The Committee to Protect Journalists just gave Hamas a gift ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Friday, July 03, 2026

The Committee to Protect Journalists just gave Hamas a gift

The internal chaos roiling the Committee to Protect Journalists deepened late Wednesday, when the embattled advocacy group’s board of directors—under fire for the anti-Israel bias of several members, including the vice chair—voted to affirm that "organizations affiliated with militant groups" meet the criteria of a legitimate journalistic outlet "provided they are not engaging in combat or inciting violence in a manner likely to have imminent effect."

The CPJ’s board voted 17 to 1 in favor of keeping this contentious definition, according to one person familiar with the situation, with Fox News’s representative casting the lone no vote. The CPJ’s influential list of "Journalist Casualties in the Israel-Gaza War," which has been used by news organizations to discredit Israel’s war effort, contains dozens of names of military operatives for Hamas and other terror groups.

This sounds principled — do not presume a journalist is acting as a combatant unless they are holding a gun. But it betrays an ignorance of how war works.

A spotter is a person whose entire job is to watch enemy positions and movements and relay what he sees to the fighters who will act on it. The ICRC's Interpretive Guidance on Direct Participation in Hostilities treats that activity as combat. Section V.2.(c) lists "the identification and marking of targets, the analysis and transmission of tactical intelligence to attacking forces" among the acts that constitute direct participation in hostilities, stripping civilian protection. The Guidance's own worked example, in footnote 103, is a civilian who repeatedly peeks into a building where enemy troops have taken cover in order to indicate their location to attacking forces; the ICRC concludes she has directly participated in hostilities, because what mattered was the importance of the transmitted information to the execution of a concrete military operation. A person whose only observable act is watch-and-report loses protection under the framework built to protect civilians.

That is for a civilian. All the more so does this apply to a member of a militant organization who reports to a media outlet that is also part of the military. It would be naive in the extreme to presume that a person whose entire salary is paid by, and whose allegiance is entirely to, a terrorist group is only observing enemy positions rather than relaying them. It is even more naive to think that the militant news outlet is not relaying information to their own bosses who are holding the guns. Journalists who belong to Hamas use even more effective tools of combat than a traditional spotter - they can openly operate with a camera (with a telephoto lens) that displays, in real time, video of the enemy position over the Internet directly to Hamas leaders.

The United States DoD Law of War Manual (§5.8.3.1) names the spotter as a paradigm case of direct participation, alongside relaying target intelligence and guiding forces to a target, and no one can plausibly accuse the DoD Manual of violating international humanitarian law — it is the codified practice of the world's most-scrutinized military and it lands in the same place the ICRC does. Two frameworks built from opposite starting points, the humanitarian and the operational, agree that transmitting tactical observation to a fighting force is combat.

The CPJ just handed Hamas and every terrorist organization a gift. Terrorists need only issue every spotter a 'Press' jacket, and CPJ will protect them by policy. The global journalism apparatus that follows CPJ standards has made itself an accessory.

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