The Committee to Protect Journalists employs multiple staffers who have engaged in anti-Israel advocacy, accused Israel of “genocide,” promoted anti-Israel economic boycotts and, in one case, authored a bizarre manifesto advocating “resistance and revolutionary violent pressure” against “the Zionist occupation,” according to new research from the media watchdog group HonestReporting.
The revelations are likely to raise further questions about the CPJ’s impartiality as the embattled New York group—founded in 1981 to defend journalists worldwide—descends further into turmoil and infighting over its oft-cited list of Palestinian “journalists” killed in the Gaza war. The list, which major media outlets use to discredit Israel’s war effort, has been found to include numerous military operatives for terror groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The embattled CPJ is already in an uproar over the vote by its board—composed largely of leading journalists from prestigious news operations like the New York Times and NBC News—to affirm that people who work for “organizations affiliated with militant groups” can still be considered “journalists.” The board, already under fire for the pronounced anti-Israel sentiments of several members, voted 17 to 1 last week in favor of keeping that contested definition, with only Fox News voting “no,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.
The hostility to Israel seen on the CPJ’s board appears to extend to at least half a dozen of the group’s staff members, according to HonestReporting, an Israeli media watchdog which unearthed extensive evidence of some CPJ staff’s past affiliation with radical—and sometimes violent—anti-Zionist organizations and causes.
CPJ Levant researcher Rama Sabanekh, for example, who is listed on the organization’s website as a “third-generation Palestinian refugee based in Amman, Jordan,” emerged as an anti-Israel student activist around 2017 while attending SOAS University of London, HonestReporting found. When Sabanekh ran for a SOAS Students’ Union position that year, she penned a “manifesto” outlining support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the global campaign to economically isolate, punish, and shame Israel.
Just a year prior, in 2016, Sabanekh helped orchestrate a virulently anti-Israel protest at University College London to oppose a speaking appearance by former Israel Defense Forces commander Hen Mazzig. The Telegraph noted that police were called to the event, “which left Jewish students barricaded” inside the room, which was ultimately breached by the protesters. The following day, Sabanekh uploaded a photo to Facebook celebrating that the “lecture theatre [was] shut down,” according to archived posts accessed by HonestReporting.
In another since-deleted Facebook posting from 2017, Sabanekh wrote that “justice will never be achieved through political and diplomatic ‘efforts’ … But, it is a collective people’s effort towards resistance and revolutionary violent pressure to the Zionist occupation by all means possible.”
Another 2017 photo shows a keffiyeh-wearing Sabanekh posing beside the anti-Israel activist Hadi Nasrallah—who mourned the death of late Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, and claimed that “Israel deliberately aim[s] to kill children and babies in every way possible”—during a protest against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Additional open source information uncovered by HonestReporting revealed that Sabanekh penned a 2022 article decrying “the settle[r] colonial project of Israel over Palestinian waters” and the “Zionist expansionist ideology.” A February 2024 video shows Sabanekh delivering a lecture on how the “Zionist occupation of Palestine has engineered its borders and its plans for occupation and dispossession of the Palestinians around water resources.”
CPJ staffer Yasmine Mosimann, who joined the organization in 2025 as a “specialist editor” for the Middle East and North Africa, also cut her chops as an anti-Israel student activist affiliated with Solidarity for Palestine Human Rights (SPHR) at McGill University in Montreal. Mosimann supported the BDS movement, lending her name to the movement’s official website, and backed a 2016 vote by McGill undergraduate students to support anti-Israel boycotts.
Since-deleted photos further confirm that Mosimann “celebrated the student body’s decision,” according to HonestReporting, and that, in 2018, she posed for a group photo with SPHR McGill holding a bullhorn during “a vigil for Gaza.” Mosimann also penned several articles for the McGill Daily about the “voices of Palestine” and “understanding state violence in Palestine.”
A third CPJ staffer, Levant program coordinator Joud Hasan, has also shared pro-Palestinian content across LinkedIn and Facebook. Hasan promoted one post, for instance, encouraging people to “unite against ‘genocide, apartheid, and occupation’ by participating in Palestine Cinema Days.” In another, he shared a post that praised the independent Meta Oversight Board’s 2024 determination that the phrase “from the river to the sea”—a term widely understood to advocate for Israel’s erasure—does not violate the social media company’s policies on hate speech and incitement.
Between 2021 and 2024, HonestReporting found, Hasan “uploaded a series of images documenting his attendance at multiple ‘Queers for Palestine’ rallies, alongside a post depicting an elderly Arab woman confronting an IDF soldier, captioned: ‘I’m older than your state.’”
