No entry: foreign journalists say Israel’s Gaza travel ban compromises ‘accurate, independent’ reporting

Al Jazeera’s Wael Dahdouh (second from right) mourning the death of his journalist son Hamza Dahdouh, on 8 January 2024

Hagar Shezaf reports in Haaretz on 12 September 2024:

Peter Beaumont has been in his share of war zones; Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo are just a few. But when he wanted to cover the current Gaza war, he encountered another difficulty: covering a war without being there.

“It’s sometimes like trying to report from space, because you’re looking at satellite imaging and location data and trying to draw conclusions from things that you are very far from,” he told Haaretz.

For Beaumont, a senior international reporter for The Guardian, this was not his first visit to Israel or Gaza under fire. He was here, for example, during the 2014 Gaza war, when from his hotel room balcony he saw Israel’s army kill four boys in an attack on a beach in the Gaza Strip. He saw and reported.

Now, for 11 months, things have been concealed from him and his colleagues. When the war broke out, a mass of foreign correspondents came to cover the aftermath of Hamas’ massacre in the south, and some also hoped to go into Gaza. But they came up against a proverbial “no entry” sign.

Israeli journalists are never permitted to enter the Strip independently. In the past, however, foreign correspondents were allowed in, even during fighting, though sometimes they had to launch legal proceedings to get in.

But now foreign journalists have to rely on the work of local reporters, telephone conversations and an analysis of video or photos. Journalists have only been allowed to enter Gaza accompanied by members of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, and whatever information they bring out is subject to censorship by the army.

Palestinians flee north Gaza southward, November 2023

“In the short term, the army succeeds in controlling the narrative,” says a foreign journalist who is covering the war for an international media organization. “Israel throws out so many claims and it is hard to look into them during the fighting or even afterwards when you don’t have people on the ground.”  He adds: “It’s still unclear, for example, what happened at Al-Shifa Hospital,” which has been inactive since Israel raided it in November, claiming that it was a Hamas command center.

In any case, it’s not only Israel’s claims that cannot be checked. Foreign correspondents say that, since they are not allowed into Gaza, they have a harder time verifying or refuting claims by Hamas.

Of the many questions left unanswered, the situation in northern Gaza is one of the most striking examples. “No one really knows what’s the situation is in northern Gaza,” the journalist says.

“The issue of the famine – there were some really, really bad periods in the north where we had almost no idea what was going on.” In the current situation, he adds, reporters sometimes have to rely on the tweets or people who make all kinds of claims. “You can’t verify them, and then the army denies them, so it’s just very hard to do reporting.”

Beaumont recalls another conflict he has covered – Russia’s war in Ukraine. One day the Russians bombed a convoy of civilian vehicles.  “You can go there in five minutes and you see you are essentially surrounded by civilian bodies,” he says. “It kind of removes that endless to and fro over – well, what are you seeing? [because] you know what you are seeing a lot of the time.”

He believes that restricting media access to Gaza is significantly changing the coverage. “I think this is one of the biggest issues,” he says. “It pushes journalism away from eyewitness into a slightly more difficult territory, where you’re trying to balance one thing against another and come to an approximation of what you think might have happened.”

Risk is part of the job

In July, a group of 73 media companies and journalists’ organizations – among them The New York Times, The Washington Post and Sky News – published an open letter calling upon Israel to allow foreign correspondents entry into Gaza. Among other things, the letter addressed the common claim in Israeli discourse that foreign journalists should be barred from entering Gaza for their own safety.

“We fully understand the inherent risks in reporting from war zones,” the letter read. “These are risks that many of our organizations have taken over decades in order to investigate, document developments as they occur, and understand the impacts of wars the world over.”

