Key Takeaways:
- Palestinian Journalists Syndicate is tied as the top source for CPJ’s journalist database, cited in over a quarter of profiles.
- PJS is an affiliate of IFJ and worked with it on IFJ’s journalist database. IFJ senior vice president Nasser Abu Bakr also serves as PJS president and a member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council.
- PJS and Abu Bakr are supporters of terrorism, glorifying individual terrorists with blood on their hands and acting as an advocacy organization for imprisoned terrorists.
- PJS acts as a partisan political organization, not an independent, objective professional union.
The slain Gaza journalist databases maintained by Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) are significantly based on the work of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS), a radical and partisan organization led by a pro-terrorist politician.
PJS’s Terrorism Support
PJS’s president Nasser Abu Bakr, PJS Public Relations and Media director and Gaza branch head Luay Nahed Mohammed Al-Ghoul, and the organization itself have repeatedly expressed support for and advocated on behalf of terrorism and terrorists.
Abu Bakr extolled individual terrorists such as Diaa Hamarsheh, who shot dead four Bnei Brak residents and a police officer in March 2022, calling him a hometown “hero” whose “light” illuminates “the dignity of the Arab nation in a time of meanness, cowardice, and humiliation.”
The PJS head posted martyr posters for other terrorists. Immediately after gunman Muhammad al-Jabari murdered a Kiryat Arba resident and wounded three people, including a paramedic and a Palestinian bystander, Abu Bakr shared a martyr notice and called him a “hero” and “lion of Hebron.” He likewise praised Uday al-Tamimi as a hero after the terrorist was shot dead by security guards at the entrance to Maale Adumim in October 2022. Al-Tamimi had shot and killed a soldier and wounded a security guard at the Shuafat checkpoint ten days prior. After the father of the April 2022 Dizengoff Street mass shooter was killed in an August clash with IDF troops, in which he allegedly attempted to stab soldiers, Abu Bakr shared a Fatah poster congratulating him on his “martyrdom.”
Abu Bakr had also praised well-known terrorist figures, mourning the 2024 death of imprisoned Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) cell commander and “freedom fighter” Walid Daqqa, and memorializing former PFLP spokesman Ghassan Kanafani as a cultural icon to whom they pledged “loyalty and faithfulness.”
“On the anniversary of the martyrdom of journalist, writer and thinker Ghassan Kanafani, one of the most prominent pillars of Palestinian national journalism, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate renews its loyalty to those who wrote in blood for Palestine, raised the Palestinian national flag high, and remained faithful to the covenant with the homeland,” Abu Bakr said on Facebook in July 2022.
Abu Bakr is a proponent of violence more broadly, describing in January 2023 how the “Fatah army in Gaza” was “ready to confront Netanyahu’s new fascist government,” and backed the violence that emanated out of Jenin that same year.
“Jenin and its heroic camp continue to offer up their finest young heroes for the freedom and independence of Palestine,” Abu Bakr said of the IDF’s 2023 crackdown on terrorism in Jenin. “Netanyahu, the intruder on this land, will fall, and Jenin will defeat him, and the people of the land, which is kneaded with the blood of the honorable, will defeat him.”
Al-Ghoul has also expressed support for terrorism. In 2023 and 2025, he shared on social media backing for arch-terrorist Marwan Barghouti. In April, the PJS officer praised Fatah co-founder and military wing leader Khalil al-Wazir, the architect of the First Intifada and cross-border raids from Lebanon.
Pro-terrorist propaganda has also been issued from the main PJS social media account. On October 7, 2023, PJS proudly shared its Tunisian counterpart’s statement praising the “achievements of the resistance in southern Palestine.”
As an institution, PJS mourned the Lions’ Den terrorist brother of a PJS member, but it has done more than just report on such news – it has advocated on behalf of imprisoned terrorists. In December 2022, PJS called on Palestinian media outlets to dedicate their coverage to imprisoned terrorists following the death of former Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade leader Nasser Abu Hamid in prison. Abu Bakr shared this call to action on his own Facebook account. Four months prior, PJS sent a delegation to join a protest calling for the release of terrorists at the Gaza Red Cross headquarters, with posters emblazoned with the faces of terrorists and the logos of terrorist organizations.
PJS as a Key Source
PJS, despite being a pro-terrorist organization, serves as the wellspring from which international journalism organizations wet their lips before slandering Israel with the narrative that the IDF deliberately targets journalists.
PJS is tied with Skeyes Media as the most cited source on CPJ’s database of slain Gazan journalists, cited for information about 58 media workers. This accounts for 26.6% of the 218 Gazan journalists on the CPJ database that were reviewed by HonestReporting. This includes 9 removed individuals.
For CPJ database profiles of individuals with terrorist ties, PJS was the most cited source, providing information for 37 entries. It was the fifth most cited for individuals who were proven operatives of terrorist organizations, and the most cited for those who worked with terrorist group-affiliated media.
Another source for CPJ is IFJ, featured in 14 profiles. Like CPJ, IFJ has been cited as a source of information in dozens of news articles about the deaths of journalists in Gaza. According to the IFJ, it works “closely with its affiliate, the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate (PJS) to verify information in real time.”
PJS is not only a member group of the 600,000-strong Belgium-based international union – PJS president Abu Bakr is also the IFJ senior vice president. Another notable IFJ vice president is the head of the National Syndicate of Tunisian Journalists – the very same group that shared its support for the October 7 Massacre with PJS.
PJS as a Political Tool
PJS is advertised as an objective professional organization, but is deeply connected to a Palestinian political movement. Abu Bakr is a member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, the parliamentary body of the Fatah Movement. Al-Ghoul in June related how he and Abu Bakr had met at Fatah’s Egypt office to discuss opening an Egyptian PJS branch. Fatah Egypt secretary Mohammed Gharib reportedly said that such unions and syndicates were pillars of the Palestinian national “struggle,” and meeting participants agreed on the need “for concerted media efforts” to advance Palestinian narratives such as those about supposed Israeli “policies of systematic killing and destruction.”
The databases produced in cooperation with PJS have been used to promote a narrative that Israel was deliberately targeting Palestinian journalists. Supposedly, this policy to target journalists was done to hide war crimes and genocide. Yet this has been a narrative pushed by PJS prior to the October 7 War. A few months before the war, PJS claimed that Palestinian journalists were being systematically targeted during the fighting between the IDF and terrorists in Jenin in order to “cover the occupation’s crimes.” The same was said almost exactly a year before the October 7 Massacre, when there were clashes in Nablus – ostensibly there was the “systematic settler targeting of Palestinian journalists.” The day after the October 7 Massacre, the accusation was already being repeated, with PJS issuing an official statement claiming that journalists killed while joining incursions from Gaza into Israel were victims of a “systematic policy committed by the Israeli occupation against journalists and press institutions.” Abu Bakr had likewise already claimed on October 11, 2023 that “Genocide is being committed tonight in beloved Gaza.”
With PJS as a major source, more context is given to the fake journalists that fill CPJ and IFJ databases. In June, CPJ announced that it would be conducting an audit of its own database, due to terrorist organizations publishing obituaries exposing individuals in its database as operatives. In August, an HonestReporting audit found that at least 57% of those listed in the CPJ database had terrorism ties. Eight have already been removed for involvement in hostilities, and seven more for not meeting the definition of journalist. IFJ has silently removed nine people tied to terrorism from its own database, though it has provided no public explanation for this move despite being exposed by HonestReporting.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
