Journalists in War Zones: From the Crimea to Gaza

The First War Correspondent

War has always produced witnesses. But for most of human history, the only account of a battle available to the public was the one provided by the generals who fought it. The dispatches were written by the victors, edited by the state, and arrived weeks after the events they described. The dead were counted by the people who killed them.

That changed in February 1854, when John Thadeus Delane, editor of The Times of London, sent a 33-year-old Irish reporter named William Howard Russell to cover the British expedition to the Crimean Peninsula. Delane promised Russell the war would be over by Easter. It lasted 22 months.

Russell was not, strictly speaking, the first journalist to report from a war. Reporters had covered the Napoleonic Wars and the first Carlist War in Spain. But those were temporary assignments for writers who went back to covering politics and horse races. Russell made war correspondence the centre of his career, and in doing so created a new form of journalism that would define the next two centuries of reporting.

What made Russell dangerous was not his prose, though his writing was vivid. It was his refusal to reproduce the official version. Previous war reports had been drawn from officers' letters and government dispatches. Russell ignored both. He gathered his information from junior officers and enlisted men, from observation and from the evidence of his own eyes, and he reported what he found: an army ravaged by cholera, led by incompetents, and left to die in conditions that would have scandalised a workhouse.

His dispatches were published without censorship, transmitted via the new telegraph, and read by a public that had never before encountered the reality of war in a daily newspaper. The backlash was immediate. The British government fell. Florence Nightingale credited Russell's reports with inspiring her mission to Crimea. The Duke of Newcastle told Russell directly: "It was you who turned out the government."

Russell had demonstrated something that every government since has struggled with: an independent journalist in a war zone is the single most dangerous thing to the official narrative. Not because journalists take sides, but because they describe what they see. And what they see is rarely what the generals want reported.

The Twentieth Century

The two world wars expanded the scale of conflict and, with it, the scale of journalist casualties. Record-keeping was inconsistent. The International Federation of Journalists estimates that between 60 and 80 journalists were killed during World War II, including 69 reporters covering the Allied campaign according to former war correspondent Ray Moseley's count. Sixteen correspondents from the Soviet Union's Red Star newspaper alone died between 1941 and 1944. Many more deaths went unrecorded in a war where the boundaries between civilian, soldier, and journalist were often indistinguishable.

The Vietnam War produced some of the most iconic journalism in history. It also killed at least 63 journalists over 20 years, according to Reporters Without Borders, with the caveat that media support workers were rarely counted at the time.

Among the dead was Dickey Chapelle, an American photojournalist who had covered conflicts from Iwo Jima to the Hungarian Revolution. On November 4, 1965, she was on patrol with a Marine platoon south of Chu Lai when the lieutenant ahead of her tripped a booby trap. Shrapnel severed her carotid artery. She became the first American female reporter killed in action. The Marines who carried her body home gave her a military burial. Their memorial marker said: "She was one of us and we will miss her."

Vietnam changed something fundamental about war journalism. For the first time, television brought the images of combat into living rooms. The gulf between official statements and on-the-ground reality became visible to anyone with a television set. The military learned a lesson it would apply in every subsequent conflict: control the journalist, and you control the story.

Iraq and the Age of Targeting

The Iraq War, beginning in 2003, became what Reporters Without Borders called "the bloodiest war for journalists" up to that point. Over the course of the conflict, RSF documented 242 journalists killed in Iraq alone. The peak years were devastating: 94 killed in 2012, 92 in 2013.

Something had changed since Vietnam. In earlier conflicts, journalists were, for the most part, collateral victims. They died in crossfire, in bombings, in accidents. In Iraq, they became targets. Both state and non-state actors discovered that killing journalists served a strategic purpose: it eliminated witnesses, discouraged coverage, and created what UNESCO would later call "zones of silence" where events unfolded without documentation.

The pattern repeated across multiple conflicts. In Syria, journalists were targeted by the Assad regime, by ISIS, and by other armed groups. In Afghanistan, the Taliban killed reporters to suppress coverage of civilian casualties. In Mexico, cartels murdered journalists investigating corruption, creating information black holes where organised crime operated without scrutiny.

By 2022, RSF had documented 1,668 journalists killed worldwide in connection with their work over the preceding two decades. An average of more than 80 per year. Iraq and Syria combined accounted for over a third of the total, with 578 dead.

The Deadliest War in History for Journalists

Then came Gaza.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing approximately 1,200 people, including two Israeli journalists. Israel's military response in Gaza began immediately. So did the killing of journalists.

The numbers defy comparison with any previous conflict. As of March 2026, at least 254 journalists and media workers have been killed across Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon, Israel, and Iran since the war began, according to CPJ's preliminary investigations. The International Federation of Journalists puts the count of Palestinian journalists and media workers killed at more than 260. According to a study by Brown University's Watson Institute, the war in Gaza has killed more journalists than the US Civil War, both World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav Wars, and the war in Afghanistan combined.

