.
Dec 27, 2023
A week after Reuters revealed that "Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts it long knew were defective," the news agency exclusively reported Wednesday that a pair of U.S. senators wrote to billionaire CEO Elon Musk to demand vehicle recalls.
Citing the "alarming" journalistic investigation into the electric vehicle (EV) company, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) expressed "extreme concern following recent reporting about Tesla's knowledge of safety flaws in its vehicles and concealment of the causes of these flaws from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration," or NHTSA.
Based on thousands of internal documents from 2016-22 as well as interviews with over 20 customers and nine former Tesla managers or service technicians, Reuters found that tens of thousands of buyers "have experienced premature failures of suspension or steering parts" and "the chronic failures, many in relatively new vehicles, date back at least seven years and stretch across Tesla's model lineup and across the globe."
Reuters reported that the company, which sells directly to customers and controls many of its service centers, "has denied some of the suspension and steering problems in statements to U.S. regulators and the public—and, according to Tesla records, sought to shift some of the resulting repair costs to customers" with language like "driver abuse" and "vehicle misuse."
Blumenthal and Markey—who have previously written to Musk, the world's richest person, about issues at Tesla and publicly shared concerns about the company—wrote that "we are disturbed that you would blame your customers for these failures."
"It is unacceptable that Tesla would not only attempt to shift the responsibility for the substandard quality of its vehicles to the people purchasing them, but also make that same flawed argument to NHTSA," the pair added, calling on Musk to correct "apparent false and misleading representations" made to the federal agency.
While the CEO and company did not respond to Reuters' requests for comment about the initial findings or the senators' letter, the news agency noted that "Tesla's handling of suspension and steering complaints reflects a pattern across Musk's corporate empire of dismissing concerns about safety or other harms raised by customers, workers, and others as he rushes to roll out new products or expand sales."
Musk's other business ventures include Neuralink, OpenAI, SpaceX, the Boring Company, and X, formerly Twitter.
The senators' recall demand comes as both the Norwegian Public Roads Administration and the Swedish Transport Agency investigate issues with Tesla vehicles. Tesla is also facing further trouble across Scandinavia: Unoinized workers in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden have made clear they won't help the company circumvent a work stoppage launched in October by Swedish service center mechanics.
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Groups Demand Probe of 'Apparently Deliberate' IDF Attack on Journalists
Amnesty International said that the October 13 Israeli tank strike that killed Issam Abdallah and blew the legs off Christina Assi was "likely a direct attack on civilians that must be investigated as a war crime."
Dec 07, 2023
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International on Thursday called for an official investigation of a deadly Israeli attack on a group of journalists, which HRW called "apparently deliberate" and a likely "war crime."
HRW, Amnesty, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse on Thursday all published their own separate investigations into the October 13 Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attack that killed 37-year-old Lebanese Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah and wounded half a dozen other journalists who were covering cross-border clashes between Israeli and Hezbollah troops near the village of Alma al-Shaab in southern Lebanon.
"This is not the first time that Israeli forces have apparently deliberately attacked journalists, with deadly and devastating results."
Reuters determined that an Israeli tank crew "fired two shells in quick succession" at the journalists, who HRW said were "clearly identifiable as members of the media, and had been stationary for at least 75 minutes." HRW "found no evidence of a military target near the journalists' location."
"This is not the first time that Israeli forces have apparently deliberately attacked journalists, with deadly and devastating results," HRW Lebanon researcher Ramzi Kaiss said in a statement. "Those responsible need to be held to account, and it needs to be made clear that journalists and other civilians are not lawful targets."
Amnesty International, meanwhile, asserted that the IDF strike was "likely a direct attack on civilians that must be investigated as a war crime."
The organization said it "verified over 100 videos and photographs, analyzed weapons fragments from the site, and interviewed nine witnesses. The findings indicate that the group was visibly identifiable as journalists and that the Israeli military knew or should have known that they were civilians yet attacked them anyway in two separate strikes 37 seconds apart."
Aya Majzoub, Amnesty's deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, noted that "direct attacks on civilians and indiscriminate attacks are absolutely prohibited by international humanitarian law and can amount to war crimes."
