'There is real fear': How Israel's attack on Iran enabled an assault on press freedoms

Middle East Eye

15 hours ago

Journalists working in Israel are facing harassment, violence and ever-tightening restrictions on their ability to report as a result of military censorship powers reinforced by tough new restrictions imposed during last month's war with Iran.
Palestinian journalists in Israel say they have borne the brunt of the latest crackdown on press freedoms, with some describing being attacked by police or hostile mobs as they worked.
Israel's military censor has sweeping powers, requiring both domestic and international media organisations to seek its approval on stories related to matters of national security.
Earlier this year, +972 magazine reported that Israel had seen an "unprecedented spike" in the use of military censorship powers in 2024, citing data collected annually by the magazine since 2011.
It said the censor last year banned the publication of 1,635 articles and censored a further 6,265, intervening in an average of 21 news stories per day, and in about 38 percent of more than 20,000 stories submitted for review.
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Haggai Mattar, the executive director of +972, told Middle East Eye: "There is nothing like this in other countries that define themselves as liberal and democratic."
Israel this year dropped from 101st to 112th in the annual World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), with RSF warning that journalists had faced "intensified repression" since the start of the war on Gaza.
Israel's war on Gaza 'worst ever conflict' for journalists: Report Read More »
RSF also accused Israel of "annihilating journalism" in Palestine, which it said had become "the world's most dangerous state for journalists", citing the killing of almost 200 journalists in Gaza by Israeli forces.
Last month, the censor's office issued a flurry of new guidelines further limiting journalists' ability to report, most notably restrictions requiring media organisations to seek written authorisation to report from missile impact sites and potentially criminalising journalists who did not abide by the new rules.
These restrictions were condemned by the Union of Journalists in Israel, which represents both Israeli and Palestinian journalists accredited inside Israel, as "the latest nail in the coffin of press freedom in Israel".
International press freedom organisations also expressed alarm.
Anthony Bellanger, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, said: "This wave of assaults and censorship against Palestinian Israeli and foreign journalists in Israel is deeply alarming. Journalists must be allowed to report freely and safely."
Broadcasts taken off air
Razi Tatour, a Palestinian journalist from the Galilee region who holds an Israeli press card, told MEE he had faced days of harassment while trying to report on the Iranian attacks for Jordan's Alghad TV news network.
In one incident, he had gone with a television crew to a residential building damaged by an air strike near Tel Aviv, accompanying journalists from Kan, Israel's national broadcasting corporation.
Initially, the crew were allowed access, alongside their Israeli press colleagues. But when a police officer heard him speaking Arabic, Tatour said, the mood quickly changed.
"He immediately attacked me, trying to cover the camera and trying to scare me. Then they told us to leave."
Tatour and his crew left the area. They set up their equipment nearby and started broadcasting live.
Tatour was then approached by more police officers who asked him who he was working for.
"I told them I was on air and that I had a press card. But they refused to listen and called in forces to cut the cable and take us off air."
The police officers had also called them "terrorists", Tatour said, which he feared risked inciting crowds gathered at the scene. Their equipment was confiscated and only returned to them four hours later.
The next day, Tatour was broadcasting again from a hotel room overlooking the northern city of Haifa when police burst in.
"They stormed the room and stopped the broadcast," he said. "They claimed we were filming in an illegal place and that we had bypassed the military censor and were providing information to the enemy."
Tatour said he and a number of others working for Arab news organisations were detained for around three hours, and their equipment was again confiscated.
'Freedom of the press is no longer constitutionally guaranteed as a right but is rather conditional on national identity and discipline'
- Anton Shalhat, chair of I'lam Media Center
"They accused me of working with Hezbollah, that the footage had reached websites affiliated with Hezbollah. They threatened to arrest me, but there was no arrest."
The next morning, Tatour received a phone call summoning him to the police station in Haifa.
"In the end, there was nothing. They explained the censor's instructions and said we were prohibited from covering Haifa. To this day, our cameras are still being held."
Tatour told MEE he believed his experiences were part of a systematic policy on the part of the Israeli government to intimidate journalists.
"Civil society organisations, human rights groups and journalists' unions may support us legally and in court, but they cannot really protect us. That's the reality," he said.
"There is fear, real fear, among journalistic crews, and that fear is intentional. We were made an example of. It was an attempt to intimidate all the other journalists in the country."
In other cases, journalists have complained of being prevented by police from reaching the sites of rocket and missile strikes.
Following a ballistic missile strike on the town of Rishon Lezion, near Tel Aviv, which killed two people and injured dozens more, journalists from Saudi Arabia's Al Arabiya network, as well as Turkish and Egyptian networks, said they had been refused access when attempting to visit the area.
Creating an 'internal enemy'
Anton Shalhat, the chair of I'lam Media Center, which supports Palestinian journalists working in Israel, told MEE that at least 30 Palestinian journalists had reported facing disruption while trying to report during the days of Iranian air strikes targeting Israeli towns and cities.
These included being subjected to physical assaults, threats and intimidation, and the confiscation of equipment, Shalhat said.
While police were responsible for many of these incidents, Shalhat said that journalists had also reported being threatened and assaulted by mobs emboldened by a permissive environment "that allows for violations of the law as long as the target is an Arab journalist".
The ability to work as a journalist in Israel, he added, was now linked to "ethnic affiliation and presumed loyalty".
"Freedom of the press is no longer constitutionally guaranteed as a right but is rather conditional on national identity and discipline," he said.
Some Israeli journalists observe that harassment of colleagues working for Arab media organisations has also increased since the government banned Qatar-based Al Jazeera from reporting inside Israel in May last year.
"After closing Al Jazeera, they needed to create an internal enemy," said Oren Ziv, a photographer and reporter for Local Call, a Hebrew-language news site.
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"In my opinion, the harassment of Arab journalists is not related to censorship or security, but to the exploitation of censorship."
Ziv said photographers had been put in danger by an assault on press freedoms led by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi.
"They gave a licence to every citizen, every guard, every police officer and every volunteer in the police to harass and bully photographers," he said.
"Not only Arab and Palestinian photographers who work in the field but also foreign photographers and even Israeli photographers."
Ziv added that a climate of fear and the growing weight of reporting restrictions meant that many journalists and photographers were now more inclined to self-censor their work.
"You have these very confusing guidelines; you need to check before you release photos and check what others are doing, and of course, it is discouraging."
In some cases, he said, even when Israeli photographers had been given permission to take photos, they had been unable to do so because of police harassment.
"They say: 'You are leftists and you serve Iran. Don't take photos here.' There is a broader move that everyone is an enemy and everyone needs to be silenced, and it doesn't matter who you are.
"But without a doubt, the Arab journalists and photographers are the first to pay the price."