2024 deadliest year for journos in more than 3 decades: report!

At least 124 journalists and media workers got killed across the globe in the year 2024, making it the deadliest one for them in more than three decades, the Committee to Protect Journalists informed. Out of the killed, around 70 per cent were Palestinians and victims of Israel’s brutality in Gaza.

In an annual report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based media watchdog, it is revealed that the highest number of journalists were killed in 2024 than any other year since the agency began collecting data, which was since 1992.

The report published on Wednesday suggested that there was an increase of 23 per cent in the killing of journalists from 2023, which reflects the surging levels of international conflict, political unrest and criminality worldwide.

It further said that the number of conflicts, whether political, criminal or military in nature, had doubled in the last five years. The journalistic killings in Sudan, Pakistan and Myanmar contributed to this rise. In 2024, six journalists each were killed in Sudan and Pakistan, while more countries like Haiti, India, Mozambique, Myanmar, Iraq, etc., are on the list of those killed journos.

In the case of the Gaza conflict, the numbers are glaring, with 78 killings in 2023 and 85 in 2024. It should be noted that all these deaths were “at the hands of the Israeli military”.

On October 7, 2023, the war in Gaza erupted after the Palestinian armed group Hamas launched an incursion into Israel’s southern regions. Hamas killed around 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostages, triggering the deadly 15-month relentless war in Gaza. Israel unleashed an unprecedented air and ground offensive, killing more than 62,000 people in the enclave, and most of them were women and children.