Did they know beforehand? Reuters and AP in the eye of the storm because their photographers were present during the Hamas massacre on October 7

On October 7, Hamas began terrorist attacks in Israel, massacring civilians and kidnapping hostages directly in the Gaza Strip. The jihadist group's actions took both the Jewish State and practically the rest of the world by surprise. However, some photojournalists in the Middle East obtained privileged images, which caught the attention of the Honest Reporting site, which raised "serious ethical questions" about the situation.

The site mainly targeted photojournalists from the Associated Press and Reuters, who were at the scene before the attacks began, raising questions of journalistic ethics. "What were they doing there so early on what would normally have been a quiet Saturday morning? Was it coordinated with Hamas? Did the respectable wire services, which published their photos, approve of their presence inside enemy territory, together with the terrorist infiltrators?" they asked in their writing.

Four AP reporters were explicitly named, Hassan Eslaiah, Yousef Masoud, Ali Mahmud and Hatem Ali, who managed to capture images of the kidnapping of some Israelis, of a burning tank and were able to enter some kibbutz.

"Interestingly, the names of the photographers, who appear in other sources, have been removed from some of the photos in the AP's database. Perhaps someone at the agency realized that it posed serious questions about their journalistic ethics," Honest Reporting indicted. As for Eslaiah, a selfie was revealed showing him with Yahya Sinwar, leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

On the Reuters side, the photojournalists are Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa and Yasser Qudih. While both managed to capture photographs of a burning Israeli tank, Abu Mustafa captured the moment a lynch mob brutalized the body of an Israeli soldier.

"News agencies may claim that these people were just doing their job. Documenting war crimes, unfortunately, may be part of it. But it's not that simple. It is now obvious that Hamas had planned its October 7 attack on Israel for a very long time: its scale, its brutal aims and its massive documentation have been prepared for months, if not years. Everything was taken into account — the deployments, the timing, as well as the use of bodycams and mobile phone videos for sharing the atrocities. (...) Is it conceivable to assume that 'journalists' just happened to appear early in the morning at the border without prior coordination with the terrorists? Or were they part of the plan?" stated the website mentioned above.