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In Gaza, journalists filming with drones are in the Israeli army’s crosshairs
Of the few journalists who used drones to document the destruction wrought by the Israeli army, at least five have been killed or seriously wounded by deliberate strikes. The latest victim, Gaza Project contributor Mahmoud Isleem Al-Basos, was killed on March 15 while a ceasefire was still in effect. The testimonies of his surviving colleagues, corroborated by exchanges with Israeli military sources, demonstrate the absence of clear rules given to soldiers to distinguish between combatants and journalists filming with drones.
(Crédit : / Bellingcat)
- Since October 2023, Palestinian journalists have been prevented from filming Gaza from the air.
- In the absence of clear rules of engagement, some Israeli soldiers consider journalists filming with drones to be legitimate targets.
- Using drone footage, we have created a 3D map of Gaza to show the extent of destruction in areas that journalists have been prevented from covering.
- Journalist Mahmoud Isleem Al-Basos was killed by the Israeli army shortly after contributing the images featured in this map while using a drone to film the activities of an NGO during the ceasefire.
Par Youssr Youssef, Magdalena Hervada (Forbidden Stories)
March 27, 2025
With Jake Godin (Bellingcat), Thomas Bordeaux (volunteer with Bellingcat’s Global Authentication Program), Hoda Osman (ARIJ)
Additional reporting by: Mariana Abreu (Forbidden Stories), Zarifa Abou Qoura (ARIJ), Charlotte Maher (Bellingcat), Maria Retter (Paper Trail Media).
On February 15, 2024, images shared by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) were seen around the world.
Four months after the start of Israel’s war on Gaza following the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, many people realized the scale of the disaster in the north of the Palestinian enclave: dozens of gutted and partially collapsed buildings in the Al-Shati refugee camp, forming a horizon of ruins.
Exposition « Gaza vue du ciel » du journaliste Soliman Hijjy à la Press House – Palestine, un mois avant le début de la guerre.
Abdallah Al-Hajj filmed these images by drone. Nine days after they were posted online, on February 24, 2024, the Palestinian journalist was seriously injured by an Israeli military strike, which killed his 18-year-old nephew and a fisherman. At one point, believed to be dead, he lost both of his legs. He explained to Forbidden Stories that he had worked for UNRWA for over 10 years and is convinced that he was deliberately targeted by the Israeli army.
“Two days after I was targeted, my house was hit,” he said. “Why? (…) To destroy all the archives I had. I had a stock of archives accumulated over 20 years from the entire Gaza Strip. Imagine: of all my archives, only a few images remain.”
At the time, Al-Hajj was one of the few journalists left in the area after the Israeli army ordered inhabitants to evacuate to the south of Gaza. This was impossible for Al-Hajj, as he could not abandon his parents, who were too old for the arduous crossing. Some of the people he came across during his reporting had resorted to eating animal feed. “Every time they saw me with my drone and camera, they asked me to show the world what was happening in Gaza,” he explained in an interview with our partners at Le Monde. So he returned to Al-Shati.
“Filming with drones is essential to show the extent of the destruction.”
On the phone with Forbidden Stories, Al-Hajj listed the precautions he had taken in the field. He filmed with his drone during the one-week truce in November 2023. A few months later, during wartime, he filmed briefly, around “five minutes,” and “not very high, at around 50 meters” above his head, as his images confirm. Al-Hajj did not don his press vest during that period, fearing it would be tantamount to labelling himself as a military target. On the day he was injured in the drone strike, the Israeli army had apparently withdrawn from the area. According to an analysis of satellite images carried out by our partners at Bellingcat, the Israeli military vehicles closest to the Al-Shati area were around 2.5 kilometers from the refugee camp on February 8, 2024. A week later, the vehicles had disappeared from the images.
According to the Israeli press, the army carried out a two-week military operation in the Al-Shati area, which ended on February 15. Yet, on February 24, he would still be targeted.
“If I had been targeted in an area [where there were military operations], they would have said to me, ‘By God, Abdallah, it’s not reasonable to have used your drone [there].’ But here, I was in an area far from everything, near the sea, in an open space,” Al-Hajj said.
In a statement to Forbidden Stories last year, the Israeli army claimed to have “used an Israeli air force plane to eliminate” a “terrorist cell using a drone, posing an imminent threat to forces in the Shati area.”
“If I did belong to Hamas, I would never have been able to leave the Gaza Strip to receive medical treatment,” said Al-Hajj.
Faced with repeated attacks on the Palestinian press, some journalists, like Soliman Hijjy, chose to give up filming with his drone at the start of the war. One of the first journalists in Gaza to use a drone, he has tirelessly covered every conflict that has shaken the region, and his work has won him several international awards. But this time, bitterly, he told Forbidden Stories that in Gaza, “the Israeli army targets us without proof and invents pretexts. (…) It’s a way of preventing the story from being transmitted clearly.”
“Gaza from the Sky”: exhibition by journalist Soliman Hijjy at Press House. Palestine, one month before the start of the war.
