Why Israel is so determined to keep the world’s media out of Gaza

A protester with a mock camera around her neck carries photos of journalists who have died working in Gaza, during the annual Al-Quds Day rally in Karachi, Pakistan, in March 2025

Dahlia Scheindlin writes in Haaretz on 21 May 2025:

As Israel rolls out its vast expansion of the war, the feverish ongoing battle over information is raging alongside the gunfire. Is there famine in Gaza? Does Hamas steal humanitarian aid? Were the aid workers the IDF shot from point-blank range in March near Rafah and buried along with their vehicles murdered in cold blood, and is Israel “killing babies as a hobby,” as Yair Golan, head of the Democrats party said on Tuesday?

The only way to answer these questions in real time is for media professionals to witness, investigate, and interrogate the war independently, firsthand. But since Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023 and the start of the war, Israel has not permitted foreign journalists to enter Gaza – except through the one option available to Israeli journalists: spending a few hours in Gaza embedded with the Israeli army.

Foreign journalists and bureaus have coped by working with local Palestinian journalists and stringers (freelance reporters), or those who were already in Gaza, to gather information, footage and stories, and through remote reporting. Even permission to enter with the IDF has been granted in limited, arbitrary and non-transparent ways, say foreign correspondents in Israel.

Being shut out is like having the carpet ripped out from under a story. It creates a serious obstacle to firsthand reporting and longer-term investigations, especially for smaller outlets or freelance journalists who don’t have the resources to hire local staff in Gaza. A correspondent or bureau chief bears ultimate responsibility for their stories, but they can’t “go there,” as per CNN’s tagline. That makes it hard to navigate competing claims and counterclaims – in a war with an avalanche of both.

In late 2023, the Foreign Press Association in Israel filed a petition to the Israeli Supreme Court (in its role as the High Court of Justice) against the Defense Minister and the relevant army figures. In January 2024, the court rejected the petition outright, upholding the state’s position that letting journalists in posed a security risk to the journalists, the troops and threatened the war effort.

In the fall of 2024 the FPA filed a new petition. The Union of Journalists in Israel joined with an amicus curiae, an outside supporting petition. The High Court has repeatedly set and postponed dates for a hearing, including this Sunday – for the sixth time.

Genuine wartime dilemmas

In response to the first FPA petition in late 2023, the state argued that the only entry point into Gaza for individuals (as opposed to cargo crossings) was the Erez crossing, which had been destroyed in Hamas’ attack on October 7, and would need to be rebuilt for that purpose; the army was too distracted, both in terms of human and economic resources.

Furthermore, the state argued that journalists roaming freely in Gaza could endanger themselves, the troops and the war effort. They might inadvertently reveal the positions of IDF forces and put them at risk. The Court accepted all of these arguments in its rejection of the FPA’s petition.

In that January 2024 ruling, the justices gave a nod to freedom of the press, arguing that the army provided a fair balance of concerns by allowing journalists to enter with the IDF – even though the forays of a few hours hardly compare to the longer-term “embedding” practice associated with the Iraq war from 2003.

Still, the wartime dilemma of how to protect the media while fighting Hamas is serious: If (when) militants in Gaza fire at Israel or Israeli forces from positions close to media installations (or schools or hospitals), that either places a significant constraint on the IDF – or if it doesn’t, and the army kills media personnel in its response, Israel is blamed.

And of course, information does flow from Gaza. Palestinian journalists report from the region, feeding tens of millions of screens directly via al Jazeera, or by providing material to many other international networks. One foreign correspondent, Clarissa Ward of CNN, did enter and report from Gaza without the IDF, one time, in December 2023. Foreign media outlets have also demanded that Egypt allow journalists to enter through Rafah, which has been closed to them for over a decade.

Vacuum of information and ulterior motives

Alongside a key missing pillar of credible information via independent foreign media coverage, informal documentation floods the cyber-airwaves through social media. Audiences scramble to figure out what’s credible or not – if they actually care. Some use social media information mainly to satisfy pre-existing political convictions. Others use it in good faith to augment the news, but few have the tools to verify every video. At some point, most of us have been duped by malicious fakes designed to corrupt our very belief in truth.

Depending on Palestinian journalists in Gaza alone is insufficient. Three board members of the FPA, representing CNN, AP and Deutsche Welle wrote in Haaretz of their Palestinian colleagues’ “heroic” work, but noted that they are facing “inconceivable dangers and hardships in order to report on reality on the ground. They cannot carry the burden of covering this war themselves, and their ability to do so is being stretched beyond the limit of what’s possible.”

Those dangers include immediate threats to their lives. The Committee to Protect Journalists has estimated that 180 journalists have been killed in total (including Gaza, the West Bank, Israel and Lebanon) since the start of the war, up to May, while the Paris-based Reporter Sans Frontiers estimated that close to 200 have been killed in Gaza alone – the large majority by Israeli forces.

CPJ also recently published a report documenting severe Hamas repression and intimidation of the media in Gaza, which highlights the essential need for foreign correspondents on the ground.

This ghastly figure is where the lines of truth come under political assault. Israel regularly claims that Hamas and Al Jazeera are one, and passed a law banning Al Jazeera from operating or broadcasting in Israel (though there are workarounds). Israelis commonly view Palestinian journalists as terror propagandists, or outright terrorists; earlier this month, the IDF killed Hassan Aslih, which it claimed joined terrorists who stormed Israeli towns during the October 7 attack.

If some of the claims are true, better outside media coverage would be a good way to investigate. That holds for most of Israel’s claims it is so desperate to promote about Hamas: from using hospitals, schools and UN facilities, to stealing aid, or recruiting the entire civilian population in popular Israeli imagination.

Then there are specific incidents seared into everyone’s horror-memory: The explosion at the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza in mid-October 2023 appeared at first to be an Israeli strike that killed over 300, but Human Rights Watch later found that it was likely to have been Palestinian fire, and casualties were probably lower than reported. More firsthand foreign media could have helped find the truth faster.

Instead, Israel has continued to ban their entry, while complaining that foreign media coverage is sweepingly anti-Israel. There’s something convenient about the equation, as if Israel’s media policy is less about defending Israel on every incident, and more to convince the audience that truth and fact don’t really exist if it comes from Palestinian sources.

Normally conspiratorial thinking is neither helpful nor accurate; but the policy does create the appearance of a bad-faith attempts to engineer the truth. Or at the very least, that Israel has something to hide.

That bad look seems obvious to outside observers – but attitudes inside Israel are much darker. The constant incitement in Israel against Palestinian media as terrorists or accomplices serves to justify their deaths, either as collateral damage or in targeted attacks. Israelis, who are barely beginning to acknowledge the dead children in Gaza, have raised no protest about the killing of Palestinian journalists.

Just do it

The excuses for banning foreign journalists have run out. Even the High Court’s initial decision in early 2024 noted that if the security situation changed, the journalists might have a stronger claim. The Israeli Union of Journalists amicus brief, filed eleven months into the war, argued that the situation had in fact changed, and it was safer to operate – moreover, there was “no end in sight,” wrote the Union.

Journalists who cover war always endanger their lives; it’s a risk they and their employers make and do their best to take precautions. There are compromise solutions for coordinating with the army that are better than a blanket ban on independent reporting. The situation in Gaza is becoming inconceivably worse, after three months of a humanitarian aid siege, mass displacement, bombing campaigns over the last week and the start of an even more punishing military phase.

No foreign media outlet can make this war of destruction look good, as Israel would like, but banning foreign media will never blot out the truth. It serves mainly to habituate Israel to authoritarian rule, with fewer freedoms, fewer facts and less humanity.

This article is reproduced in its entirety