"Those responsible for Issam Abdallah's unlawful killing and the injuring of six other journalists must be held accountable," Majzoub added. "No journalist should ever be targeted or killed simply for carrying out their work. Israel must not be allowed to kill and attack journalists with impunity. There must be an independent and impartial investigation into this deadly attack."
According to HRW:
The journalists interviewed said that the first munition struck Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah and a short concrete wall, killing him instantly and badly injuring an Agence France-Presse photojournalist, Christina Assi. Thirty-seven seconds later, another attack destroyed the car belonging to Al Jazeera, igniting it in flames, and injuring six journalists, including Carmen Joukhadar and Elie Brakhya from Al Jazeera, Dylan Collins and Christina Assi from AFP, and Thaer al-Sudani and Maher Nazeh from Reuters.
Brakhya, an Al Jazeera cameraman, told Amnesty: "I was looking at Issam when we heard the [first] explosion. I saw Issam's body fly, with the glow and the heat behind his back… [I] ran up the hill, heard Christina shouting 'I can't feel my legs,' ran back to where she was, saw Dylan searching for the tourniquet."
Collins, an American deputy editor at Al Jazeera English, said that "as soon as I turned around, I heard Christina's voice saying, 'Oh my God!' I say, 'You're okay.' I ran to her directly and I see that her legs are blown off at the kneecap."
The second Israeli shell exploded as Collins tried to tie a tourniquet around Assi's legs.
"When the second blast hit, I was stunned and dizzy, but in my blurry memory, I remember Issam's leg falling in front of me, I remember looking up and seeing Carmen by the car, her face is black and she is walking like a zombie," he recalled. "Her entire back is covered in shrapnel."
The day after the attacks, IDF spokesperson Richard Hecht said that the Israeli military was "very sorry for the journalist's death."
Presented with Reuters' findings, Hecht later said that "we don't target journalists."
However, Kaiss argued that "the evidence strongly suggests that Israeli forces knew or should have known that the group that they were attacking were journalists."
"This was an unlawful and apparently deliberate attack on a very visible group of journalists," he added.
"They don't want us to see the truth. That's why they're taking out the journalists."
Numerous international observers accused Israeli forces of intentionally targeting journalists in an effort to prevent them from reporting the truth about what many critics call a genocidal war against Palestinians.
"I believe that it is in the military strategy of Israel to kill journalists so that they kill the truth," Lebanese Information Minister Ziad Makary told Reuters.
U.S. journalist Abby Martin told Middle East Eye Wednesday that Israel is "killing the truth."
"They don't want us to see the truth," she said. "That's why they're taking out the journalists."
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) responded to the rights groups' and media probes into the October 13 attacks by demanding an "immediate, independent, and transparent investigation that holds the perpetrators to account."
CPJ cited its May 2023 report, "which showed a pattern of lethal force by the Israel Defense Forces that left 20 journalists dead over the last 22 years. No one was ever held accountable."
According to the report, "The majority of the 20 journalists killed—at least 13—were clearly identified as members of the media or were inside vehicles with press insignia at the time of their deaths."
Since the IDF launched its war on Gaza following the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, CPJ has documented the killing of at least 63 media professionals, including 56 Palestinians, three Lebanese, and four Israelis.
"CPJ emphasizes that journalists are civilians doing important work during times of crisis and must not be targeted by warring parties," said Sherif Mansour, the group's Middle East and North Africa program coordinator.
Last month, after also concluding that the group in Lebanon was "deliberately targeted," the international press freedom group Reporters Without Borders called on the International Criminal Court to formally investigate the deaths of all journalists killed by Israeli troops and Hamas militants during the war.
"Journalists across the region are making great sacrifices to cover this heartbreaking conflict. Those in Gaza, in particular, have paid, and continue to pay, an unprecedented toll and face exponential threats," Mansour said. "Many have lost colleagues, families, and media facilities, and have fled seeking safety when there is no safe haven or exit."
Nazeh, a Reuters camera operator who survived the October 13 attack, demanded justice for his slain colleague Abdallah.
"We can't bring Issam back. Issam is gone," he said. "But he hears us, he sees us, and he's waiting for us to do something for him... to expose who hit him, who killed him, to the world."