Like Hijjy and Al-Hajj, Shadi Al-Tabatibi spent hours filming Gaza before the war. Though he once enjoyed “capturing the beauty” of its historical sites, after October 7, he wanted to document the devastation. Now a refugee in Cairo, he provided extensive testimony as part of the Gaza Project. Al-Tabatibi vividly remembers the moment, on February 24, when he learned of the strike on his colleague and everything changed.
“That’s when I said to myself, ‘khalass’ [stop]. I’m going to stop filming,” he told us. And yet, as the young journalist pointed out, “filming with drones is essential to show the true extent of the destruction, which images from the ground cannot fully capture.”
Moustafa Thuraya and Shadi Al-Tabatibi in a tent in Rafah with friends. The two journalists often went out to film together using their drones.
The strike on Al-Hajj was far from the first aimed at the press. With great emotion, Al-Tabatibi recounted January 7, 2024, the day his friend Moustafa Thuraya, a freelance journalist working for several media outlets, including Al Jazeera and AFP, set off to film what would be his last report. “That day, Moustafa asked me to go with him, but I couldn’t because my wife had to take our daughter, born during the war, to be vaccinated,” he said. In missing the reporting trip, Al-Tabatibi escaped death for the first time.
Journalist Motaz Azaiza is known worldwide for his images of Gaza, his shots revealing the extent of the damage caused by bombing. In late November 2023, he accused the Israeli army of taking control of his drone and moving it behind Israeli lines, an area inaccessible to him. After Moustafa Thuraya’s death in January 2024, and only a few days before his evacuation, Azaiza announced that he would no longer film by drone and apologized to his viewers for not being able to show the extent of the destruction. Several drone operators interviewed by Forbidden Stories, including Shadi Al-Tabatibi, also testified to losing control of their aircraft. The Israeli army did not respond to our questions on this subject.
The day after the strike, which also killed journalist Hamza Al-Dahdouh, the Israeli army announced that it had “identified and struck a terrorist using a [drone] that posed an immediate threat to Israeli soldiers.” They even published what they presented as evidence linking Thuraya to Hamas and his colleague to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Contacted by partners of the Gaza Project, the Israeli army did not provide evidence to verify the authenticity of the documents they shared online. According to a Washington Post investigation, Thuraya had previously worked for about five years as a photographer for the Ministry of Religious Endowments of the Gaza government. Moreover, according to the same newspaper, analysis of the footage filmed by Thuraya and satellite images of the area showed no Israeli military presence or anything that might have made the journalists a threat to the army.
“I was afraid of being targeted in my own home.”
In the wake of these two strikes, filming with drones became difficult. The head of security for a major international media company told us that the decision to slow down the use of drones came in January 2024, before they stopped using them altogether in April. “I remember the moment when we said to ourselves, ‘now we’re stopping,’” he said. “It was a period so full of bad news that it became impossible to continue.”
Photograph posted on Facebook by journalist Shadi Al-Tabatibi when he was still using his drone at the start of the war. In the caption, he says, “We are still alive, between witness and martyr.”
But the killings continued, and Al-Tabatibi would lose more of his journalist friends using drones. He recalled discussions with his friends Ayman and Ibrahim Al-Gharbawi. The two brothers, aged 23 and 32—one of whom rejoiced in the October 7 attacks on social networks before becoming more critical of the Gaza authorities as the war progressed—had seen their photo studio, the fruit of “11 years of hard work,” destroyed by the bombardments. Despite this, they were not discouraged.
“Ibrahim told me he’d just bought a drone and wanted to start using it, and asked me to come and help him fly it,” said Al-Tabatibi. “I replied, ‘This really isn’t the right time. The situation is frightening.’”
Ibrahim and Ayman barely had time to try their hand at using the drone. On April 26, 2024, they were killed by an air strike either during or just after their filming, according to eyewitness accounts. They were not wearing press vests.
In May 2024, Al-Tabatibi finally set off for Cairo, leaving behind the ghosts of his friends who died in Gaza, as well as his two drones. He left one of them to his friend Mohammed Abu Saada, who was killed three months later in the bombing of his uncle’s house, along with three of his cousins. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), shortly before his death, Abu Saada had confided in his mother that the Israeli army was “deliberately killing anyone who owned a drone and used it for filming.”
Al-Tabatibi himself shared this fear. “I was afraid of being targeted in my own home, with my wife and children. I felt under constant threat,” he said.
“If we see someone flying a drone, the idea is to shoot, no questions asked.”
Michael Ofer-Ziv didn’t know the Al-Gharbawi brothers, Thuraya, Abu Saada, or any of the other Gazan journalists using drones. For the first two months of the war, he was at the Gaza border in the Israeli military center of Sde Teiman. His role was to verify that the Israeli army was not firing on its own soldiers. “At no point during this war did I receive an official document listing the rules of engagement. And this is a problem because it leaves a lot of space for interpretation,” he said.
