Four weeks after the massacre of Israeli civilians perpetrated by Hamas gunmen during the October 7 terrorist attack, the Israeli army is conducting military operations of unprecedented scale in Gaza. Deaths and destruction are piling up, without the international press being able to report directly on them. Access to this narrow strip of land is forbidden by the Israeli authorities.
Such a situation is intolerable, and even more intolerable is the heavy toll paid by Palestinian journalists and their families, more than 20 of whom have been killed since October 8 while doing their jobs or in bombings of their homes. This is almost double the number of journalists killed in Ukraine over 20 months of war, and sadly this death toll is only provisional.
These deaths represent only one part – the most dramatic part – of the information blockade that the Jewish state is trying to impose. Other journalists have had to leave their workplaces in a hurry to take refuge in areas deemed safer, abandoning their equipment – including their protective gear – according to the organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which speaks of a process of "suffocating journalism."
This is facilitated by the now catastrophic state of the Gazan electricity network, which has been hard hit by the Israeli strikes, when the Jewish state has not simply cut off the means of communication, as was the case on October 28.
Another aspect of this war on information is the approximately 50 cases of destruction of media outlets reported by the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate. This practice, which is part of a strategy of concealing the reality in Gaza, is not new. Already in 2021, during a previous military campaign, the offices of the Qatari television station Al Jazeera and those of the Associated Press, both housed in a 12-story building, were destroyed in the bombing of the building after they had been hastily evacuated. As always in such circumstances, the Israeli army justified its actions by citing the presence of entities linked to the military wing of Hamas in the building.
Outside Gaza, a Reuters journalist covering exchanges of fire between the Israeli army and the Hezbollah militia was also killed on the border between Israel and Lebanon on October 13. An RSF investigation has also just concluded that the position occupied by a group of journalists which included the reporter was deliberately targeted, without attributing responsibility.
This pernicious situation plays into the hands of rumor and propaganda, to the benefit of Hamas, which has no use for freedom of information. It can only contribute to the exacerbation of emotions, which leads to the abyss.
The media blockade of Gaza is incompatible with the principles of democracies, of which Israel prides itself on being the only example in the Middle East. It follows from the Jewish state's efforts to ensure that the whole world, through the media, is made aware of the level of barbarity from the October 7 massacres. There can be no double standards when it comes to information. Israel must give up this closed-door policy.
Le Monde
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.