A Palestinian journalist uses his mobile phone to report from southern Gaza in December 2023

In the absence of foreign correspondents in Gaza, all first-hand reporting from the field is done by Palestinian journalists, some of whom work for international media organizations, others for local outlets, and others do the bulk of their reporting on social media. “Those Gazan journalists are doing the most amazing work,” says Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

She notes that local journalists have been covering the war for months without break, all while living under the same constraints as the rest of Gaza’s inhabitants – lack of food, fuel shortages – and with equipment that gets damaged as the war continues. “Normally when people are covering a war, they can pull back and maybe get a couple of weeks of R and R [rest and relaxation] and then go back in,” she says. “These people are covering it day in and day out.”

The fact that only Palestinian reporters cover the war from the field, says Ginsberg, affects the way these reports are perceived and enable Israel and other players to question the information that comes out. “It creates a space in which doubt can be cast on the credibility of the journalists who are reporting,” she adds, referring to the Palestinians reporters, “and say ‘How can we trust them.”’ She elaborates: “People are able to say – because they are local they must be not independent.”

All foreign journalists who spoke to Haaretz for this report emphasized the importance of their Gazan colleagues’ coverage. However, some noted that relying on it poses certain challenges, as these local journalists might be subject to pressures from Hamas, the Hamas communications ministry, or their own society, as often occurs in war zones.

Local journalists face quite a number of dangers. According to CPJ figures, since the beginning of the war 111 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza. Four of them, according to the organization, were intentionally killed by the IDF (the army claimed in retrospect that three of them were Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives, a claim that Palestinian sources rejected).

The fact that the number of journalists in Gaza is decreasing as a result of the war also affects the ability to cover what is happening there. “If 100 have died, that’s 10 percent of the entire [journalist] population,” says Ginsberg. She notes that some Gazan journalists have stopped reporting due to fear of being targeted by the army or because of the harsh living conditions resulting from their displacement. Additionally, some have left Gaza, either independently or with the help of the media organizations that employ them, through the Rafah crossing.

Controlling empathy

The imposition of restrictions on media outlets during war is not an invention of the IDF, and it can take on multiple forms. In Ukraine, notes Ginsberg, the army initially divided the field into several zones: those where journalists could work freely, those where they required military accompaniment and those to which entry was prohibited. “Even then, people were critical of that because they felt it was overly restrictive, and in fact earlier this year they significantly liberalized access to those zones,” she adds.

During the war in Chechnya as well, Gisnberg says, journalists managed to go inside and cover the war zone despite restrictions, as was the case in the war in Syria. “Some regimes, like Russia, are already restrictive of journalists reporting inside the country,” but unlike countries like Syria and Russia, “Israel would argue that it’s a liberal democracy that supports press freedom.”

In particularly tumultuous countries, journalists can sometimes slip in amidst the chaos, but this is not the case with Israel. Several journalists we spoke to noted that Israel’s organization and extensive experience in managing media relations make it particularly effective at restricting journalists. This, another journalist covering the war explains, is compounded by the fact that the foreign press is commonly perceived in Israel as almost like “a hostile entity.”

This suspicious attitude, to put it mildly, is reflected in the access foreign press is afforded into areas under the control of the Israeli army, including Gaza. And it has been doubly true since Israel’s occupation of the Rafah border crossing this past May. Until then, at least ostensibly, some in Israel claimed that journalists could enter the Gaza Strip from Egypt. In actuality, since the start of the war only one CNN journalist managed to enter Gaza through Rafah, back in December.

“I can’t think of another conflict in recent years that has been totally impossible for foreign journalists to cover in the same way that the Gaza war is,” says Matthew Cassel, a freelance journalist who has reported from many war zones in the past and hopes to cover the current war in Gaza as well. “In Syria even if the government wasn’t letting foreign journalists in there were plenty of ways for us to access to country. Even in Myanmar where there’s an an insurgency, there are ways to access the country, or in Sudan where there’s a full civil war and the main airports are closed, there are still ways to enter.”

