Israel responsible for two-thirds of 2025 media worker deaths: CPJ

Report says India loses at least one journalist to work-related killings each year

KARACHI:

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has documented a second consecutive year of record fatalities, driven largely by Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza and what it calls an unprecedented campaign against the press.

The New York-based media freedom watchdog says more than 60% of the 86 journalists killed by Israeli fire in 2025 were Palestinian reporters covering the war from inside the war-torn enclave, where UN experts and human rights organisations have described the scale and pattern of violence as amounting to genocide.

According to the report, more than three-quarters of journalists killed last year died in conflict zones. Ukraine saw four deaths and Sudan nine, only slightly higher than in 2024. Gaza, by contrast, still bore far heavier losses, with Israel responsible for the majority. Since the group began tracking targeted killings of media workers three decades ago, the Israel Defense Forces have been responsible for more such deaths than any other state military.

In its 12-page report, the CPJ also flags dangers outside war zones. According to the press freedom group, India, often described as the world’s largest democracy, loses at least one journalist to work-related killings each year, a pattern mirrored in Mexico over the past decade.

In Mexico, at least six journalists were killed last year, up from five in 2024 and two in 2023. All six, the CPJ notes, are unsolved, continuing a longstanding pattern of journalists’ killers going undiscovered and unprosecuted due to powerful criminal influence over police and political activity, and widespread corruption. At least one journalist has been killed in Bangladesh and Colombia—as well as by Israel—every year for the past five years.

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are also featured in the grim tally of press deaths worldwide. Both countries suffer from weak rule of law, allowing criminal factions to operate with impunity and political leaders to exercise unchecked power, the advocacy group cautioned.

In countries with weaker democracies, journalists have been brutally targeted for reporting on corruption and organized crime. In 2025, both Bangladesh and India saw reporters meet tragic and mysterious ends. Bangladeshi journalist Asaduzzaman Tuhin, the CPJ reports, was chased and hacked to death by armed assailants in a killing orchestrated by a fraud ring, according to police.

Tuhin’s employer, the Bangla-language daily Protidiner Kagoj, said the attack came after he filmed several armed men assaulting a man in a public dispute. In India, the mutilated body of freelance journalist Mukesh Chandrakar was found in a septic tank weeks after NDTV aired his investigation into alleged corruption in a 1.2 billion rupee ($12 million) road project.

Similarly, in the Philippines, which also has a long history of violence against journalists, three journalists were shot dead, including veteran publisher Juan Dayang. So far, only one case has resulted in an arrest.

Drone killings

In its report, the CPJ noted a sharp rise in journalist deaths caused by drones, unmanned aircraft, and other remotely controlled devices in 2025. Killings of press members attributed to such attacks surged from just two in 2023—the first year CPJ documented drone-related deaths—to 39 last year. Military drones, the advocacy group says, were confirmed or believed to be responsible for 33 of these fatalities.

Of those killed by drones in 2025, 28 were struck by Israel’s military in Gaza, five by Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, four by Russia in Ukraine, one by Houthi forces in Yemen, and one by a suspected Turkish strike in Iraq. Over the past three years, CPJ records a total of 62 journalists killed in drone attacks, with Israel responsible for three-quarters of those deaths between 2023 and 2025.

Paying for the truth

Journalists, the CPJ notes, are particularly vulnerable in countries where conflict continues, corrupt politics prevails, and authoritarian regimes weaken the rule of law.

The report adds that declines in press freedom—including the closure of independent outlets, censorship, and physical attacks on media, including killings—often serve as early indicators of democratic erosion.

Globally, the press watchdog observes, the persistent failure to hold perpetrators accountable continues to embolden those who kill journalists, allowing them to evade justice year after year.

Silenced by smear

The media advocacy group warns of a growing pattern in which unsubstantiated allegations of criminal activity are used to justify attacks on the press. This trend appears both in the large numbers of journalists detained for their work and in the rationales offered for their killings.

Israel, the CPJ notes, has repeatedly killed journalists whom it later—or in some cases preemptively—claimed were militants, without providing credible evidence. The most striking example of this, the advocacy group says, is the targeting of Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif, who had publicly warned that his life was at risk after repeated, unverified smears by Israeli authorities.

To date, the press freedom group states in its report that no one has been held accountable for any targeted killing of a journalist by Israel since October 7, 2023, or in the preceding 22 years.

Call for protection

The continued failure of government leaders to protect the press or hold attackers accountable, the New York–based group cautioned, lays the groundwork for further killings—even in countries that are not at war. Media practitioners, it notes, were killed in Mexico, India, and the Philippines in 2025, all nations that have persistently failed to secure justice for journalists’ murders.

In its report, the CPJ called for radical reform of how governments investigate journalist killings, including the establishment of an international investigative task force and the imposition of targeted sanctions.

“The uptick in journalist killings is symptomatic of a wider decline in press freedom and journalist safety globally,” the group warned, adding that a near-record number of media workers were jailed in 2025 amid smear campaigns and legal abuses aimed at criminalizing reporting.

CPJ also reports a growing wave of online harassment and physical attacks on journalists, driven by increasingly hostile rhetoric toward the press—even in countries that claim democratic credentials.