Four years ago, Mahmoud Isleem al-Basos began messaging Shadi al-Tabatiby on social media, again and again, asking to join him on shoots. Al-Tabatiby, one of Gaza’s best-known drone journalists, didn’t pay much attention at first. “But Mahmoud was persistent,” he said. “So I told him: ‘fine, I’ll meet you.’” Twice, al-Tabatiby told him where he’d be filming; both times, al-Basos showed up and waited. “There’s an age gap between us, but I love people who work hard and want to learn. I found that in Mahmoud.”
They became close. Al-Basos began joining al-Tabatiby on shoots. When the war began, al-Tabatiby, freelancing for the Associated Press, relocated to the south. Al-Basos stayed in the north. With movement between the two areas cut off by the Israeli military, they kept in touch. Shadi began assigning him shoots from afar. Al-Basos also picked up work with international outlets, including Reuters and the Turkish news agency Anadolu.
Even after al-Tabatiby evacuated to Egypt, they stayed in close contact.
On Saturday, March 15, al-Basos was filming the opening of an expansion of a displacement camp and preparations for a Ramadan iftar in the northern city of Beit Lahia for the London-based Al-Khair Foundation when two Israeli airstrikes hit the area. At least seven people were killed, including al-Basos.
“I was in shock,” Shadi said. “I couldn’t believe it…We were in a ceasefire.”
Al-Basos became the fifth drone journalist to be killed by Israel since the war in Gaza began in October 2023.
“We were deeply saddened to learn that journalist Mahmoud Al-Basos, whose work Reuters published in recent weeks, was killed by an Israeli strike while on assignment for the Al-Khair Foundation,” a Reuters spokesperson said.
Earlier this month, al-Basos was hired by Forbidden Stories for the Gaza Project to film drone footage for this article. A few days On March 9, six before the strike that killed him, he had completed his second assignment, capturing images of al-Shati refugee camp. “The journalist is back home and safe,” a colleague wrote in a shared group chat. Forbidden Stories had been coordinating the filming and regularly updating partners on its progress.
A drone journalist working on a story about the killing of drone journalists gets killed himself.
Gaza has become the most dangerous place in the world for journalists.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the war in Gaza is the deadliest conflict for journalists that the organization has documented. At least 165 Palestinian journalists have been killed—more than during six years of World War II.
Drone journalists face even greater risk. Five have been killed and one severely injured, out of a group of about a dozen working in Gaza at the start of the war, according to journalist Shadi al-Tabatiby. ARIJ, Forbidden Stories and their partners documented that in nearly every case, they were killed or injured shortly after capturing aerial images.
In several of these cases, including the March 15 strikeIsrael accused the journalists of ties to militant groups but provided no substantiated evidence. Interviews with former Israeli reservists (maybe say officials) and leaked internal documents point to the absence of clear rules of engagement when it comes to journalists using drones.
With the scale of destruction so vast in Gaza, drone footage is often the only way to capture its full extent. A recent example is a one-minute video by AFP published in January, after the ceasefire took effect, showing the magnitude of the destruction in Rafah.
Drones have been used for coverage in Gaza since 2014, when journalist and filmmaker Ashraf Mashharawi first introduced them into the field. They were in use before and during the 2014 war, and became a key tool for documenting its aftermath and destruction.
Al-Tabatiby believed drone footage was essential to capture the scale of devastation during the current war, something ground photography couldn’t show. So he kept filming. Until January 2024.
On January 7, 2024, al-Tabatiby was supposed to join his friend Mustafa Thuraya on a shoot. The two had been sharing a tent and covering the war together. But that morning, al-Tabatiby stayed back to help his wife take their newborn daughter for a vaccination. Thuraya, who had been freelancing for AFP and Al Jazeera, was killed in an Israeli airstrike after filming the aftermath of a previous strike with his drone. He was the first Palestinian drone journalist killed in the war.
The Israeli military said it had “identified and killed a terrorist operating a flying device that posed a threat to Israeli troops.” But a visual investigation by The Washington Post contradicts that claim. In an article titled “Drone footage raises questions about Israeli justification for deadly strike on Gaza journalists,” the Post analyzed footage from Thuraya’s drone and found no Israeli soldiers, aircraft or military equipment in the area.
Abdallah al Haji
On February 24, drone journalist Abdallah el-Hajj was seriously injured in an Israeli strike after filming in Al-Shati refugee camp. “As soon as I finished filming and put the drone inside my backpack, I was hit,” said El-Hajj, who regularly contributed to UNRWA.
