Four of the world’s biggest news organisations have vigorously denied any prior knowledge of Hamas’s deadly assault on Israel on 7 October, saying such a suggestion was untrue, outrageous and reckless.

The Associated Press, Reuters, the New York Times and CNN issued robust statements in response to questions about Palestinian photographers in Gaza who documented Hamas’s cross-border raid in which at least 1,400 people were killed.

Benny Gantz, a former defence minister who sits in Israel’s war cabinet, said on X, formerly Twitter: “Journalists found to have known about the massacre, and [who] still chose to stand as idle bystanders while children were slaughtered, are no different than terrorists and should be treated as such.”

The AP and CNN said on Thursday they had severed ties with Hassan Eslaiah, a freelance photographer who took images of Hamas gunmen crossing the border.

The US Republican senator Tom Cotton called on the justice department to investigate the media outlets in question, claiming without evidence that the journalists “almost certainly knew about the attack in advance”.

Some of their atrocities were captured by Gaza-based photojournalists working for the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies, whose early morning presence at the breached border area raises serious ethical questions.”

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