Who counts?

THE Committee to Protect Journalists has spent the war in Gaza producing the number everyone cites — 209 at last count. It is the figure that goes into headlines, into UN statements, into the columns of people like me who want a shorthand for a toll too large to itemise. It is also, CPJ now tells us, a number that just got smaller — 20 names have been removed from the list: eight because Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) published obituaries claiming the dead as combatants, and 12 for reasons it hasn’t detailed.

CPJ says it has always excluded anyone with evidence of direct participation in hostilities, consistent with international humanitarian law, under which journalists affiliated with non-state actors remain civilians unless they fight. CPJ’s CEO Jodie Ginsberg says the organisation is reviewing every name on its lists to make sure no one engaged in combat remains. That review is expected to finish this month.

Online, the removals were read as something else: a quiet redefinition of who counts as a journalist, timed to placate critics who have spent two years accusing dead Palestinian reporters of having been militants in disguise. CPJ has now pushed back. Recently, its board voted to affirm the organisation’s existing definition of a journalist and rejected claims that it planned to change it to exclude slain Palestinian and Lebanese press. Such allegations, board chair Jacob Weisberg said, undermine years of rigorous documentation and endanger the journalists still on the ground; the board, he added, stands fully with CPJ’s staff.

That may be a firmer answer than silence, and should be noted. But look at what it answers and what it doesn’t. The denial addresses the definition. It does not explain the 12 names removed without detail. And the number still moved because two armed groups decided, after the fact, to claim some of the dead as their own. Sit with that for a moment. Hamas and PIJ wrote obituaries honouring some men as fighters. CPJ had counted the same men as journalists. Both are, in effect, arguing over a corpse’s biography, and the corpse cannot object to either claim.

A journalist in the midst of war is not a fixed identity.

A journalist in the midst of war is not a fixed identity. The identity is a designated institution’s conferral, and institutions confer designations under pressure: from grief, from politics, from the people funding them, from the people threatening them. CPJ has been threatened from one direction for two years, accused of inflating a death toll to indict Israel. It is now also being pulled from another, by groups eager to count their dead as soldiers, because a soldier’s death serves a different story than a reporter’s.

None of this exonerates Israel, which has killed more journalists in this war than in any conflict CPJ has documented since 1992; it continues to deny international media entry into Gaza. It is Israel that created the conditions in which the obituaries became evidence in the first place: no foreign press on the ground, no independent verification possible, every fact about every death arriving through whichever party survived to tell it. CPJ has said this itself, repeatedly.

Which leaves the issue the board’s statement did not touch. Palestinian and Lebanese reporters who worked for government-funded outlets have had their status questioned. Israeli reporters embedded with the IDF, drawing on its briefings, sometimes wearing its uniform, have not. Ukrainian journalists at state-funded outlets have not. If proximity to a state or a military is grounds for scrutiny, the standard should run in every direction it can run. If it is not, CPJ should explain why eight Palestinian na­­mes came off the list anyway, and what happened to the other 12. Affir­ming a definition is not the same as showing it has been applied evenly.

I do not know whether CPJ moved under pressure or to correct an ‘error’ once it was pointed out. Both are possible. For three decades CPJ has been the record-keeper journalists trust when no one else is counting, and that is precisely the problem: an institution whose reputation rests on consistency cannot afford even the appearance that its consistency bends, however briefly or unintentionally. The damage is not abstract. A reporter in danger, weighing whether to call CPJ for emergency assistance, for advocacy, for someone to say their name when a government will not, now has a new question: does the organisation’s protection follows principle or power?

Two hundred and nine became 189 in a week. This week’s statement defended the definition. It did not account for the campaign that made finding combatants so urgent all of a sudden, or for the names that vanished without explanation. Until it does, the omission will keep doing the work that the obituaries started.

The writer conducts writing workshops in Karachi.

X: @LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, July 5th, 2026

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