A Hamas terrorist who pulls on a press vest becomes untouchable, according to Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories. Speaking to JNS at a briefing last week on her latest report, which accuses Israel of “mediacide,” Albanese argued that a person who is not actively fighting at the moment he is hit keeps his civilian status, even if he belongs to a terrorist organization. She told JNS that Gazans being photographed in a terror group’s uniform does not make them legitimate targets, and dismissed Israel’s identification of Hamas operatives among Gaza’s media workers out of hand. “Labeling everyone as ‘terrorists’ has paid off. Voila,” Albanese said.
Albanese, whom the UN designates an “independent expert,” appeared remotely because of US sanctions against her. During the exchange, she compared Gaza’s terrorist-journalists to Israeli reporters who served in the IDF reserves and later returned to journalism, arguing that neither loses civilian protection. She went further, asserting that Israel has no right to self-defense against Gaza under international law and that it cannot claim the right to wage war there. She also said that if any Palestinian journalists took part in the October 7 massacre, she has no information about it.
Her adviser told JNS that Albanese lacked the patience others at the UN show for questions from the outlet. When JNS asked the office of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk for the list of slain journalists Albanese said she relied on, a spokesman replied that the office releases numbers and trend analysis, not lists of verified fatalities.
“Not consistent with any state practice”
Brian Cox, a senior fellow at Canada’s Macdonald-Laurier Institute who spent seven years as a US Army military lawyer, told JNS that Albanese is applying an unrealistically narrow reading of international law and presenting it as a standard Israel must accept. Cox said her position is inconsistent with the practice of any state and would not even be supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross’s own interpretive guidance. He pointed to the US Army’s operational law handbook, which treats members of hostile non-state armed groups as combatants who may be targeted based on their membership, with no need for a separate analysis of whether they were fighting at the moment of the strike. Israel’s approach is largely the same as Washington’s, Cox said, adding that activists like Albanese frequently misrepresent the law of armed conflict to fit their narrative.
The Red Cross itself states that passing on tactical information or engaging in espionage is likely to constitute direct participation in hostilities, the very activities Israel has documented among Gaza’s “journalists.”
The Press Files: 170 names
The IDF released “The Press Files” on October 1, publishing the names, military ID numbers, photographs, and captured personnel records of Gazans killed in the war who were mourned worldwide as journalists. Of the 170 names, 118 served in Hamas’s military wing and 49 in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, two in the Popular Resistance Committees and one in the Mujahideen Brigades. Seventeen of them crossed into Israel during the October 7 massacre. IDF Spokesman Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin said the 170 were presented to the world as innocent journalists but “were in fact terrorists,” and vowed the military would keep exposing what he called Hamas’s lies.
The IDF said its findings come from an extended review of intelligence, open-source material and documents recovered by troops in Gaza, including records produced by the terrorist organizations themselves. For each name, the site lays out the evidence: photographs, Hamas death notices and extracts from the groups’ own spreadsheets. The military released the first 10 names as an opening installment, announcing them with a blunt summary: “A terrorist in a press vest is still a terrorist.” One of the first 10, Mohammed Sami Abdullah Jarghoun, was reported as a journalist for Smart Media while serving as an operative in the support platoon of Hamas’s Rafah Brigade, and infiltrated Israel on October 7.
The names reach deep into the international press. According to the IDF, some worked for or with Reuters, CNN, the BBC, Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press, ABC Australia and Le Monde, along with Hamas-affiliated outlets such as Al-Aqsa Media Network, Shams News Agency, and Palestine Today. The list includes four Al Jazeera correspondents. The files name Rahman Abu Odeh, who worked for Reuters, as a squad commander in the photography unit of Hamas’s military wing, and Roshdi Sarraj, who filmed in Gaza for ABC Australia, as a military operative in Hamas’s military wing.
Al Jazeera’s people feature prominently. The files list Anas al-Sharif as a company-level officer in the artillery company of Hamas’s Northern Gaza Brigade, with a Hamas military ID number. When the IDF first exposed him in October 2024, Al Jazeera called the documents fabricated; ten months later, Sharif was dead, and the same documents now appear in the Press Files. The IDF identifies Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul as a Hamas military operative in the Gaza Brigade, after previously saying he belonged to Hamas’s Nukhba force and took part in the October 7 massacre. Hamza al-Dahdouh, an Al Jazeera journalist killed in January 2024 after a drone shoot, is listed as a Palestinian Islamic Jihad member based on a 2022 document recovered in Gaza. Hossam Shabat, named in October 2024, was identified through captured documents as a sniper in Hamas’s Beit Hanoun Battalion.
The scale dwarfs what the press-freedom groups have admitted. Gaza’s Hamas-run government media office claims 263 Palestinian journalists have been killed in the war, meaning the IDF’s 170 account for roughly two-thirds of that figure. The Committee to Protect Journalists has removed a total of 36 names from its tally since October 7, either for confirmed military activity or because they were not journalists at all. The IDF said the site will be regularly updated.
Most of the international media barely noticed the Press Files when they were released, even as ABC Australia’s own media watchdog program conceded: “Hamas and other terrorist groups have infiltrated the Gazan press corps.”
