The ceasefire framework announced on 9 October delineates three phases, limited redeployments, hostage-prisoner exchanges, and phased aid deliveries. Yet it contains no explicit clause protecting press safety, ensuring media access, or enabling investigative recourse. That omission reveals a biopolitical logic: the truce functions less as a humanitarian instrument and more as a technique of governance, regulating visibility, circulation, and legitimacy. In Foucauldian terms, it governs populations via logistics and enumeration (aid trucks, prisoner counts, territorial grid mapping) while systematically excluding epistemic actors – journalists – whose presence could upset or complicate those metrics. Within such a managerial order, information becomes territorialised, thus, its movement is treated as a threat to stability.
Since October 2023, the Committee to Protect Journalists and other press freedom networks have documented nearly 300 Palestinian journalists and media workers killed in Gaza. Notable among these is Anas al-Sharif, killed in an Israeli airstrike on August 10, 2025 and five journalists (Hussam al-Masri, Mariam Abu Dagga, Mohammed Salama, Moaz Abu Taha, Ahmed Abu Aziz). Across this dataset, no credible independent investigation or prosecution has been initiated, pointing toward structural impunity rather than incidental neglect. Through this pattern, we see accordingly, a transformation of individual tragedies into structural phenomena.
Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, one can understand Gaza’s information sphere as a terrain where sovereign power extends beyond the capacity to decide life and death, to the authority to determine who may narrate, document, or be believed. In this sense, power operates not only through physical domination but also through epistemic control – the governance of who is allowed to speak and whose truth is recognised. Consequently, what emerges is the production of “death-worlds”, spaces in which entire populations are confined within conditions that blur the boundary between living and dying. Moreover, Israel’s restrictions on foreign correspondents and its control of telecommunications infrastructure have effectively positioned Palestinian journalists within this liminal zone: at once subjects and instruments of international knowledge production.
Meanwhile, operating under siege, many rely on personal phones, solar chargers, and improvised digital networks to document – thus transforming these minimal tools into infrastructures of survival and testimony. Anthropologically, this configuration resonates with the notion of the “intimate register of the state,” wherein bureaucratic structures and everyday life collapse into one another. As a result, this dual positionality – simultaneously governed and witnessing – produces a paradox of agency, whereby journalists create visibility within a structure explicitly designed to erase it.
Under international law, the deliberate targeting of journalists is explicitly prohibited. Article 79 of Additional Protocol I stipulates that “journalists engaged in dangerous professional missions in areas of armed conflict shall be considered as civilians … and shall be protected as such,” so long as they take no action adversely affecting their status. Journalists are thus legally civilians under international humanitarian law, entitled to protection. However, the absence of meaningful enforcement in Gaza underscores that the law has been reduced to a formal procedure without protective effect. From October 2023 through late 2025, no prosecution or disciplinary measure has followed any journalist’s killing in Gaza. The ceasefire’s supervisory committee seems to lack investigatory authority, thereby institutionalising impunity as an administrative norm. In this configuration, ceasefire governance becomes a technology of forgetting and lethal violence is absorbed into paperwork rather than adjudication.
If Phase II of the ceasefire, scheduled to begin on 21 October 2025, is to operationalise accountability, it must embed epistemic protection into its design. This shift demands a move from humanitarian managerialism to a knowledge-security architecture that protects witnessing itself. Among proposed measures: immediate review of attacks on accredited journalists, establishment of an independent observation mission with unrestricted investigative access, protected zones or “epistemic corridors” parallel to humanitarian routes, unmediated access for foreign correspondents without military escort, and a journalist protection fund for evacuation, medical care, and trauma support. These are structural preconditions for truth production. Without them, transitional justice collapses into abstraction – documentation without consequence. Yet beyond architecture lies a deeper ethical dimension, one where journalists must be recognised as indispensable agents in sustaining moral and historical coherence.
A non-colonial, human security-inflected approach must therefore reconceive journalists as central actors in historical continuity. Their work supports what Didier Fassin calls the “moral economy of testimony” – the holding together of factual coherence under conditions of erasure. Excluding them from ceasefire frameworks reproduces the epistemic asymmetry characteristic of colonial humanitarianism. And we see it once more, populations are protected only insofar as they remain silent. In that light, protecting journalists is ontology rather than advocacy- defending evidence as the material substrate for justice, legality, and collective memory.
One week into the ceasefire, the killing of Saleh Aljafarawi demonstrates that Gaza’s “peace” is a form of managed exposure. The truce may slow kinetic violence, but it sustains epistemic violence – controlling who may see, record, or remember. Thus, the ceasefire cannot be read as a pause in warfare but as its bureaucratic mutation, an administration of silence masquerading as humanitarianism. To protect Gaza’s journalists is to defend the infrastructure of witnessing. Let’s say… the minimal condition for history, legality, and collective truth to survive genocidal trajectories.
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