In an attempt to fight Israel’s decree, the Foreign Press Association in Israel, which represents some 370 journalists from 130 media organizations, petitioned the High Court of Justice through attorney Gilead Sher to allow foreign journalists access to the Gaza Strip.

In a statement issued when filing the petition, the group called on Israel to uphold its commitment to freedom of the press, emphasizing that it is a fundamental right in a democratic society. In response, the Israeli government argued that allowing foreign journalists into Gaza could endanger Israeli soldiers, as reporters might reveal troop locations. The government also noted that the Erez crossing, previously used by civilians to enter Gaza, was destroyed during the Hamas attack on October 7, making it impossible to operate during the ongoing war.

The court accepted the state’s position and rejected the group’s petition in January. In the ruling, Justice Ruth Ronen wrote that Israel’s ban on journalists entering Gaza isn’t total and that it does allow them access to limited areas accompanied by IDF soldiers and representatives of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit. “Taking into account the extreme security-related circumstances currently existing,” she wrote, “we believe that this is a balanced and reasonable policy.” The association has submitted a new petition earlier this week.

This model that Ronnen pointed to in her ruling isn’t new, and it even has a name: embedded journalism. Its development is attributed to the United States Army – a product of its desire to better control the critical press that it witnessed in the end of the Vietnam War. Embedded journalism then became extensive during the invasion of Iraq. “This idea was born when in the American establishment there was an honest desire to allow journalists to go in [to battle zones], but to do so under conditions and in an environment that would produce the maximum positive coverage of the fighting and the soldiers,” explains Ayala Panievsky, a scholar of political communications at Cambridge University and City University, London.

Indeed, she says, studies of previous wars showed that embedded reporting leads to more positive coverage of the fighting forces. “There are scholars who relate to this as a more sophisticated method of creating censorship during the course of a war,” she says.

The Israeli version of the model includes bringing journalists into Gaza at the invitation of the IDF Spokesman’s Unit, on condition that they sign a commitment to send their written materials for approval by the Israeli censor and immediately deliver visual materials upon leaving the Gaza Strip for inspection by the IDF field security unit – which is liable to erase or blur some of the images. Their signature also allows the army to impose an embargo on publication of certain materials. At any rate, not every journalist is invited to these tours.

Many journalists believe that entering Gaza with IDF representatives is better than not entering at all. However, throughout the war, some foreign media outlets have refused to sign the commitment required by the IDF and have chosen not to enter Gaza at all. “That’s a problem when it’s the only way to get in because as the term implies you’re embedded with the military,” adds Cassel. “You’re seeing things from their perspective, you’re controlled – where you can go, who you can talk to – and you can’t really talk to anyone local. it’s not a proper way for a journalist to be able to fairly, accurately, or independently report on war”

Some of the journalists who ultimately joined the tours under the aegis of the IDF expressed criticism, for example that the visits were quite brief, lasting for only a few hours. This is as compared to the U.S. Army, which over the years allowed reporters to accompany its forces for a week or two at times, which inevitably becomes a less supervised and less controlled experience. “It’s a way to ensure that the journalists’ empathy is on the correct side,” says Dr. Panievsky. “When you go in with the forces and you sit with them in a tank, naturally the coverage looks different.”

The IDF Spokesperson said in response: “Foreign journalists’ requests to enter [Gaza] freely is subject to the consideration of the political echelon. In the context of the petition submitted by the Foreign Press Association to the High Court of Justice, the court rejected the petition and accepted the state’s position that it is unable to allow free and independent passage and movement in light of the risks that entails at this time. Entry by journalists without coordination and without accompaniment is liable to endanger both the journalists themselves and the IDF personnel operating in the Gaza Strip.”

Moreover, the IDF maintained that it “does not harm journalists intentionally. It is possible there are journalists who have been harmed in the course of operational activities that were directed at legal military targets. In certain cases the harm is caused due to the fact that [the journalists] are militant activists in terror organizations or took direct part in the fighting at the time.”

This article is reproduced in its entirety