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AMY GOODMAN: We wanted to continue by looking at your other report. The Committee to Protect Journalists has found a record 129 press workers were killed worldwide last year. The Israeli military was responsible for two thirds of all press killings worldwide due to attacks on journalists in Gaza, in Yemen and Iran. More journalists and media workers were killed last year than in any of the previous three decades for which CPJ has collected data and the previous record was set just the year before, in 2024. The number of journalists killed in Sudan and Ukraine also rose.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: But journalists were not only killed in conflict zones. CPJ documented journalists killed in Bangladesh, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Mexico, Nepal, Peru, the Philippines, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as well. They were targeted often for their reporting on corruption and crime. According to CPJ, there have been very few transparent investigations and no one has been held accountable for these deaths. Sara Qudah, if you could talk about the wider findings of this CPJ report?
SARA QUDAH: One hundred percent. To start with, because the biggest number of journalists being targeted and killed was in Israel, this shows the systematic pattern that Israel is using to silence the journalists whether by killing them, targeting them, imprisoning them, intimidating them, and also smearing them. So this is in the context of Israel.
Worldwide, we see that the journalists are being targeted because of their work. It is now the most dangerous time for journalists to work since we started documenting in 1992. This tells us that this profession is becoming a very dangerous profession and journalists might be killed just because they are trying to convey the truth for everyone in the world.
In this report we have documented even new patterns of targeting the journalists. We documented using the drones. It is a very high-technology, sophisticated technology to target civilians. It was widely used in Israel where at least 28 journalists were killed in Israel by drones. It was also used in Sudan widely by the RSF, used in Ukraine by the Russian military where they killed four journalists in Ukraine targeted by drones. It was also used in single incidents once in Yemen and once in Iraq. So we can see that there’s a new global trend in targeting journalists.
Also, the smearing. We have seen that Israel used the smearing campaigns as a tool to target the journalists or justify killing them after they killed them. In so many incidents in 2025, journalists have been smeared for months, some of them for years. Like Anas Al-Sharif who was killed in August 2025, he was smeared months before he was killed because of his reporting on starvation and mass killing in Gaza. Then he was killed after being smeared. Other journalists, after they were killed the Israeli authorities and the IDF said that they are terrorists and we targeted them because they are terrorists. So we are seeing that the smearing is being used to justify killings and to target killings with full impunity, with no accountability or justice.
Also, organized crime. In Mexico, per se, a few journalists were targeted and killed because they were trying to expose corruption inside the country and because of that, they were killed. And so we can see now that the journalists are not only being killed by military or governments. They are also killed by organized crimes. This is something very alarming for us at the CPJ. And as the report mentions, few investigations happened and no one was ever held to account to these killings.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Sara, obviously you documented the killing of journalists in active war zones like Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza, but you just mentioned Mexico. But in addition to Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Bangladesh, Pakistan. Can you tell us, are these killings that are mostly carried out by the state or by—
SARA QUDAH: Mostly by the state. Some of them by organized crime groups, but mostly by the states. Since you mentioned Saudi Arabia, the journalist who was killed is Turki al-Jasser. He was a prominent journalist who was imprisoned four years before he was charged with a death sentence and then he was hanged and killed last year, unfortunately, by the Saudi Arabia government. In Yemen, the journalist who was killed was killed by the Houthi army, which is a terrorist group, a terrorist-designated group.
AMY GOODMAN: Sara Qudah, we want to thank you very much for being with us, Middle East and North Africa regional director at the Committee to Protect Journalists. We will link to both of CPJ’s reports, Record 129 press members killed in 2025; Israel responsible for 2/3 of deaths. And we’ll link to your report, 'We returned from hell': Palestinian journalists recount torture in Israeli prisons.
That does it for our broadcast. Democracy Now! produced with Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Nermeen Shaikh, Maria Taracena, Nicole Salazar, Sara Nasser, Charina Nadura, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud, Safwat Nazzal, Sam Alcoff, our executive director Julie Crosby. Special thanks to Becca Staley, Jon Randolph, Paul Powell, Mike DiFilippo, Miguel Nogueira, Hugh Gran, Carl Marxer, Denis Moynihan. I’m Amy Goodman with Nermeen Shaikh for another edition of Democracy Now!.
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