Richard Sanders is a film maker, journalist, author and director of the full Al Jazeera investigation: Investigating War Crimes in Gaza.
"As has been the issue throughout the war, there's the question of proportionality.
Is it justified to kill five journalists when you are only targeting one?
The Israelis have murdered Anas al-Sharif, the Al Jazeera correspondent in Gaza City, and along with him, his entire team. Five men. That's the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City.
This is quite clearly part of a strategy the Israelis are pursuing ahead of their entry into Gaza City to remove potential witnesses.
A deliberate strategy, and indeed very often the Israelis boast immediately afterwards about having killed these people.
If the Russians were murdering Ukrainian journalists in this way and proportionate to the population, that would involve murdering thousands of journalists.
If the Russians were just systematically murdering Ukrainian journalists and then boasting about it, the West's media would do something.
News clip: “Mr. Putin, will you agree to a ceasefire? Mr. Putin, will you commit to not killing any more civilians?”
They would organize. They would protest. They would seek to bring pressure on the Russians.
They'd perhaps say, "We're not gonna take your press releases. We're not gonna attend your press conferences unless this stops."
That would definitely happen. Yet in the case of Palestinians, they report it as a news story and they give prominence to the Israeli claim that these people were Hamas operatives when the Israelis themselves know damn well this isn't true.
News clip: “Why is Hamas and why is Al Jazeera having terrorists on their payroll? And we need to ask them about what's going on in Gaza, but the IDF does not target journalists.”
In that sense, large media organizations in the West are directly culpable for the death of Anas and of all the other journalists who've been killed in the Gaza Strip.
This is part of a track record the Israelis have going back many years. Most notably in 2022, they murdered the Al Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank.
On that occasion, they followed a familiar pattern of denying it completely, then conceding they may have had something to do with it, and then eventually admitting it was them.
By then, of course, the Western media had all repeated their denials and it had stopped being a news story by the time the truth came out.
In the Gaza Strip it's rather different in that in some instances, they effectively announce they're gonna target these journalists and then brag about having killed them afterwards.
Back in October, the Israelis identified six Al Jazeera journalists who they said were members of Hamas.
What they were doing, were doing what the Israelis always do, is trying to work out what they could get away with.
They were testing the waters. Are these people killable? Are they not?
And I remember writing to a number of people at the time saying, "The world's media has to respond to them for what they are, as death threats against journalists."
But of course, what the entire world's media did was simply report it as a news story.
Breaking news. This is from the Israel Defense Forces. Exposed. Six Al Jazeera journalists have been exposed as Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists.
The Israelis themselves know it is absolute nonsense that these people are Hamas operatives.
Take the case of Anas al-Sharif, who has been on camera pretty much constantly for the last two years, when he is meant to have found the time to be a Hamas operative.
It's absolutely absurd. They're testing the waters. They're seeing what they can get away with. And sure enough, since then, of the six people on that list, two of them have been murdered by the Israelis.
The Israelis will not allow international media in. They say, "Look, pictures are coming out anyway." But at the same time, of course, they condemn those pictures as being fake.
There is a very interesting question here about how Western news organizations deal with this problem.
There is a very logical way to deal with it. Al Jazeera does this, Dropsite also does this.
They take local journalists and they employ them. They don't simply let them just hold forth immediately onto camera.
They treat them like any other employee and there are senior management and things have to go through various editorial processes, but they make use of the very, very good and extraordinarily brave journalists on the ground.
It's a very obvious question. Why doesn't the BBC do that? Why doesn't ITN do that? It's the obvious thing to be doing.
On the aid flights, suddenly the news is full of these aerials of Gaza City.
News clip: "Israel bans foreign journalists from entering Gaza. 15,000 feet above is the closest we get to seeing for ourselves the consequences of the war it is waging here. When we joined an air drop last week, we were told Israel didn't want images from above being filmed or shown."
Now, I've been working with local journalists in Gaza who supply me with drone footage.
There have been aerials coming out of Gaza since October 2023. And this idea that all this information is suddenly new is bogus and it's to excuse the fact that people were not expressing the outrage they ought to be.
