Terrorists are not journalists. But some in the media would have you think otherwise.

In the Israel-Islamist conflict, there is a longstanding trend of news outlets portraying terror operatives as reporters. In doing so, they diminish the work of, and endanger, real journalists who are often doing dangerous work.

An April 1, 2025 article in Foreign Policy magazine embodies the problem. FP claims that the latest war between Israel and Hamas “has killed more journalists than the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in Yugoslavia, the post-911 war in Afghanistan combined.”

The publication cited a new report by Brown University’s Costs of War project for proof. But there’s a problem with this claim: it’s a lie. 

As the Middle East analyst Daniel Laufer observed on X, FP “rewrote WWI/II to demonize the Jewish state.” The magazine “laundered Al Jazeera claims of Gaza media killed” while Al Jazeera “staff moonlight as terrorists.” This is a fact.

Numerous Al Jazeera employees have been caught working as terror operatives. As the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington D.C.-based think tank, noted in an August 2024 briefing, an Al Jazeera employee, Ismail al-Ghoul, who was killed in a July 31, 2024 missile strike, was a member of Hamas’s elite Nukhba force.

After his death, Al Jazeera accused Israel of “assassinating” its journalists. Yet not only was Ghoul a Hamas operative, but he also took part in the October 7 massacre. Ghoul helped instruct Hamas operatives on “how to record attacks on IDF forces and published the resulting videos,” FDD noted. The IDF and Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, called this a “vital part of Hamas’s military activity.” And he was far from the only Al Jazeera employee moonlighting as a Hamas operative.

In October 2024, Israel’s Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi said that it had “proof” that Al Jazeera reporters were “passing sensitive information to the enemy” about IDF troop locations.

Moreover, as FDD noted, on Jan. 7, 2024 “Al-Jazeera journalist Hamza al-Dahdouh and cameraman Mustafa Thuraya were killed in a targeted IDF strike as they were traveling from Khan Younis to Rafah. The IDF later revealed that al-Dahdouh — the son of the network’s Gaza bureau chief — was an operative in the ‘Electronic Engineering Unit’ and a regional official in the ‘Rocket Unit’ of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group. The IDF also revealed that Thuraya’s name appeared on a list of operatives fighting for Hamas’s Al-Qadisiya Battalion.”

And in February 2024, the IDF revealed that Al Jazeera correspondents Muhammed Wishah and Ismail Abu Omar were also serving as Hamas commanders. Abu Omar had even filmed himself participating in the October 7 massacre. Jonathan Schanzer, the executive director of FDD and a former terror analyst for the US Treasury Department, highlighted Al Jazeera’s ties with Hamas in an exhaustive March 2024 article for Commentary Magazine. It’s a long list.

The numerous instances of collaboration between the two prompted Israel to shutter the faux news organization in the spring of 2024. Tellingly, FP’s article omitted all of this relevant information. Yet none of it is surprising.

Indeed, Al Jazeera itself is the state media of Qatar. Numerous former Al Jazeera employees have made their way to Western news outlets, including Reuters and The Washington Post, among others. In fact, the Post has employed more than two dozen staffers with links to Al Jazeera, the Qatar Foundation, and other similar orgs funded by Doha. The Qatar Foundation has even helped “shape” columns filed by Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist who was killed in a Saudi consulate in 2018.

In a December 22 2018, article, the Post revealed that “text messages between Khashoggi and an executive at Qatar Foundation International show that the executive, Maggie Mitchell Salem, at times shaped the columns he submitted to The Washington Post, proposing topics, drafting material and prodding him to take a harder line against the Saudi government.” The newspaper also acknowledged that Khashoggi “appears to have relied on a researcher and translator affiliated with the organization.”

Khashoggi’s editor, the Post’s Karen Attiah, has never addressed whether she was aware that the columns under her purview were effectively being written by someone else. Now a columnist herself, Attiah has become known for accusing Israel of genocide and proudly retweeting “what did y’all think decolonization meant?” on October 7. The Post itself has flogged the idea that the Jewish State intentionally targets journalists and has given free ad space to Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists.

As the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) has noted, both of these organizations have listed known terrorists as journalists. CPJ’s own database of slain journalists even identifies some who have worked for outlets associated with Hamas and Hezbollah, among other designated terrorist groups.

Notably, Qatari-linked entities have also funded numerous Western universities and think tanks. As CAMERA has documented, Brown University is foremost among them. CAMERA’s investigations into Brown revealed that the university has excluded Jewish students, had student organizations who called the October 7 massacre “just,” and hosted forums where speakers cheered the attack.

Until recently, Brown’s “Choices” program, which served approximately one million students and 8,000 schools, was supported by the Qatar International Foundation. Brown ended the program in April 2025 after “growing scrutiny over alleged anti-Israel content in the program and accusations of indirect Qatari funding,” Ynet reported.

Nor is FP itself immune. As Tablet’s Armin Rosen reported, the magazine is the “official podcasting partner of the Doha Forum and the only media organization whose logo appears on the front page of the website for the Doha Debates. Both events are a project of the state-funded Qatar Foundation.”

Suffice to say: Al Jazeera, Brown, Foreign Policy Magazine, and The Washington Post are hardly unbiased when it comes to reporting on Qatar, Hamas, and Israel. Their ability to judge what constitutes journalism and terrorism is, at best, severely compromised. 

But others have worked to blur the lines between the two.

As CAMERA documented, on June 2, 2022, the National Press Club released a statement “calling attention to the shooting of another Palestinian journalist by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).” The NPC lamented the death of Ghufran Hamed Warasneh, a “radio presenter” who was merely “commuting to work.”

But the day before, the Times of Israel reported that Warasneh was “armed with a knife” and had “approached a soldier stationed in the southern West Bank before being shot and killed.”

The Times of Israel even obtained pictures of the knife that was found at the scene. Further, Israel’s Channel 12 news noted that Warasneh had “attempted a stabbing attack in the past” in Hebron.

Yet, the NPC, which bills itself as a “professional and social club for working journalists and communications professionals,” was unmoved. 

Nor is the problem new.

In 2015, for example, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate published a list of 17 “journalists” who they claimed were killed in IDF operations in 2014. But a study by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center found that “almost half (eight out of 17) were names of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist operatives, or were journalists who worked for the Hamas media.” Yet, “the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate and the Gaza office of the ministry of information tried to hide their military-terrorist identity, representing them only as journalists and media personnel.” The Center’s 2015 study was burnished with extensive evidence, including pictures of the “journalists” carrying weapons and wearing headbands identifying them as terrorists. 

Indeed, as CAMERA noted in 2016, the Newseum, a now defunct D.C. museum that sought to “educate the public about the value of a free press in a free society,” had listed several slain members of terrorist groups in its memorial to fallen journalists. Among them were Hussam Salama and Mahmoud al-Kumi, operatives who worked for Hamas’s al-Aqsa TV, which was run by Fathi Hammad, a man named by the US State Department in 2016 as a “specially designated terrorist.”

These individuals aren’t journalists. One doesn’t just set aside his Hamas headband and put on a flak jacket labeled “press” and magically transform into a reporter. News organizations that conflate terrorists with journalists endanger their own employees and beclown the standards of their own profession. 

The writer is a Senior Research Analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.

The post A Lesson for the Media: Terrorists Are Not Journalists first appeared on Algemeiner.com.