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Instagram accused of killing Saleh Al-Jafarawi for a second time by removing his reporting

Israel-aligned extremists reportedly killed Palestinian journalist Saleh Al-Jafarawi in recent days. And now, Instagram faces accusations of ‘killing him for a second time’ after his popular account on the platform disappeared.

Saleh Al-Jafarawi: another crime of Israel’s infocide in Gaza

Saleh Al-Jafarawi warned just weeks ago that Israeli occupation forces had been threatening him, just as they had with many other journalists covering the genocide in Gaza. Al Jazeera says Israel’s genocidal campaign has killed 273 journalists and media workers since October 2023. That means it’s taken the life of at least one journalist every three days in the last two years. As International Federation of Journalists general secretary Anthony Bellanger wrote recently:

silence is a victory for the executioners. It allows them to say that nothing happened.

Scholars say the apartheid state has committed infocide (journocide / mediacide) in Gaza, systematically waging information warfare not only via propaganda efforts but by working to ensure the censorship or murder of Palestinian journalists. And in Al-Jafarawi’s case, it seems both have happened.

Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa suggested that Instagram removing Al-Jafarawi’s account may be about efforts from Israeli occupation forces (and their supporters) to “try to scrub the internet as much as possible of evidence of their crimes”.

Reports have previously exposed the ways in which billionaire corporation Meta – the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – has helped to manufacture consent for Israel’s genocide in Gaza by systematically targeting and silencing Palestinian voices.

UN expert Francesca Albanese, who has been documenting Israel’s crimes meticulously, has called large corporations out for their participation in Israel’s “economy of genocide”. And responding to the news of Al-Jafarawi’s murder and censorship, she called for a future Genocide Museum to honour voices like his, insisting that:

Deleting a killed journalist’s account is to kill them twice.

Hold the war criminals to account for infocide and genocide

Saleh Al-Jafarawi enjoyed singing, but committed much of his time to showing the world the decimation of Gaza:

Censorship, however, was not new. Instagram had already removed his account just months before:

Days before his murder, he expressed hope for the future and posted a message with some of Gaza’s children:

As the Quds News Network noted regarding the apparent wiping of his reporting:

Observers warn that these developments may signal “a new phase in efforts to erase evidence of Israeli war crimes from the internet.”

Researchers, however, have been diligently collecting and documenting evidence over the last two years. So it’s unlikely Israel will be able to hide all the proof of its crimes. And the apartheid state will find it hard to change the overwhelming consensus among genocide experts, legal scholars, and human rights organisations that it has committed genocide in Gaza. But the international community must also take steps to hold Israeli war criminals to account for their infocide too. We must not allow it to forget or ignore the bravery of Saleh Al-Jafarawi and his colleagues.

By Ed Sykes

This post was originally published on Canary.