Two other CPJ employees—CEO Jodie Ginsberg and Middle East and North Africa regional director Sara Qudah—have worked with and platformed Hamas operatives and those affiliated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group.
Qudah gave an “exclusive interview” to the Iranian state-controlled Tehran Times in October 2025 in which she discussed how in Gaza, “reporting is not just a job — it’s a form of survival, resistance, and witness.” She added that the “resilience” of so-called Palestinian journalists “is both heartbreaking and deeply inspiring. It reminds us of the essential role of journalism in documenting human suffering, injustice, and resistance.”
In a recent LinkedIn post, Qudah referred to a Palestinian man who was killed while trying to seize an IDF officer’s weapon as a “martyr.” In others, she has accused Israel of perpetrating “industrial-scale mass killing,” a “literal genocide,” and a “systemic descent into unrestrained brutality.” The “current violence” between Israel and Hamas, she wrote in 2024, “is not an isolated incident but rather a symptom of underlying conditions such as apartheid and oppression.”
In April of this year, Qudah moderated a panel at the International Journalism Festival and hailed Al Jazeera Gaza bureau chief Wael Al-Dahdouh as “one of the most important voices documenting the genocide in Gaza.” She did not mention that Al-Dahdouh was arrested during the first Palestinian intifada in 1989 for serving in a Palestinian Islamic Jihad cell and throwing Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison, served 7, and was released in 1993.
CPJ CEO Ginsberg has also “regularly platformed Hamas operatives,” according to HonestReporting. In October 2024, for instance, Ginsberg reposted a message from supposed Palestinian journalist Anas Al-Sharif claiming that Gazan reporters face “silence or death” from Israel. Just five days later, Israel released extensive evidence that Al-Sharif was a Hamas squad leader and member of its elite Nukhba forces. Ginsberg never removed her post or acknowledged that Al-Sharif was an active terrorist. Al-Sharif—who died last year in an Israeli airstrike—is also still listed as a “murdered” reporter on the CPJ’s website.
Ginsberg has also publicly accused Israel of “smearing journalists” by revealing they are actually terrorists. “Smearing journalists as criminals is a tactic prevalent in autocracies – and one used frequently by Israel – and has two aims,” she posted in November 2024. “The first: justify attacks on journalists after the fact. The second: discredit Palestinian journalists and their reporting.”
The CPJ’s chief global affairs officer, Gypsy Guillén Kaiser, has a similarly biased footprint on social media. She reposted New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof—the author of a widely discredited report alleging Israeli soldiers raped two different Palestinian journalists with a carrot and a dog—in May of this year when he claimed that “Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza, enabled by the US, was a moral outrage.”
“The facts. #ThisIsJournalism,” she wrote above Kristof’s missive. Later that same month, Kaiser promoted Kristof’s outlandish rape column, writing, “Facts matter. #ThisIsJournalism.”
The CPJ did not respond to a request for comment.
The Free Beacon recently reported on pronounced anti-Israel bias by CPJ board members such as New York Times writer Lydia Polgreen, the board’s vice chair, and Maria Ressa, a Nobel laureate known for employing antisemitic tropes. The anti-Israel biotech heiress Nika Soon-Shiong, daughter of Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, was ousted by the board last week after an argument over the Free Beacon’s coverage, according to her own posts.
The Free Beacon has been unable to identify any staff or board members of the CPJ who are vocally supportive of Israel.
The drumbeat of revelations about the CPJ’s bias, centered primarily on its oft-cited list of journalists slain in Gaza, has thrown the organization into turmoil and infighting as it becomes increasingly clear that list often includes active combatants affiliated with Hamas and other terrorist organizations. A CPJ spokesman confirmed to the Free Beacon that, following the contentious board vote affirming that Arab militants can also be journalists, it “is continuing to undertake review of its documentation of journalists killed in [the] Israel-Gaza war since 2023” and expects that effort to be completed sometime this month. But questions remain about the impartiality and mechanisms underpinning that review, particularly since it may be overseen in part by several staffers who have evidenced strong bias against Israel.
HonestReporting CEO Jacki Alexander said the body of evidence on the CPJ’s staff cast a shadow over any anti-Israel report in mainstream media that uses the CPJ as a credible source. The notorious Kristof rape piece employed the CPJ as a key source, calling it “a respected American organization.”
“These revelations are not surprising for the staff of an organization that considers Hamas terrorists journalists and is contemplating considering state-sponsored propagandists as journalists,” Alexander told the Free Beacon. “CPJ is meant to protect journalists. They appear to be neglecting that duty in order to promote an anti-Israel narrative at the expense of actual journalists.”
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