Journalism Is Not a Crime.
Updated: Sep 16
A book review of Journalism Is Not A Crime, published by FotoEvidence which chronologically documents Israel’s genocide in Gaza and stands as a historical defense of journalists' right to bear witness. Published in ZEKE Magazine Fall 2026.
Link to Published Article
In Gaza, truth is neither an abstraction nor simply part of the job, but a lifeline, pursued by Palestinian journalists who continually bear witness to the violence and devastation wrought by Israel.
Since October 7, 2023, Palestinian journalists have borne the unimaginable responsibility of documenting Israel’s genocide in Gaza while living through the very conditions they record. With no independent access for international media, Palestinian journalists have continued to work amid targeted airstrikes, communication blackouts, hunger and thirst, forced displacement, and the systematic destruction of homes, hospitals, and newsrooms. They report facing constant bombardment, deprivation, and injury, and the people they photograph are not distant subjects but their colleagues, friends, neighbors, and family members. It is this devastating reality that FotoEvidence’s Journalism Is Not a Crime chronicles, centering Palestinian journalists who have continued to report under constant risk. “I regard this war on Gaza as something we have never seen before [...] It has left nothing untouched, not a rock, not a tree, not a human, not a child,” says photojournalist Mohammed Salem.
To speak bluntly, FotoEvidence’s newest publication, Journalism Is Not a Crime, will stand as a historic record among photobooks confronting human rights violations. Spanning October 7, 2023, through the end of 2025, the 378-page volume is among the earliest to chronologically document Israel’s genocide in Gaza, though not as an attempt to explain the war but rather to preserve the testimony of those who witnessed it. Its pages are saturated with devastation: children wrapped in burial shrouds, mass graves, flattened buildings, grieving families, and journalists photographing through their own bereavement. “Sometimes, behind the camera, I just stand and cry,” writes photojournalist Mahmoud Bassam. Yet it is not the horror of these images, nor their accumulation, that gives the book its historical permanence. Journalism Is Not a Crime turns away from rhetoric and toward evidence.
Under international humanitarian law, journalists are protected civilians and must not be deliberately targeted in conflict. Yet since October 7, 2023, at least 212 journalists have been killed in Palestine by Israeli forces, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), with the overwhelming majority in Gaza—a catastrophe that multiple human rights organizations and U.N. experts have unequivocally described as genocide. In 2024 and 2025, Israel was responsible for approximately two-thirds of all journalists and media workers killed worldwide, making the Israel-Gaza war the deadliest conflict for journalists according to CPJ’s records.
Against this staggering toll, Journalism Is Not a Crime represents thirty-eight living journalists and commemorates thirty-five who have been killed. Rather than asking us to adopt a political position, the book confronts the devastating human toll paid for in blood by Palestinian journalists whose status as protected civilians has too often been disregarded. The book advocates for something deliberately simple: journalism is not a crime.
Journalism Is Not a Crime captures a profound shift in the nature of journalism itself. Bringing together 116 photographs and 70 screenshots selected from approximately 57,000 social-media posts, the publication transforms an overwhelming algorithmic and often ephemeral stream of images into a curated and chronological visual record of the war that has become one of the most visible and extensively livestreamed conflicts of the modern era, equalled only by the war in Ukraine.
In the absence of foreign journalists and Israel’s attacks that devastated Palestine’s remaining media infrastructure, the role of the journalist has increasingly moved into the hands of anyone with a camera, which, in an age of ubiquitous smartphones, often means ordinary civilians. A phone becomes a press camera; Instagram becomes journalistic infrastructure; and a social-media feed becomes a frontline newsroom. As journalist Wael al-Dahdouh writes in the book, “This experience should become a model studied in journalism schools everywhere. Indeed, it has already become an inspiring journalistic model on a global scale.”
Journalism Is Not a Crime, therefore does more than document the genocide in Gaza. It establishes the region's radically changing conditions of journalism and maps the increasingly porous boundary between professional journalism and civilian testimony. The book's images and written testimonies make you cry, shudder, and reckon with the unbearable realities they contain: the dead, final wills, blood, and grief. By forcing us to confront these agonizing images, the permanence of the printed page slows the otherwise endless flow of the digital media feed. Above all, this photobook stands as a historical defense of journalists' right to bear witness.
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