Double Down News first reported the murder of journalists in Gaza on October the 26th, 2023. Almost two years ago now.
Good media has been reporting the slaughter of journalists all along, and it's been quite obvious from the very early days of the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip that journalists were a specific target. Not least because they often boasted about killing them.
Just as it's been perfect obvious, really since about a week into the assault, that the aim of the assault... is to make the Gaza Strip unlivable.
It is to effectively ethnically cleanse it. It has been blindingly obvious that that is the aim all along.
The strikes we see now, every day, 30, 40, 50 people killed.
People killed queuing for food, but also people still being killed in airstrikes.
No one seriously believes that the genuine target of those attacks was Hamas, and not to clearly report this is grossly irresponsible by the Western media.
To be very clear, the five-man Al Jazeerah crew murdered in Gaza City had nothing at all to do with Hamas.
Now, some of the agencies operating in the Gaza Strip are connected to Hamas.
That's very, very different from saying that their journalists are Hamas operatives.
They're still journalists, and the logic would be that if you're at war with Britain under a Conservative government, that Daily Telegraph journalists or Daily Mail journalists are fair game.
It's absurd.
And there's a broader point here as well, that Hamas had formed the government of the Strip for 20 years.
So, civil servants, refuse collectors, policemen, all of those people, yes, in effect were connected to Hamas. To suggest that makes them a legitimate target is grotesque.
The way the media covers things begins to infect society as a whole.
When a very prominent Palestinian footballer was killed recently, UEFA put out a statement reporting his death without saying how he had died, which was quite grotesque in the circumstances.
And Mo Salah, who has not been outspoken about Palestine, actually weighed in on this occasion and said, "How did he die? Where did he die? Who killed him?"
In other countries, it's even worse. Germany, of course, is particularly appalling on Gaza.
Bild, which is the best-selling newspaper in Germany, reported the murder of Al Jazeerah's Anas al-Sharif with the astonishing headline, “Terrorist disguised as journalist killed in Gaza.”
And that's Bild, Germany's best-selling newspaper.
So many Western media institutions and organizations have failed to speak up. They're all culpable in their own way.
I think the most appalling example I can think of is the behavior of the International Women's Media Foundation. Last year, it presented what's called the Courage in Journalism Award to Maha Hussaini.
Maha Hussaini is a human rights worker and journalist who has been working in the Gaza Strip from the first day of the conflict and is still there. She features in our Al Jazeerah film, Gaza, an extraordinarily brave woman.
Once the award had been announced, some right-wing publication in Washington dredged up a couple of completely innocuous cartoons that she had shared about Israel and accused her of being an antisemite.
In response to this, with no sense of irony at all, the International Women's Media Foundation withdrew the Courage in Journalism Award from Maha Hussaini.
It's astonishing in itself, but in a context where you know damn well the Israelis are watching like hawks and working out who is killable and who isn't.
To effectively point the finger at an incredibly brave female Palestinian journalist and call her an antisemite, which is what they were doing, is just breathtaking.
And I think really in all the litany of appalling actions by Western media organizations over the last two years, that one really takes the biscuit.
It was just breathtaking.
One of the most grotesque things as well when they come for journalists is how often they kill them in their homes.
Al Jazeerah has lost 10 staff in the Gaza Strip over the last two years, but many staff have lost family members as well.
Among them is Al Jazeerah's former Gaza bureau chief, Wael al-Dahdouh, who continued in his pursuit to report on the war even after his wife, teenage son, seven-year-old daughter, and his grandson were killed in an airstrike.
They have no compunction about killing not just journalists, but their family members as well.
There are many of us journalists who've worked in very dangerous places around the world over the years and, you know, you wrestle with the possibility you'll be killed.
We have the luxury that we never wrestle with the possibility that they will murder our children, but that is the reality for journalists operating in the Gaza Strip.
No one can say they didn't know.
The betrayal of Palestinian journalists by their colleagues in the West is a disgrace and a shame that it will take decades to live down.
The Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip shows us that the mass slaughter of journalists is something that is apparently tolerable to the Western media political class.
It shows more than ever that you need independent alternatives, like Double Down News, to that media political class.
So if you can, donate to Double Down News on Patreon."