Israel’s seal around the Gaza Strip has been so effective in denying overseas journalists access to the conflict zone that there should be fears it will become a blueprint for other regimes to prevent independent reporting on wars in the future.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Israel has targeted and assassinated at least 26 journalists after making unsubstantiated claims of their links to Hamas. More than 200 media workers have died in Gaza, more than in any other conflict, says Reporters Without Borders. Israel denies deliberately targeting journalists.
The BBC’s John Simpson memorably wore a burqa to enter Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in 2001. During World War One, war correspondent Dorothy Lawrence dressed as a soldier in the trenches on the Somme. In 2023, Sky News reporter Stuart Ramsay eluded a media blockade to report undercover on the civil war in Myanmar.
There is palpable frustration among seasoned war correspondents at being unable to report on the ground from a historic crisis. More than 1,000 journalists – including the BBC’s Lyse Doucet, Sky’s Alex Crawford and Channel 4 News’s Lindsey Hilsum – have signed a petition calling on Israel to let them in. “The longer Gaza remains sealed off, the more global press blackouts become the norm,” they warn.
In an accompanying letter, petitioners pledged support for professional colleagues who “by any legitimate means, independently, collectively, or in co-ordination with humanitarian or civil society actors, choose to enter Gaza without the consent of the [belligerent] parties involved”.
Soon after Israel began its military operation, CNN’s Clarissa Ward slipped into Gaza with an Emirati medical team and visited a field hospital. The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen recently accompanied a Jordanian aid airlift and reported that Israel prevented the filming of Gaza’s ruins from the plane’s windows.
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Two journalists who accompanied the activist Greta Thunberg on a Gaza-bound aid boat were arrested and deported after the vessel was intercepted by Israel’s military in June.
For the remaining Palestinian journalists left in Gaza, the pressures are intolerable. They fear being targeted following this month’s deliberate killing by Israel of the Al-Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif. Five of his colleagues died in the attack. Many Palestinian journalists – like other Gazans – are fighting starvation.
Israel, which faces a slew of complaints to the International Criminal Court over its targeted killings of journalists, shows no desire to invite independent scrutiny of its actions. “The danger,” argues Levy, “is that other countries look at this and think that it has worked.”
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