The Paris-based global watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has expressed support for Gaza’s media professionals and called on Israel to urgently lift the blockade on the territory.
It said the humanitarian catastrophe was continuing in Gaza and hampering journalists’ work on a daily basis.
The Israeli army had killed their colleagues and destroyed their homes and newsrooms, said RSF in a statement.
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- Other Gaza media freedom reports
- Other Pacific Media Watch reports
Gaza’s remaining journalists, who have survived 15 months of intensive bombardment, continue to face immense challenges despite the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that came into effect on 19 January 2025 with the first stage expiring last weekend.
Humanitarian aid, filtered by the Israeli authorities, is merely trickling into the blockaded territory, and Israel continues to deny entry access to foreign journalists, forbidding independent outlets from covering the aftermath of the war and the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe.
Exiled Palestinian journalists are also prevented from returning to the Gaza Strip.
“We urgently call for the blockade that is suffocating the press in Gaza to be lifted,” said RSF editorial director Anne Bocandé.
“Reporters need multimedia and security equipment, internet and electricity.
“Foreign reporters need access to the territory, and exiled Palestinian journalists need to be able to return.
“While the ceasefire in Gaza has put an end to an unprecedented massacre of journalists, media infrastructure remains devastated.
“RSF continues to campaign for justice and provide all necessary support to these journalists, to defend a free, pluralist and independent press in Palestine.”
Reporters face the shock of a humanitarian catastrophe
- Working amid the rubble
“The scale of the destruction is immense, terrifying,” said Islam al-Zaanoun of Palestine TV.
“Life seems to have disappeared. The streets have become open-air rubbish dumps. With no place to work, no internet or electricity, I was forced to stop working for several days.”
Journalists must also contend with a severe fuel shortage, making travel within the country difficult and expensive. Like the rest of Gaza’s population, reporters have to spend long hours in queues every day to obtain water and food.
- Israeli fire despite the ceasefire
“Entire areas are unreachable,” Al Jazeera correspondent Hani al-Shaer told RSF.
“The situation remains dangerous. We came under Israeli fire in Rafah.”
The journalist explained that due to an unrelenting series of crises, he was forced to choose which stories he covered.
“The destroyed infrastructure? The humanitarian crisis? Abandoned orphans?” he wondered.
- Witnesses and targets: the double trauma of reporters
With at least 180 media professionals killed by the Israeli army in the course of 15 months of war, including at least 42 killed on the job, according to RSF figures, surviving journalists must face their trauma while continuing their news mission.
Gaza media sources put the journalist death toll at more than 200.
“We covered this tragedy, but we were also part of it. Often, we were the target,” stressed Islam al-Zaanoun.
“We still can’t rest or sleep. We’re still terrified that the war will start again,” adds Hani al-Shaer.
- The suspended lives of exiled journalists
From Egypt to Qatar, journalists who managed to escape the horror continue to live with the consequences, unable to return to their loved ones and homes.
“My greatest hope is to return home and see my loved ones again. But the border is closed and my house is destroyed, like those of most journalists,” lamented Ola al-Zaanoun, RSF Gaza correspondent, now based in Egypt.
The Gaza bureau chief of The New Arab, Diaa al-Kahlout is one of many who watched the Israeli Army destroy his house.
“When they arrested me, they bombed and set fire to my house and car. I’ve lost everything I’ve earned in my career as a journalist, and I’m starting all over again,” he told RSF.
A refugee in Doha, Qatar, he is still haunted by the abuse inflicted by Israeli forces during his month-long detention in December 2023, following his arbitrary arrest at his home in Beit Lahya, a city in the north of the Gaza Strip.
“No matter how many times I tell myself that I’m safe here, that I’m lucky enough to have my wife and children with me, I have trouble sleeping, working, making decisions,” confided the journalist, whose brother was killed in the war.
“I’m scared all the time,” he added.
- Israel is ranked 101st among the 180 countries listed by the RSF World Press Freedom Index and Palestine is 157th.
Asia Pacific Media Network’s Pacific Media Watch project collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.
