The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said in a report on Wednesday that 129 members of the press were killed around the world in 2025 and that the state of Israel was responsible for two-thirds of the deaths.
The CPJ recorded the Israeli military killing of 86 journalists, and more than 60% were in Gaza. The rest were killed in Yemen when the IDF bombed two newspaper offices affiliated with the Houthi-led government in Sanaa, killing 31 Yemeni journalists and media workers, a massacre that received very little attention in Western media.
The CPJ said at the time that the September 10 Israeli strikes on the newspaper offices were the worst massacre of journalists in 16 years. The IDF tried to justify the slaughter to the CPJ by saying what it called the Houthis’ “Public Relations Department is responsible for distributing and disseminating propaganda messages in the media, including speeches by Houthis’ leader Abdul-Malik and statements from spokesman Yahya Saree.”
Israeli attacks on members of the press in Gaza in 2025 included the August 25 double-tap tank shelling of the Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, which killed five journalists. The initial attack hit a Reuters cameraman, and it was followed up by another strike that hit journalists and rescue workers who arrived at the scene. A total of 22 people were killed in the massacre.
The IDF claimed it targeted a “Hamas camera” at the hospital, but a Reuters investigation debunked the claim and found that its journalist who was killed, Hussam al-Masri, regularly set up a camera for live broadcast from that location. The IDF also never provided an explanation for why it didn’t provide a warning to the hospital beforehand or why it conducted a double-tap strike, which was caught on a live TV broadcast, when journalists and rescue workers were clearly on scene.
The CPJ recorded the killing of journalists in other conflict zones, including nine who died in Sudan and four who were killed by Russian drones in Ukraine, but no other state actor came close to the number of journalists killed by Israel. According to CPJ numbers, 2025 marked the third year in a row that the IDF was responsible for the majority of the killings of journalists in the world.