The Israeli military later claimed it had struck a “terrorist cell using a drone,” but did not respond to questions about the incident. Abdallah denied any ties to militant groups, calling the allegation “false and unfounded.” He said he was checked twice by Israeli forces, once at al-Shifa Hospital and again before leaving Gaza for treatment in Qatar. “If I were Hamas,” he said, “I would not have gone out of the Gaza Strip for treatment.”
Abdallah had both legs amputated. A few days after the attack, his house was hit. He believes it was targeted to destroy the archives he had accumulated over 20 years.
In April, al-Tabatiby got a call from photographer Ibrahim al-Gharbawi, who had just bought a drone and asked for help learning to fly it. Al-Tabatiby advised him not to use it, saying the situation was “frightening.”
Ibrahim and his brother Ayman had evacuated with their family to Rafah. On April 26, they left for Khan Younis to film the destruction left by the Israeli invasion, according to their brother, Abdallah. Ibrahim’s wife, Inas, said he called to say they had finished shooting and were on their way back. She never heard from him again. Later that night, she learned they had been killed in an Israeli airstrike.
Losing two brothers at once was devastating. “There’s not a moment that passes without us bringing them up, remembering them, crying for them,” said Abdallah.
“After he [Ibrahim] was targeted, I decided that khalas—enough.” ٍAl-Tabatiby evacuated to Egypt and sold his drone to a colleague, Mohammed Abu Saadeh. Three months later, Abu Saadeh was killed in an airstrike on his uncle’s tent, where he had gone to use the internet to upload footage. “It was 5:29, I remember looking at the phone.. I hardly walked away [from where they were sitting],... when a missile fell, I felt everything freeze for a second” his cousin, Saif Abu Saadeh, who was with him at the time, says. Mohammed and three of Saif Siblings were all dead
His final post showed him with his drone, filming the destruction in Bani Suhaila, east of Khan Yunis.He was the only drone journalist who wasn’t killed after filming in the field. Saif says he wasn’t using the drone, and he had removed the battery and he had left it at home.
“We all knew that anyone using one would be shot down, even if they were civilians.”
Interviews with several former Israeli officials, including Michael Ofer-Ziv, a former military reservist who monitored drone footage from Gaza in the war's early weeks, reveal that there were no clear guidelines about how to handle civilian drones. “At no point during this war did I receive an official document outlining the rules of engagement,” he said. “And that’s a problem, because it leaves a lot of room for interpretation.”
Ofer-Ziv says the “general vibe” was clear: “If you see someone flying a drone and it’s not ours, you shoot, without questions.” The use of drones by journalists, he added, was never discussed.
Leaked emails from 2020, shared with Forbidden Stories, show that officials in the Israeli Ministry of Justice were cautioning against suggesting that journalists using drones could be misidentified as fighters, as it could be perceived as Israel not adhering to the laws of war.
In one exchange, two senior officials in the State Attorney’s Office reference a statement made by then–Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman about the killing of journalist Yasser Murtaja during the Great March of Return protests in April 2018, where he says, “I don’t know who he is, a photographer, not a photographer, whoever operates drones over IDF soldiers needs to understand he’s putting himself in danger.”
The officials note that such a statement, cited in a UN inquiry report on the Gaza border protests, could be seen as blurring the line between journalists and militants, which, they warned, could be used to “undermine Israel's claims that it adheres to the laws of war in general and the principle of distinction in particular.”
There is no public record of an Israeli warning to journalists not to use drones.
“We never saw any statement or warning from the army clearly telling journalists not to use drones. But there’s a clear pattern: journalists who do are targeted,” says Mashharawi, the Palestinian journalist who first introduced drones to Gaza. “They have tools to disable or even take over a drone, without sentencing the journalist to death. There are many other options before firing a missile.”
In three of the four attacks that killed drone journalists documented by this report, the drones survived. The journalist does not.
As part of the consortium, we asked the Israeli military whether it has a specific policy on drones in Gaza and how it distinguishes between civilians and military targets. We also requested information about several of the individual cases. The Israeli military did not respond to questions about specific incidents or provide further evidence, but said it “rejects outright the allegation of a systemic attack on journalists.”
In its response, the military said it “takes all feasible measures to mitigate harm to civilians, including journalists.” It added that it only targets “military objects” and individuals directly participating in hostilities, and that exceptional cases are subject to internal review, without specifying if any of the cases in this report were under investigation.
This investigation was completed with support from ARIJ