The “journalist” lists collapse
Albanese’s numbers rely on casualty lists that are shrinking under scrutiny. The Committee to Protect Journalists recently removed another 22 names, months after dropping several Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives; 19 of them were removed after research established they had engaged in combat. A Telegraph investigation of a BBC Arabic list of more than 180 journalists killed in the war found that 53 had ties to Hamas or other terrorist groups, and the BBC is now reviewing its reporting. Among them was Abdullah Darwish, described by BBC Arabic as a cameraman for Al-Aqsa TV, who was removed from the CPJ list after photographs emerged of him in a Qassam Brigades uniform and it was revealed that he took part in the October 7 attacks. The International Federation of Journalists removed eight names from its own list this summer.
“A Stain on the United Nations”
Albanese presented her report, titled “Truth under the rubble: media in the time of genocide,” to the UN General Assembly on October 26. She described “mediacide” as “the systematic destruction of the media’s public function,” and called for the prosecution of Israeli media figures for incitement. The report accuses Western outlets of attributing civilian deaths to Hamas’s tactics, singling out German broadcaster ARD for editorial guidance citing Hamas’s use of human shields.
Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, confronted her in the chamber. “You are a liar, a fraud, and a stain on the United Nations,” Danon told Albanese, and handed her a mock resignation letter. Danon accused her of dismissing evidence that Hamas uses press credentials and noted that the United States, the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, France and her own country, Italy, have spoken out against her conduct.
Even The New York Times, which once ran a lengthy opinion profile of Albanese, rejected the report’s claims about its coverage, saying she “offers no proof” that Israeli officials and pressure groups influenced its editorial guidance and calling her report neither impartial nor based on impartial sources. Mediacide joins a long list of terms Albanese has coined against Israel, including domicide, urbicide, scholasticide, medicide, and ecocide.
“No right of self-defense”
Albanese’s claim to JNS that Israel has no right to defend itself against Gaza is a position she has held since the bodies were still being counted from the October 7 massacre. In November 2023, speaking to the National Press Club in Canberra, she declared Israel’s right to self-defense against Hamas “non-existent,” even after the slaughter of more than 1,200 people and the abduction of 240 hostages. Israel, she argued, cannot invoke self-defense “against a threat that emanates from a territory it occupies.” Israel withdrew every soldier and civilian from Gaza in 2005.
She has made the same argument repeatedly on social media. Albanese wrote on X that under Article 51 of the UN Charter, force in self-defense is “permissible solely to repel an armed attack by another State,” and therefore Israel’s actions in Gaza could not qualify as self-defense. In the days after the massacre, she said she was horrified by the narrative that focused outrage on Hamas. She allowed that Israel could act to repel the attack and neutralize the attackers, “not waging war.” Her position mirrored that of Russia’s UN Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya, who had argued the previous week that Israel forfeited its right to self-defense as an occupying power.
She extended the argument to Judea and Samaria. “As an ongoing unlawful use of force, Israel’s occupation of the OPT cannot be justified by any claim of self-defence,” Albanese wrote, adding that Israel should withdraw, pay reparations, and apologize to its victims on the way out. Pressed by i24NEWS in late 2023, she insisted Israel has a right to protect its territory and citizens, but defended Palestinian “resistance” in the same interview: “An illegitimate act of resistance doesn’t delegitimize the resistance itself.”
A record of antisemitism
Albanese’s hostility toward Israel long predates her UN appointment. In July 2014, while fundraising for her former employer UNRWA, she wrote that America was “subjugated by the Jewish lobby,” and Europe by guilt over the Holocaust. In another 2014 post addressed to the BBC, she wrote that the Israeli lobby was inside the broadcaster’s veins and blamed an Orwellian nightmare on Israel’s greed. When the remarks surfaced in 2022, US Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt condemned them as blatantly antisemitic, and the US, France, and Germany followed suit. The ADL has also documented her claim that Jews “have learnt that to survive in this world they need to be superior,” a classic antisemitic trope of Jewish power.
In 2015, she compared Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto and equated Hamas with Jewish partisans fighting the Nazis. In November 2022, months after taking up her UN post, she addressed a conference hosted by Hamas’s Council on International Relations and told the audience they had a right to resist. On October 7, 2023, as the massacre was still unfolding, she wrote that “today’s violence must be put in context.”
When French President Emmanuel Macron called October 7 the largest antisemitic massacre of the century, Albanese answered on X that the victims “were not killed because they were Jewish,” but in response to Israel’s oppression. According to the ADL, France and Germany condemned her for antisemitism, the first time in UN history that governments formally did so against a special rapporteur. UN Watch documents that she endorsed a comparison of Israel’s prime minister to Adolf Hitler in July 2024 and compared Israel to the Third Reich and its racial laws that October.
This fall she went further, redefining antisemitism itself and claiming that Jews sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz were labeled Muslims, in an interview Hillel Neuer of UN Watch said distorted the history of the Holocaust. “Her remarks reveal astonishing ignorance, and malice,” Neuer wrote. Washington had already asked UN Secretary-General António Guterres to dismiss her, accusing her of antisemitism.
Sanctioned by Washington
Secretary of State Marco Rubio sanctioned Albanese in July 2025 over her efforts to push the International Criminal Court to act against American and Israeli officials, companies, and executives. Rubio said she had “spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism,” and declared that her campaign of political and economic warfare against the US and Israel would no longer be tolerated. The sanctions followed a campaign led by UN Watch, and Combat Antisemitism Movement CEO Sacha Roytman said Rubio had acted decisively to hold Albanese accountable for her antisemitic smears.
Neuer has since dared Albanese to take him to court over his description of her role at the UN, noting that truth is an absolute defense. “You are Hamas’s de facto spokesperson at the UN,” Neuer wrote on X.