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68% of US Public Wants Gaza Cease-Fire: Poll
The Reuters/Ipsos poll also found that support for Israel had dropped by nearly 10 percentage points since the last edition on October 12 and 13.
Nov 15, 2023
Nearly 70% of Americans think that Israel should call a cease-fire in its attack on Gaza, a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday has found.
Around 68% of respondents answered that they agreed with the statement that "Israel should call a cease-fire and try to negotiate," Reuters reported. When broken down by party, around half of Republicans and three-quarters of Democrats backed this view, meaning President Joe Biden is acting against the will of the majority of his party as he refuses to urge Israel to stop its assault.
"The majority of Americans oppose this massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, so why is Biden still supporting it?" Justice Democrats asked on social media.
"4.5% of Congress currently support a cease-fire. No Republican members have come out in favor of stopping the violence."
The new poll, which was conducted online Monday and Tuesday, surveyed 1,006 adults from across the country. It also found that support for Israel had dropped by nearly 10 percentage points since the last Reuters/Ipsos poll on October 12 and 13. When asked what role the U.S. should play in the conflict, around 32% said "the U.S. should support Israel," down from 41% in mid-October. The number agreeing that "the U.S. should be a neutral mediator" rose from 27% to 39%.
The first poll came about a week after Hamas' October 7 attack that killed around 1,200 people in Israel. The militant group also took around 240 hostages into Gaza. The second poll comes during the sixth week of Israel's bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza, which has taken an increasing toll on the strip's civilian population and infrastructure. The attack has killed more than 11,000 people, approximately 40% of them children, and destroyed or damaged schools, bakeries, and medical facilities. Because of fuel shortages and damage to the mobile network, Gaza's Health Ministry has been unable to contact the strip's struggling hospitals to receive an updated death toll, The Washington Post reported. The last official tally came Friday, but the ministry said thousands more had likely died since then.
In the poll, more people said that they opposed than supported sending Israel weapons, at 43% and 31% respectively. In comparison, 41% supported sending weapons to Ukraine, while 32% opposed it.
Intercept reporter Prem Thakker noted that the poll results show a growing disconnect between American voters and their representatives when it comes to U.S.-Israel policy.
"4.5% of Congress currently support a cease-fire," Thakker tweeted. "No Republican members have come out in favor of stopping the violence."
The poll is just the latest indicator that U.S. voters want Israel's bombardment of Gaza to stop. An October 20 Data for Progress survey found that 66% of respondents supported a cease-fire. A recent Marist poll found that the percentage of respondents thinking Israel had gone "too far" in its response to the October 7 attacks had increased from 26% in the aftermath of the attacks to 38%, The Hill reported Wednesday.
Americans have also come out for a series of protests and direct actions calling for a cease-fire, including a march in Washington, D.C., on November 4 that one reporter said was likely the largest pro-Palestine march in U.S. history.
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Israel-Gaza War Is Deadliest Month for Journalists Covering Conflict in Over 3 Decades
"In over 30 years, no one has killed journalists at the rate Israel is currently killing them (not to mention their families) in Gaza," said one analyst.
Nov 03, 2023
As of Friday, at least 36 journalists have been killed since Hamas-led attacks led to Israel's devastating war on the Gaza Strip—meaning the past month has been the deadliest four-week period for members of the media since a U.S.-based group started keeping records in 1992.
Of the three dozen deaths recorded by the Committee to Project Journalists (CPJ) since October 7, there are 31 Palestinians, four Israelis, and one Lebanese reporter. The group has also documented at least eight injuries, three missing people, eight arrests, and "multiple assaults, threats, cyberattacks, censorship, and killings of family members."
Sherif Mansour, the organization's Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, said in a statement, "CPJ emphasizes that journalists are civilians doing important work during times of crisis and must not be targeted by warring parties."
"Journalists across the region are making great sacrifices to cover this heartbreaking conflict," he stressed. "Those in Gaza, in particular, have paid, and continue to pay, an unprecedented toll and face exponential threats. Many have lost colleagues, families, and media facilities, and have fled seeking safety when there is no safe haven or exit."
The most recent death on CPJ's list is that of Palestine TV correspondent Mohammed Abu Hatab, who on Thursday "was killed along with 11 members of his family in an Israeli airstrike on their home in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza Strip," according to the group.