In 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalists recorded 124 journalist deaths worldwide, the highest annual total in its history, exceeding the previous record of 113 set during the Iraq War in 2007. Nearly 70 percent were killed by Israel. CPJ has described the conflict as "the deadliest on record for journalists."

The deaths are not incidental. Reporters Without Borders reported that the Israeli army intentionally targeted Palestinian journalists. An investigation by The Guardian found that elements within the Israeli military viewed journalists working for Hamas-affiliated media outlets as legitimate targets, despite their non-involvement in combat. The CPJ documented that Israeli drone strikes alone killed at least 49 Palestinian journalists, and stated that Israel's claims of being unable to identify journalists were "not credible given Israel's advanced surveillance, intelligence, and targeting capabilities."

Israel has denied targeting journalists, stating it "has never, and will never, deliberately target journalists." It has accused some of those killed of being members of Hamas or participating in the October 7 attack. Press freedom organisations have consistently rejected these claims as lacking credible evidence. In August 2025, Israel's +972 Magazine reported that the Israeli army created a unit called the "Legitimization Cell" specifically to link Palestinian journalists to Hamas in order to justify their killings.

The Israel Defense Forces have also barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza except on tightly controlled military-escorted visits. This means the overwhelming majority of journalism from inside the conflict has been produced by local Palestinian reporters, many of them freelancers working without the security backing of international news organisations. As the International Federation of Journalists noted, the mortality rate for journalists in Gaza exceeds ten percent of the total pre-war media workforce, dramatically higher than any other occupational group.

What Dies with the Journalist

The most immediately measurable consequence of killing journalists is the loss of information. When reporters die, the stories they were working on die with them. The sources they had cultivated go silent. The institutional knowledge they carried disappears. The coverage that would have existed does not.

But the damage extends further than any single story. Every journalist killed sends a message to every journalist still alive: this is what happens if you continue. The result is self-censorship on a massive scale. Reporters abandon dangerous stories. They leave the profession entirely. Entire regions become what UNESCO calls "zones of silence," places where events of global significance occur without independent documentation.

In Gaza, the systematic killing of journalists has created precisely this effect. RSF's US director described the territory as becoming "a black hole for reliable information," where the world is "forced more and more to rely on propaganda outlets or the information that's shared by parties with an agenda."

The pattern is not unique to Gaza. In Iraq after 2003, the sustained killing of journalists made it functionally impossible for foreign correspondents to operate independently. In Syria, the targeting of reporters by multiple armed groups meant that years of the conflict went largely undocumented from the ground. In Mexico, entire states have become information deserts where no journalist covers the cartels because the last one who tried was murdered.

The Impunity Engine

The single factor most responsible for the ongoing killing of journalists is impunity. RSF has documented that approximately 88 percent of journalist killings worldwide result in no accountability whatsoever. No arrest, no prosecution, no consequence of any kind.

The CPJ documented in 2023 that 20 journalists had been killed by Israeli military fire since 2001 without anyone being held accountable. That number has since been dwarfed by the deaths in the current war, for which the pattern of impunity has only intensified.

Impunity does not merely allow killings to continue. It incentivises them. When a state discovers that killing journalists carries no consequence, the calculation becomes straightforward. The cost of allowing coverage is embarrassment, international pressure, domestic accountability. The cost of eliminating coverage is nothing.

William Howard Russell's dispatches brought down a British government in 1855 because the government could not suppress his reporting. One hundred and seventy years later, the problem has been solved differently: kill the reporter, and the reporting stops. The information that Russell provided to the British public, the information that changed the course of a war, is the same kind of information that is being eliminated by the systematic targeting of journalists in war zones today.

The Obligation

The history of war-zone journalism is a history of people who went to the worst places on earth to describe what they found. They did this knowing the risks. Many of them - from Russell in his quasi-military uniform trudging through Crimean mud, to Dickey Chapelle on patrol with the Marines, to the Palestinian freelancers filing from the rubble of Gaza - did it because they understood that without their reporting, the only version of events available would be the one provided by the people with the guns.

In 2024, UNESCO awarded its World Press Freedom Prize to the Palestinian journalists of Gaza. It was the first time the prize had been awarded collectively rather than to an individual. The committee recognised what was already apparent to anyone paying attention: an entire generation of journalists was being destroyed, and the world's capacity to understand what was happening in Gaza was being destroyed with them.

The question for the rest of us is whether we understand what is lost when journalists are killed in war zones. Not in the abstract. Not as a press freedom issue to be discussed at conferences. But as a direct and measurable reduction in our ability to know what is being done, by whom, and to whom.

Every war produces a version of events that serves the interests of the powerful. The only counter to that version has ever been journalism. The people who provide it have always been vulnerable. They have never been more vulnerable than they are now.