With regard to drones, Ofer-Ziv said that “the general vibe” in the war room was clear. “If we saw anyone piloting a drone, and that drone is not ours, the idea was to shoot the drone and the person using it, no questions asked,” he told us. As for whether this applied to journalists, Ofer-Ziv said, “We didn’t talk about that.”
When asked about the rules of engagement given to its soldiers, the Israeli army said it referred to the law of armed conflict and refused to “comment on operational directives, as these are classified.” In June 2024, after a period of reflection, Ofer-Ziv officially refused to return to service, a decision that might lead to sanctions, including a prison sentence.
To further investigate the targeting of journalists with drones, our consortium got in touch with several high-ranking military officers. These individuals had left their posts and were, therefore, able to speak on the record. However, their analyses remain uncertain, confirming the lack of definitive rules noted by Ofer-Ziv. Reserve Lieutenant-Colonel Maurice Hirsch, who served for 19 years in the Israeli army’s legal corps, told our partners at Paper Trail Media that if a soldier spots a drone in a combat zone close to fighting forces, “I certainly wouldn’t presume any wrongdoing if that drone and its operators had been targeted (…) It wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume they were part of an enemy force.” Neither Thuraya nor Al-Hajj was in a combat zone, and both were targeted after filming.
Photo posted by journalist Yasser Murtaja on March 24, 2018, two weeks before he was killed by the Israeli army. The caption reads:
“The day will come when I can take this shot in the air and not on the ground!
My name is Yasser Murtaja,
I’m 30 years old,
I live in Gaza City,
And I have never traveled!”
At least as early as 2020, the Israeli Ministry of Justice seemed perfectly aware of its responsibility to obey international laws on this matter. In fact, an internal memo from the Israeli Attorney General’s office, included in an email exchange obtained by the non-profit Distributed Denial of Secrets and consulted by Forbidden Stories, expressed concern about comments made by then Minister of Defense Avigdor Liberman. He had reacted to the death of journalist Yasser Murtaja, killed while covering the Great March of Return in 2018, by saying, “I don’t know who he is, photographer or not, but anyone who flies a drone over soldiers from the Israeli Defense Forces must understand that they are putting themselves in danger.”
According to the authors of the note, such a statement could imply that there would be “no distinction—indeed, no distinction at all—between journalists and activists who launch drones over Israeli armed forces.” The Ministry of Justice feared that these remarks could be used by a United Nations International Commission of Inquiry to “call into question Israel’s claims that it respects the laws of war.” The Ministry of Justice did not respond to Forbidden Stories’ questions about the internal memo.
Mahmoud Isleem Al-Basos: The latest journalist using a drone killed by the Israeli army
After the slew of journalist killings, Al-Tabatibi was left with only one close friend in Gaza who owned a drone. He had provided several images for the news agencies Reuters and Anadolu. In early March, during the ceasefire, Forbidden Stories asked Mahmoud Samir Isleem Al-Basos to film Gaza. The idea was to continue the work of journalists killed or injured during the war while enabling readers to visualize the unprecedented scale of destruction through detailed 3D maps.
Journalist Mahmoud Isleem Al-Basos (courtesy of Shadi Al-Tabatibi).
On Saturday, March 15, Al-Basos was killed while on assignment for the Al-Khair Foundation in Beit Lahia, north of Gaza. According to his cousin, quoted by the CPJ, he was wearing his press vest and helmet. That morning, two Israeli air strikes killed at least six other people. Among them were aid workers and cameramen dispatched by Al-Khair. The NGO explained that it was using a drone to film the preparation of a Ramadan meal and the future extension of a refugee camp.
The Israeli army claimed that these strikes were aimed at “terrorists”—two of whom were operating a drone—and issued an error-filled list of names and photos. Mahmoud Samir Isleem Al-Basos is neither mentioned nor pictured in the list of “terrorists.” Instead, we found a name that resembles his, belonging to an individual described by the Israeli army as “a Hamas terrorist operating under journalistic cover.” Based on our research, the individual named by the army has no direct link with Al-Basos and was not killed in the strike. The military also denounced a connection between the drone used in Beit Lahia and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad without providing any evidence.
According to the journalists who knew him, as well as the Al-Khair Foundation and a Hamas representative we interviewed, our colleague Al-Basos had no affiliation with Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Our partners at Bellingcat have also geolocated the two strikes in Beit Lahia: the first around two kilometers from the Israeli border and an Israeli army post and the second around three kilometers away. Did the presence of a drone at this distance represent a threat to the Israeli army, as it claims?
When asked on two separate occasions to provide evidence supporting its accusations, the Israeli military stated that it would “not elaborate on the published statements.” More generally, they said it “categorically reject[ed] the allegation of a systemic attack on journalists.”
“Israel has repeatedly made similar unproven claims without producing any credible evidence,” explained Doja Daoud from the CPJ. “We know that this practice endangers journalists and erodes public trust in Palestinian journalists reporting from Gaza.” The CPJ has just added Al-Basos to its list of journalists killed by the Israeli army and refers to his case as “murder.”
You can watch the video of this investigation, made by Charlotte Maher (Bellingcat).
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