Israel has killed an unprecedented number of Palestinian journalists in Gaza since 7 October 2023. And completely refused independent Western media access.
I spoke to the Columbia Journalism Review about what this means:
“Other countries will have no hesitation to do the same thing,” agreed Antony Loewenstein, an Australian journalist who has covered international affairs for more than two decades. In his book The Palestine Laboratory (2023), Loewenstein documented how the Israeli military-industrial complex has used Palestinians as guinea pigs for an array of weapons aimed at suppressing dissent. These tools have included defense hardware—think: killer drones—and software developed close to home and then exported at great profit, such as the program used to hack the cellphone of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident journalist who was tortured and murdered by government agents. “What happens in Palestine never stays there,” Loewenstein said. “Israel has shown how to get away with it—how to get that impunity themselves. So you’ll see many other nations being far more brazen in targeting journalists, including the Trump administration.”