NGO alleges war crimes in Gaza, Israel reporter deaths

PARIS: An NGO defending press freedom said Wednesday it had filed a complaint alleging war crimes with the International Criminal Court (ICC) over the death of journalists in the Israel-Hamas war.

Reporters Without Borders, known by its French acronym RSF, said its complaint concerned “war crimes committed against Palestinian journalists in Gaza” and “against an Israeli journalist”.

Specifically, the complaint concerned “eight Palestinian journalists who were killed in bombardments of civilian areas in Gaza by Israel, and an Israeli journalist who was killed on October 7 while covering an attack on his kibbutz by Hamas”, the organisation said in a statement.

“It also cites the deliberate, total or partial, destruction of the premises of more than 50 media outlets in Gaza,” it said.

Israel has been pounding the Gaza Strip since Hamas gunmen stormed across the border on October 7 and, killed more than 1,400 people, according to Israeli officials.

The bombing campaign has killed more than 8,500 people, two-thirds of them women and children, according to the Gaza health ministry.

“The attacks suffered by Palestinian journalists in Gaza correspond to the international humanitarian law definition of an indiscriminate attack and therefore constitute war crimes,” it said, while the Israeli journalist’s death constituted “the intentional homicide of a person protected by the Geneva Conventions, which is a war crime”.

Governments and the UN Security Council can bring cases before the ICC, but so can the court’s own prosecutor who, RSF hopes, will accept the complaint and investigate.

RSF said it had called on the prosecutor, Karim A.A. Khan, to investigate all of the cases of the 34 journalists it said had been killed since 7 October.