Palestinians in press vests in the Gaza Strip, May14, 2021. (credit: Osps7, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
As part of the background information in CNN’s “‘Someone will die’: Incitement against journalists alarms Israel as elections near,” Tal Shalev cited Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which has alarmingly ranked Israel 116 out of 180 countries in its 2026 World Press Freedom Index.
Through the Index, RSF aims to compare the level of freedom enjoyed by journalists and media in 180 distinct countries and territories. Yet RSF fundamentally undermined its own comparative framework by penalizing Israel’s domestic press freedom score for casualties in Gaza, which RSF explicitly evaluated and ranked as “Palestine” at 156 as a separate entity.
The July 31, 2026, article falsely claimed that RSF attributed Israel’s fall from 112 in 2025, 101 in 2024, and 86 in 2022 mostly to “wartime restrictions, expanded security-based censorship and limitations on coverage of Palestinian issues.” However, RSF’s own official documentation reveals a different primary driver: the organization explicitly cited its own count of nearly 220 journalists killed during the Gaza military offensive as the main justification for Israel’s low ranking.
By faulting Israel’s domestic score for journalist deaths in Gaza, RSF conflates press freedom inside a sovereign nation with the operational hazards of an external warzone. RSF fails to distinguish state censorship from necessary operational security during a defensive war.
Israel initiated neither the 2008 conflict nor the current war, which Hamas triggered through a brutal, systematically orchestrated invasion on October 7, 2023, where terrorists murdered 1,200 people and took 250 hostages. Yet RSF punished Israel’s domestic score for warzone realities outside its sovereign borders.
As West Point law professor and U.S. Army judge advocate Maj. Emily E. Bobenrieth argued in March 2024, armed conflict presents “prudent and appropriate national security-based limits on freedom of the press.” Protecting troop locations, operational plans, and unit capabilities, she noted, provides justifiable grounds to restrict press access or review content prior to publication.
Crucially, while RSF penalizes the Palestinian Authority for press suppression in the West Bank, it omits Hamas’s systematic press restrictions in Gaza, despite its history of arbitrary journalist arrests (which even RSF documented in 2007), intimidation, abuse, strict censorship, and use of journalists as human shields.
Reporters With No Boundaries
Besides accepting RSF’s flawed premise for Israel’s poor rank, CNN overlooked the unverified and dubious nature of the organization’s figure of 220 slain journalists. Since RSF only explicitly named less than a third of all the individuals on its list, it is not only unclear how the organization reached the figure of 220, but also makes verifying the status of the remaining individuals on the list impossible.
Notably, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which reported 207 media workers killed in Gaza in the war as of June 11, 2026, named and provided the media affiliations for all the alleged media professionals, providing a degree of relative transparency absent from RSF’s partial list.
Still, even CPJ’s database has faced serious credibility challenges. After Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad published obituaries identifying as combatants individuals CPJ had listed as journalists, the organization announced a full audit, as of June 25, 2026, of its own database . This review has yet to be published as of August 2026 despite the organization stating that the review was expected to be completed in July.
Furthermore, the individuals RSF does identify likewise include highly problematic figures who possess direct military ties to terror groups or fail basic journalistic standards.
For example, RSF includes Hossam Shabat, an IDF-accused Hamas anti-tank sniper. Shabat has been pictured wearing a Hamas scarf, and his own Facebook posts have glorified Hamas’s activities on Oct. 7, 2023, and celebrated the murder of civilians.
The IDF has also accused Gazan Anas Jamal Al-Sharif (who is also on RSF’s list), of holding membership in Hamas’s military wing. He has also been pictured hugging October 7 attack mastermind Yahya Sinwar.
RSF also names Gazan Mohammed Jaber Al Qarinawi, who worked for Sanad News Agency, which has justified targeting civilians with rockets and celebrated the killing of civilians at the Nova Music Festival.
CPJ also includes Shabat, Al-Qarinawi, and Al-Sharif on its list of slain journalists.
Reporters Without Basis
The RSF index’s broader methodology is highly questionable when compared to other respected metrics, like Freedom House, which measures the democracy, political freedom, and human rights of countries across the globe.
For instance, RSF ranked Qatar at 75 in 2026 and 29 in 2025. RSF ranked Israel at 112 in 2025. Yet, according to Freedom House’s 2025 index, Qatar scored significantly lower than Israel regarding free and independent media (scoring 1 out of 4 compared to Israel’s 3 out of 4). This trend holds for North African and Middle Eastern countries/territories such as Lebanon, Morocco and Western Sahara.
Overall, 47 percent of the countries ranked above Israel on RSF’s index score lower than Israel on Freedom House’s media independence metric.
This pattern is not new. Israel’s largest initial drop in the RSF rankings occurred in its 2009 ranking when the Jewish state dropped 47 places from 46 in 2008 to place 93. At the time, Freedom House left Israel’s ranking unchanged.
Reacting to this initial drop, Soazig Dollet, head of RSF’s Middle East desk, acknowledged that military operations in Gaza drove the organization’s decision, including reporter casualties, strikes on media infrastructure, and wartime access bans, rather than domestic media suppression inside Israel, according to a January 21, 2010, report by Benjamin Joffe-Walt, “Why Has Israel’s Press Freedom Ranking Taken a Crash Dive?”.
In response, media scholar at Hebrew University, Tamar Liebes, and former military intelligence officer Dr. Mordechai Kedar at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University pointed out that domestic Israeli reporting remained completely unrestricted. They argued that military operational security and restricted entry into an active, high-risk combat zone do not constitute state censorship of a nation’s press.
In contrast to Israel’s decline on RSF’s list, Israeli public trust in its media landscape has risen since 2008. According to the Israel Democracy Institute, 37 percent of the Israeli public said they trusted the media to a large extent or to some extent. As of 2024, 46 percent of Israelis trust traditional media.
CNN reporters should possess the critical discernment needed to evaluate problematic sources. Ultimately, the glaring discrepancies, unverified casualty statistics, and systemic methodological flaws in RSF’s Press Freedom Index severely undermine its legitimacy as an objective benchmark. These problematic points should have been enough to give any journalist pause in using the data as part of its background at all. Presenting such flawed data uncritically transforms routine background reporting into the very media activism that continues to compromise modern journalism.