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On June 25, the Canadian Journalists for Justice in Palestine or CJJP announced its formation in a dual press conference held in Vancouver and Toronto.
CJJP is a national organization of journalists advocating for solidarity with Palestinian journalists and media workers who have been and continue to be targeted and killed in Gaza.
“This should have been done a long time ago, and we’ve tried to do this before in a number of ways,” said Sharon Nadeem, a founding member of CJJP and a producer for the Global Reporting Centre at the University of British Columbia. “The situation in Gaza has only gotten worse.”
According to data collected by the Committee to Protect Journalists or CPJ, at least 186 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza, Israel, Lebanon and the West Bank in the last 20 months. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate has reported over 226 journalist deaths for the same period. The CPJ says the death toll over the course of a year for journalists in the Israel-Gaza war is higher than any other conflict the organization has documented.
Additionally, 2024 was the deadliest year on record for journalists to be working since the CPJ began collecting data in 1992. While the CPJ noted that the number of conflicts around the world has doubled in the past five years, “the toll of conflict on the press is most glaring in the unprecedented number of journalists and media workers killed in the Israel-Gaza war.”
Journalists in the region are also facing imprisonment. On May 9, 2025, the IFJ condemned the arrest of journalist Ali al-Samoudi, who was detained in April of this year, as well as 179 other arrests that have occurred since Oct. 7, 2023.
“We have done repeated open letters calling on our Canadian media as well as the government, to do a better job protecting Palestinian journalists and their families,” Nadeem told The Tyee.
One of the open letters that was published condemns the killing of journalists in the Gaza strip by Israeli forces and has over 300 signatures from Canadian journalists to date.
“International law clearly establishes that journalists and media workers are civilians who must be protected during armed conflict,” said Nadeem during the conference. “Yet the targeting of Palestinian journalists and their families in Gaza persists, largely unchallenged and inadequately covered by Western mainstream media.”
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported that the Israeli Defence Forces has acknowledged it targeted journalists in some attacks, but the army “claimed their journalistic work was a cover for their activity in terrorist organizations.”
The CPJ has investigated at least nine separate incidents where it has “no doubt that a journalist was shot deliberately,” according to Haaretz’s report. That includes an attack in Lebanon in 2023 that killed one journalist and injured five others.
The CJJP is also advocating to improve Canadian reporting standards and conditions for reporters who are “providing fair, accurate and context-driven reporting on the region,” the press release stated.
In another letter published in 2021, signees asked Canadian media outlets that cover Israel-Palestine to provide “fair and balanced coverage” that includes “historical and social context, reporters with knowledge of the region and, crucially, Palestinian voices.”
A Ricochet Media investigation found that certain Canadian journalists covering Gaza have been harassed, targeted and have had their jobs threatened.
“We have not heard any responses [to the letters],” said Nadeem. “We don’t see the coverage of Palestinian journalists improving.”
The goal of the CJJP, Nadeem says, is to add to the effort to see the targeting and killing of journalists in Palestine stop.
“It starts with our governments… They have to call for the unequivocal protection of journalists, because it is protected under international law,” said Nadeem. “We [also] have to, as Canadian media, start doing a better job.” ![[Tyee]](/design-article.thetyee.ca/ui/img/yellowblob.png){kind=small}
Read more: Rights + Justice, Media
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