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Middle East Eye
06-07-2025
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
'There is real fear': How Israel's attack on Iran enabled an assault on press freedoms
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. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters 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. British Jewish journalists call for Israel to allow media access to Gaza Read More » "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."
Middle East Eye
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Middle East Eye
Palestinian Oscar winner missing after being severely beaten by Israeli settlers
Palestinian film director and Academy Award-winner Hamdan Ballal was violently attacked by what his colleague described as a "lynch mob" of Israeli settlers on Monday night in the Palestinian village of Susya, south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank. Susya is also the site of an Israeli settlement, which is illegal under international law and something most American administrations have agreed violates Article 49 of the Geneva Convention. Ballal's whereabouts are now unknown after Israeli soldiers then seized him from the ambulance that arrived to treat him, his co-director and fellow Oscar winner of the documentary No Other Land, Yuval Abraham, said on X. Abraham, a journalist for +972 magazine, said in a separate post featuring a shaky cell phone video that masked settlers "attacked Hamdan's village, they continued to attack American activists, breaking their car with stones". The five Jewish-American activists at the scene "are participating in a three-month long coresistance project" in Masafer Yatta, the village at the heart of No Other Land, the Center for Jewish Nonviolence said in a statement released on Monday. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Masafer Yatta is a short drive southeast of Susiya. The activists "responded to calls to come and support the village of Susiya while it was under attack," and "when the activists returned to their car to seek shelter, the settlers surrounded the car, slashed its tires, and smashed the windows with stones", the statement read. Basel Adra, the Palestinian resident of Masafer Yatta whose story is told in the film, said on Monday that he was "standing with Karam, Hamdan's 7 year old son, near the blood of Hamdan's in his house, after settlers lynched him". Ballal "is still missing after soldiers abducted him, injured and bleeding", Adra said. "This is how they erase Masafer Yatta." Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians and their homes and farms are commonplace. The attacks are often violent and can be deadly and can include the torching of property and animals and the beatings of residents. The United Nations humanitarian agency, OCHA, has documented at least 220 attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in 2025 alone. In a particularly gruesome case in 2015, an 18-month-old Palestinian boy was burned to death when settlers torched a home in Duma, south of Nablus. Former US President Joe Biden sanctioned a number of Israeli settlers for carrying out such attacks, but President Donald Trump has since lifted those sanctions. "Local and international activists regularly document the actions of settlers carrying out similar attacks, often calling the police for some sort of recourse, but settlers are rarely, if ever, held accountable for their crimes," the Center for Jewish Nonviolence said. 'Their hands were purple' Eyewitnesses have often recounted how the Israeli military either stands by as settlers carry out attacks or arrests the Palestinians and foreign activists who are defending the property. Middle East Eye recently spoke to 44-year-old activist Alex Chabbott, who was deported back to the US this month and banned from re-entering Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza "for 99 years". Chabbott was just north of Masafer Yatta in at-Tawani, as part of the International Solidarity Movement, when he said Israeli settlers arrived with assault rifles and knives to confront Palestinian families. When Chabbott and a fellow activist began filming, they were stopped by Israeli forces, searched, and accused of being the ones who brought the knives. "Then they realised that wasn't the case," Chabbott told MEE. Israeli settlers escalate attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank Read More » "They had these four Palestinian men zip-tied on the ground, with zip ties that were on super tight. Their hands were purple," he said. "And we were there maybe for about half an hour. And basically, in that half hour, what it appears to me was happening was the settlers and the military were getting their story straight that they were going to make up. I never got anyone else's point of view [and they didn't] interview the Palestinians." Chabbott was arrested and interrogated, had his phone confiscated, and was put into a detention cell before being sent back to California. He stressed the need for Americans to understand that there is no protection for Palestinian families in the West Bank as the number of Israeli settlements grows. "They literally have free reign to do whatever they want, whenever they want," he told MEE. "They can just come in, steal a bunch of stuff, break solar panels, and eventually, you know, some of these [Palestinian] families either get orders to leave by the military, their homes are destroyed, or some just give in because they're like, 'I can't live like this anymore'."
Al Manar
17-02-2025
- Politics
- Al Manar
Israeli Occupation Used Palestinian Elderly as Gaza Human Shield: Report
The Israeli occupation military forced an 80-year-old Palestinian man to act as a human shield in Gaza by tying an explosive cord around his neck and threatening to have his head blown off, an investigation has found. A senior officer from the occupation army's Nahal Brigade tied the explosive cord around the man's neck before he was ordered to scout houses the Israeli outlet The Hottest Place in Hell found in an investigation. After eight hours, soldiers ordered the man to flee with his wife from their home in Gaza City's Zeitoun neighborhood in May, said +972 magazine, which reported the piece in partnership with The Hottest Place in Hell. But when another Israeli battalion spotted the elderly couple on the street, they were shot dead on the spot, according to Israeli occupation soldiers present at the scene. The Israeli soldiers had initially encountered the couple in their home. They told Arabic-speaking soldiers that they were unable to flee to southern Gaza due to mobility difficulties. But even in his condition, the soldiers forced the unnamed 80-year-old to walk ahead of them with his cane, while his wife was detained in their house. Additional details of the methods of warfare used in Gaza by the Israeli military and the deployment of civilians as human shields, then executed. The amount of evidence on the use of the practice in Gaza is unprecedented. It is clearly a military policy. — Nicola Perugini (@PeruginiNic) February 16, 2025 A soldier told the investigation that the Israeli commander had decided to use the Palestinian couple as 'mosquitoes', referring to a procedure where the Israeli army forces Palestinian civilians to serve as human shields to protect the Israeli forces from being shot or blown up. 'He entered each house before us so that if there were [explosives] or a militant inside, he would [take the hit] instead of us,' one soldier said. 'He was told that if he did anything wrong or didn't follow orders, the soldier behind him would pull the cord, and his head would be torn from his body.' The man was forced to act as a human shield for eight hours, before he was ordered, along with his wife, to walk towards the so-called 'humanitarian zone' in southern Gaza. But the soldiers did not care to tell nearby Israeli divisions that the couple was going to pass through the area, according to the testimonies. 'After 100 meters, the other battalion saw them and immediately shot them,' a soldier said. 'They died like that, in the street.' More reports emerge on the Israeli occupation army's war crimes committed against the Palestinian people throughout 16 months of genocidal war in Gaza, with the atrocities of the so-called 'most moral army in the world' are being exposed.
