Journalists and media workers protest after Al-Jazeera personnel killed in Gaza, in Barcelona, Spain, Aug. 13, 2025. Photo: Marc Asensio/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect

A second major watchdog tracking journalist deaths in Gaza has removed names from its list without public acknowledgment, the latest evidence that databases cited by international media to accuse Israel of targeting reporters in its war against Hamas included members of terrorist groups.

The International Federation of Journalists, a Brussels-based federation of journalists’ unions that says it represents hundreds of thousands of media workers worldwide, has removed eight names from its Gaza list, according to research cited by the Washington Free Beacon.

The revelation comes weeks after the Committee to Protect Journalists, the New York-based watchdog behind one of the war’s most cited journalist casualty databases, said it had removed Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists from its own list and launched a review of its remaining names.

The IFJ list has also been cited by major news organizations, including The Guardian, CNN, NBC News, the BBC, the Associated Press, Newsweek, Voice of America, CBC, AFP and France24, according to the Free Beacon. The outlet said CBC was the only one of those organizations to respond to a request for comment, saying that “we regularly assess the credibility of sources we cite.” 

The removals have intensified calls for news organizations to correct earlier coverage that relied on disputed journalist-casualty figures. Earlier this month, HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog, called on major outlets to update reporting based on CPJ data, saying some of the world’s most influential news organizations, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Reuters, CNN and the BBC, had cited CPJ’s erroneous figures in more than 500 articles. 

“CPJ has proven they are wholly unreliable,” said Jacki Alexander, CEO of HonestReporting. 

Alexander said HonestReporting had been able to challenge CPJ’s list using “simple open-source research,” adding that it “defies logic” that major international outlets could not have found the same information.

“They either chose not to search for the facts, or they chose to ignore them,” she said.

Andrew Fox, a former British Army officer and research fellow at the UK-based Henry Jackson Society, said that the failure to correct the record had compounded the damage done by the original claims.

“The claim that Israel killed hundreds of journalists has fallen apart, with evidence that most ‘journalists’ were combatants in terrorist groups,” Fox told The Algemeiner. 

“Yet the media outlets that spread the accusation have barely corrected it. They smeared Israel across the world, and now the truth is out, they have gone silent.” 

The New York Times has drawn particular criticism for failing to cover CPJ’s review while continuing to rely on the watchdog’s Gaza journalist figures. CAMERA, a pro-Israel media-monitoring group, noted that a recent Times article cited CPJ’s figure of more than 100 journalists killed by Israel in Gaza, more than two weeks after CPJ’s announcement that it was reviewing its database after some listed “journalists” had been eulogized by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as combatants.

Salo Aizenberg, an HonestReporting board member who has tracked Gaza casualty claims throughout the war, last week pointed to a separate case that CPJ has not publicly identified as one of its removals. The media group’s website still lists Mahmoud Issa Abu Shirby as a freelance journalist killed in a June 2025 Israeli drone strike, noting that even after he was injured, he continued posting war updates to a Telegram channel with “more than 90,000 followers up to 15 minutes before his death.” Palestinian Islamic Jihad later identified him as a commander in its Al-Quds Brigades. 

CPJ and international media “automatically believed local reports that he was an innocent man killed by IDF,” Aizenberg wrote on X. 

“The Israel ‘targeted journalists’ and ‘genocide’ narrative has collapsed,” he added. 

In another case, researcher Gabriel Epstein identified Mohammed Mahmoud Abdulaziz Abu Sharia, the 31-year-old head of the editorial department at the local Shams News Agency in Gaza, as a Palestinian Islamic Jihad member in the group’s central military media unit in the Gaza Brigade. Abu Sharia was killed in July 2024.

Epstein also noted that UNESCO director-general Audrey Azoulay had condemned Abu Sharia’s killing, calling for a full investigation. 

CPJ’s review also drew opposition from inside its own board. Nika Soon-Shiong, publisher of the pro-Palestinian outlet Drop Site News, said she was removed from CPJ’s board after objecting to the review and warning against changes that could exclude media workers linked to terrorist groups. CPJ’s board voted to keep its existing definition of a journalist, including its policy of listing people working with media organizations affiliated with terror groups as long as they are not “engaging in combat or inciting violence in a manner likely to have imminent effect.” 

Jonathan Conricus, a former IDF spokesman and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said in an interview with The Algemeiner last month that organizations like CPJ had “willingly and knowingly participated in an ongoing delegitimization effort against Israel” by failing to scrutinize their lists of Gaza media workers. 

The Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Research Institute, which published a 140-page study in December that examined 266 Palestinians identified as journalists or media workers who had been killed in Gaza and found that about 60% were members of or affiliated with terrorist organizations, said in a follow-up report earlier this month that the CPJ confirmed its earlier findings about the “double hat” worn by some Gaza journalists.

The newest report profiled 23 cases of Gaza media workers whom the institute said had been presented as journalists or media personnel but were later identified in Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad notices as operatives, commanders or members of military media units.

Shlomo Mofaz, the institute’s director, told The Algemeiner that the new material provided “solid, detailed evidence” supporting cases his researchers had already flagged months before the organizations themselves acknowledged the affiliations. 

The removed IFJ entries included Tariq Al-Maidna, a freelance camera operator for Yemen TV, an outlet controlled by Ansar Allah, the Iran-backed Houthi terrorist organization. His name disappeared from the group’s website around the same time as the other deletions.

Another deleted listing was Wafa Al-Udaini, whom the IFJ had described as a “woman journalist” killed with her husband, Munir Atiya Al-Adin. The entry did not mention that Al-Adin was a commander in the military manufacturing unit of Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Al-Quds Brigades.

Fox told The Algemeiner that the failure by major news organizations to correct the record exposed a double standard, saying outlets that demanded accountability from Israel now “owe their audiences a transparent audit of every name and an explanation of how such a grave allegation was published with so little scrutiny.”