CPJ also highlighted that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)—accused of numerous war crimes during what critics are calling a "genocidal" assault—told Agence France Presse and Reuters that it cannot guarantee the safety of their journalists working in Gaza.
As Reuters reported last week:
"The IDF is targeting all Hamas military activity throughout Gaza," the IDF letter said, adding that Hamas deliberately put military operations "in the vicinity of journalists and civilians."
The IDF also noted that its high-intensity strikes on Hamas targets could cause damage to surrounding buildings and that Hamas rockets could also misfire and kill people inside Gaza.
"Under these circumstances, we cannot guarantee your employees' safety, and strongly urge you to take all necessary measures for their safety," the IDF letter concluded.
AFP said on social media Friday that its "office in the Gaza Strip, a territory relentlessly shelled by the Israeli army, was seriously damaged yesterday by a strike," though none of the eight staffers who work there were on-site. The agency noted that an IDF spokesperson claimed there had been "no strike" by the Israeli military on the building.
"AFP condemns in the strongest terms this strike on its office in Gaza City," said Fabrice Fries, the agency's CEO. "The location of the office is known to all and has been recalled several times in recent days, precisely to prevent such an attack and allow us to continue to bear witness in images on the ground."
CPJ pointed out in a statement Friday that "the IDF has a history of attacks on media facilities" in Gaza, pointing to multiple incidents in 2009 and the bombing of at least 18 outlets in 2021.
"Journalists and media offices must be respected and protected," CPJ president Jodie Ginsberg declared in response to the AFP office strike. "Journalists are civilians who play an essential role corroborating information and keeping the public informed."
Other groups around the world have also been tracking the war's impact on journalists, including Reporters Without Borders, also known as Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF).
"We cannot ignore the level of deaths of journalists in Gaza," RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire told TIME. "These figures are worse than those killed during the Russia-Ukraine war and show that what's happening is incredibly shocking."
As TIME detailed:
On Wednesday, RSF called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate the deaths of eight Palestinian journalists it says were killed in Israel's bombardment of civilian areas in the Gaza Strip, along with an Israeli journalist killed during Hamas' surprise attack in southern Israel. The complaint also refers to "the deliberate, total or partial, destruction of the premises of more than 50 media outlets in Gaza" since the war began. "The gravity and the frequency of the killing of journalists is so intense that we are calling on the ICC to investigate these deaths," Deloire says.
RSF's latest complaint is the third filed by the organization since 2018 which alleges that war crimes have been committed against Palestinian journalists in Gaza. Under international humanitarian law and the ICC's Rome Statute, even if journalists are victims of legitimate military targets, the attack would constitute a war crime because it nevertheless caused "manifestly excessive and disproportionate harm to civilians," according to the complaint.
RSF also revealed Sunday that its investigation found Reuters video journalist Issam Abdallah and his colleagues were intentionally targeted in southern Lebanon in strikes launched last month from the direction of the Israeli border.
An IDF spokesperson said the Israeli military was "very sorry" for and would investigate Abdallah's death. The strike that killed him on October 13 also seriously injured AFP correspondent Christina Assi.
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Probe Finds Reuters Journalist Was Killed in 'Deliberately Targeted' Strike From Israeli Border
Reporters Without Borders concluded that "two strikes in the same place in such a short space of time (just over 30 seconds), from the same direction, clearly indicate precise targeting."
Oct 30, 2023
A Reporters Without Borders investigation released Sunday concluded that Reuters video journalist Issam Abdallah and a group of his colleagues were intentionally targeted in southern Lebanon earlier this month in a pair of strikes launched from the direction of the Israeli border.
The probe, which does not explicitly accuse the Israeli military of launching the October 13 strikes that killed Abdallah and injured other journalists, found that it is unlikely the reporters were mistaken for combatants given that they were wearing helmets and vests marked "press" and had been in plain view for more than an hour.
The journalists were in the Lebanese village of Alma el-Chaab covering exchanges of fire between the Israeli military and Hezbollah when they came under attack.
Reporters Without Borders, known internationally as Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF), found that roughly an hour before the two strikes hit "the exact spot where seven journalists were standing," an Al Jazeera reporter interviewed in a video analyzed by RSF "spotted an Israeli helicopter flying over the area and was able to spot the journalists."
