A CBS News journalist set himself on fire at a pro-Palestinian protest near the White House on Saturday. In a blog post written beforehand, the man said that he was self-immolating to protest media “misinformation” about Israel’s war in Gaza.
Video footage shared on social media showed the man lighting his left arm on fire, before police officers and bystanders surrounded him and extinguished the blaze with water and a traditional Palestinian keffiyeh headdress.
“We spread the misinformation,” he screamed afterwards, followed by “I’m a journalist and I said it was okay.”
The man was later identified as Samuel Mena, a photojournalist with CBS affiliate network KTVK/KPHO in Arizona. The network said that Mena was “off duty and not in Washington on station business” at the time of the incident, and that he would be sacked for breaching company policy on “objectivity and neutrality.”
In a lengthy blog post published before the incident, Mena complained at having to describe the war in Gaza as a conflict between Israel and Hamas, when the majority of its victims have been civilians.
“How many Palestinians were killed that I allowed to be branded as Hamas? How many men, women, and children were struck with a missile cosigned by the American media?” he wrote.
“To the ten thousand children in Gaza that have lost a limb in this conflict, I give my left arm to you,” he concluded.
Mena’s injuries did not appear severe in the video, and police later said that he was taken to the hospital and treated for minor burns.
The incident took place eight months after Aaron Bushnell, an active-duty member of the US Air Force, set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC to protest American support for Israel. Bushnell soaked himself in flammable liquid and screamed “Free Palestine” as he burned. Police put out the blaze with fire extinguishers, but Bushnell succumbed to his injuries and died later that day.
Monday marks the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ attack on Israel, during which the Palestinian militants killed around 1,100 people and took around 250 hostages back to Gaza. Israel responded by declaring war on Hamas, and after almost a year of aerial bombardment and ground operations, nearly 42,000 Palestinians lie dead, the majority of them women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.