The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has discontinued its annual Global Impunity Index. The move was intended to prevent Israel from topping the list of countries where journalist killings go unpunished, allege current and former staff members.
Published since 2008, the annual report is designed to highlight countries that allow those who deliberately target journalists to get away with their crimes.
The ranking measures the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of each country’s population, covering a rolling 10-year period. The ranking is regularly referenced in UN reports.
According to whistleblowers, who wrote to The Electronic Intifada as a group, CPJ’s CEO Jodie Ginsberg “decided to cancel [CPJ’s] Impunity Index simply because the math showed Israel is number one.”
They said that Israel—ranked second in the 2024 index behind Haiti—would likely have moved to first place in the 2025 edition, which covered 2024, the first full year of the Gaza war.
“Since the Impunity Index usually covers a timeframe of 10 years, Israel would have been ranked near the top, if not number one, for many years to come,” the whistleblowers argued.
According to CPJ’s own database, Israel deliberately killed 64 journalists in 2023, 76 in 2024, another 51 in 2025 and three so far in 2026.
CPJ is a nonprofit organisation based in New York. Whistleblowers alleged that Ginsberg “simply couldn’t afford the heat she would get every year from the board, the pro-Israel donors and from Israel itself and its allies.”
CPJ denied that donor considerations play any role in its decisions with respect to Israel or any other country.
The Electronic Intifada reportedly accessed an internal email from Ginsberg to CPJ staff in August, in which she wrote that “we are proposing dropping this year’s Impunity Index.”
She cited unspecified flaws in the index and said the methodology “did not take into account accountability for journalists killed but where CPJ has been unable to determine with certainty that they were murdered.” Killings of journalists by Israel was cited as an example.
Critics say that methodology already excludes many Palestinian journalists killed during Israel’s attacks in Palestine, meaning the index counts only a portion of Israel’s lethal record. But instead of expanding or reformulating the Index, CPJ scrapped it and proposed to produce “a lighter lift statement/short analysis that highlights lack of accountability and justice generally, potentially using five key cases.”
The Impunity Index “produces a huge amount of media coverage,” according to the whistleblowers. “This flimsy statement produced none.”
They described widespread frustration among staff, citing “deep disappointment, anger, and resentment” over the decision.
In response, CPJ stated that its decision to scrap the Impunity Index “was not motivated by concerns that Israel would rank at the top but a recognition that we need to radically change how to do this work to hold the worst perpetrators of crimes against journalists to account… To that end, the organization made the decision to prioritize efforts to pursue accountability and this work is ongoing.”
CPJ data indicates that more than 125 journalists were killed worldwide in 2024, with a large proportion in Gaza. Palestinian authorities say over 260 journalists and media workers have been killed since October 2023.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has also identified Israel as the world’s leading killer of journalists for three consecutive years.