For the third year in a row, one country killed more journalists than any other in the world. That country is Israel.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released its annual report confirming that Israeli forces were responsible for the deaths of 29 Palestinian reporters in 2025 — accounting for over 43 percent of all journalist killings worldwide. Since October 2023, the Israeli military has killed nearly 220 journalists, at least 65 of whom were killed either because of their work or while actively working.

RSF wrote that the Israeli army “is responsible for over 43% — nearly half — of crimes committed against journalists over the past twelve months.” The organization called 2025 a deadly year defined by hate and impunity. Those two words are doing precise work: hate, because the targeting of Palestinian journalists is not accidental; impunity, because no one has been held accountable for any of it.

The Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate reports that more than 255 journalists have been killed in Gaza in total, representing 18 percent of the entire journalist population in the Strip. The Committee to Protect Journalists has called this the deadliest period for the press since it began tracking data in 1992.

“The staggering number of journalists killed by Israeli forces for the third year in a row represents one of the gravest assaults on press freedom the world has seen in decades,” United Voices said. “When nearly half of all journalists killed worldwide lose their lives at the hands of a single military, silence is not an option.”

And yet silence has been, for too many American media outlets, exactly the option chosen. The networks that would dedicate weeks of coverage to the killing of a single journalist in Russia or China have largely treated the systematic elimination of Gaza’s press corps as a footnote — a number cited briefly in broader coverage, rarely examined as a story in its own right.

Killing journalists is not a side effect of war. It is a strategy to eliminate witnesses. Without journalists on the ground, there are no images, no testimony, no record. The world’s ability to know what is happening in Gaza depends on the journalists who remain — and those journalists are being killed at a rate that has no modern parallel.

United Voices is calling on American and international news organizations to speak out, to demand accountability, and to refuse to normalize the targeting of reporters who risked their lives to document the truth. Protecting journalists means protecting the truth itself. And the truth about Gaza — documented by 255 journalists who paid with their lives to report it — deserves to be told.