A record 129 journalists and media workers were killed in the course of their work in 2025, two-thirds of them by Israeli forces, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
It was the second consecutive year in which killings of members of the press reached unprecedented levels, and the second year running in which Israel was responsible for roughly two-thirds of the total, the New York-based independent organisation, which documents attacks on journalists worldwide, said in its annual report published on Wednesday.
Israeli fire killed 86 journalists last year, the CPJ said, the majority of them Palestinians reporting from Gaza. The toll also included 31 media workers killed in a strike on a Houthi media centre in Yemen, described by the group as the second deadliest attack on journalists it had ever recorded.
Israel was responsible for 81% of the 47 killings that the CPJ classified as intentionally targeted, or “murder”. It said the actual figure was probably higher, owing to access restrictions that made verification difficult in Gaza.
Israel’s military did not respond to a request for comment. It has said in the past that its troops in Gaza target only combatants but that operating in combat zones carries inherent risks. Israel acknowledged targeting the media centre in Yemen in September, describing it at the time as a propaganda arm of the Houthis.
In several cases Israel has acknowledged targeting journalists in Gaza that it said had links to Hamas, without providing verifiable evidence. International news organisations have strongly denied that reporters who were killed had links to militants. The CPJ called such allegations by Israel “deadly smears”.
Israel does not permit foreign journalists to enter Gaza, so all the media workers killed there were Palestinians. The report said the “Israeli military has now committed more targeted killings of the press than any other government’s military on record”, noting that the CPJ started collecting data more than three decades ago.
Its report said at least 104 of the 129 journalists killed died in connection with conflicts. Apart from Gaza and Yemen, the deadliest countries for journalists included Sudan, where nine were killed, and Mexico, where six died. Three journalists died in the Philippines and four Ukrainian journalists were killed by Russian forces, it said.
On 26 February last year, the Ukrainian journalist Tetyana Kulyk, editor-in-chief of the multimedia editorial department of the state news agency Ukrinform, was killed in a Russian drone attack.
Kulyk was the author and host of a series of interviews, Nation of the Invincible, which focused on the resilience of Ukrainians during the Russia-Ukraine war.
A few months later, on 23 October, the Ukrainian journalists Olena Hramova, 43, and Yevhen Karmazin, 33, died when a car transporting a TV crew of Ukraine’s state-funded international broadcaster Freedom was hit by a Lancet, a long-range drone often used against tanks and armoured vehicles, as the journalists were reporting on the aftermath of a Russian drone strike on a petrol station in Kramatorsk, in the eastern region of Donetsk.
Russia has denied deliberately targeting journalists and has accused Ukraine of targeting Russian reporters, which Kyiv denies. There was no immediate comment from Russia’s embassy in Washington on the CPJ report.
Among those killed in Gaza was the Reuters cameraman Hussam al-Masri, who died in August while operating a live video feed at Nasser hospital.
During the attack, Anas al-Sharif, who was one of Al Jazeera’s most recognisable faces in Gaza, was killed too. Al-Sharif left a poignant final message entrusting his family to the public, specifically mentioning his daughter, Sham.
“This is my will and my final message,’’ read the statement which was published posthumously on Anas al-Sharif’s X account. “If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice.”
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, described the strike, which also killed four other journalists, as a “tragic mishap”. The Israeli military said it had targeted a Hamas camera, but a subsequent Reuters investigation found the equipment belonged to the news agency.
The latest attack against reporters in Gaza was on 21 January when an Israeli airstrike killed three Palestinian journalists who were travelling in a car to film a newly established displacement camp in the Netzarim area.
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.
The Israeli military said it had ordered the strike after its soldiers “identified several suspects who operated a drone affiliated with Hamas” in central Gaza, but it provided no evidence of it.
The media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said Israeli forces killed at least 29 Palestinian journalists in Gaza between December 2024 and December 2025 and that nearly 220 journalists had been killed since the start of the Gaza war in October 2023. Other groups put the toll higher.