Additionally, a Lebanese journalist stationed roughly 100 meters away from his colleagues told RSF that an Israeli Apache helicopter flew over the area seconds before the pair of strikes, the first of which killed Abdallah. The second strike, which RSF found was even more powerful, blew up an Al Jazeera vehicle and injured several journalists in the vicinity just 30 seconds later.
"Two strikes in the same place in such a short space of time (just over 30 seconds), from the same direction, clearly indicate precise targeting," RSF said.
Abdallah is among the dozens of journalists who have been killed in Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon since October 7, the day Hamas launched a deadly attack on Israel. The Israeli military responded with a massive bombing campaign and ground raids in the occupied Gaza Strip that have killed more than 8,000 people and sparked a humanitarian catastrophe.
In response to the attack that killed Abdallah and seriously injured AFP correspondent Christina Assi, the Israeli military said it was "very sorry" for Abdallah's death and would investigate.
Israeli forces have repeatedly been accused of targeting journalists and refusing to hold perpetrators to account. The United Nations released a report earlier this month concluding that the Israeli military used "lethal force without justification" when it killed Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh last year. The Israeli government has refused to open a criminal investigation into the incident.
Reuters said in a statement Sunday that it is reviewing RSF's findings and reiterated its call for Israeli authorities to "conduct a swift, thorough, and transparent probe into what happened" to Abdallah and his colleagues.
"And we call upon all other authorities with information about the incident to provide it," Reuters added. "We will continue to fight for the rights of all journalists to report the news in the public interest free of harassment or harm, wherever they are."
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Pentagon Deliberately Thwarting Efforts to Close Guantanamo
Reuters exposes 'pattern' of obstructionism that has prevented or delayed the transfer of cleared detainees
Dec 28, 2015
President Obama's repeated pledges to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center have been routinely and deliberately undermined by his own Department of Defense, according to a damning new investigation published on Monday.
Citing numerous administration officials, Reuters exposed a "pattern" of bureaucratic obstacles imposed by the U.S. Pentagon which have successfully thwarted efforts to transfer cleared detainees from the notorious offshore prison.
"Pentagon officials have refused to provide photographs, complete medical records and other basic documentation to foreign governments willing to take detainees, administration officials said," according to the Reuters excluive. "They have made it increasingly difficult for foreign delegations to visit Guantanamo, limited the time foreign officials can interview detainees, and barred delegations from spending the night at Guantanamo."
Such delays, Reuters notes, "resulted in four Afghan detainees spending an additional four years in Guantanamo after being approved for transfer."
"In other cases," the reporting continues, "the transfers of six prisoners to Uruguay, five to Kazakhstan, one to Mauritania, and one to Britain were delayed for months or years by Pentagon resistance or inaction, officials said."
In the case of longtime hunger-striking prisoner Tariq Ba Odah, Pentagon officials refused to hand over the cleared Yemeni's medical files to a foreign delegation, which had requested the files as part of their consideration to take in Ba Odah to their undisclosed country.
Now, 14 years after he was first detained in the prison and five years after being cleared for release, Ba Odah remains at Guantanamo.
Ba Odah's attorney, Omar Farah, issued a statement saying that if these maneuvers persist, "Guantanamo will surely outlast Mr. Ba Odah," who has been on a hunger strike for seven years, dropping to 74 pounds from 148.
"Today's revelations prove there is no line the Pentagon will not cross to frustrate the president's efforts to close Guantanamo, even potentially blowing up resettlement negotiations at their most sensitive juncture," Farah continued. "The only question is whether the White House is blind to or passively allowing the insubordination to continue."
Spokespeople for the White House and Pentagon denied any "discord" over efforts to close the prison. However, Reuters notes that the "Bush administration faced no political opposition on transfers and was able to move 532 detainees out of Guantanamo over six years." During Obama's seven years in office, 131 detainees were transferred, while 107 remain.
Earlier this month, Obama said he'd give Congress one last chance to approve legislation to help close the facility before taking executive action.
"We will wait until Congress has said definitively 'no' to a well thought out plan with numbers attached to it before we say anything definitive about my executive authority here," Obama said during a press conference.
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