With no offices, equipment, or safe passage, Gaza’s journalists struggle to report amid devastation, while Israel blocks foreign press and exiled reporters from returning.
This statement was originally published on rsf.org on 20 February 2025.
Despite the fragile ceasefire agreement, the humanitarian catastrophe continues in Gaza, hampering journalists’ work on a daily basis. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) expresses its support for these media professionals and calls on Israel to urgently lift the blockade on the territory.
The Israeli army has killed their colleagues and destroyed their homes and newsrooms. 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. 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. 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.”
Anne Bocandé, RSF Editorial Director
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 is forced to choose which stories he covers. “The destroyed infrastructure? The humanitarian crisis? Abandoned orphans?” he wonders.
- 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. “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.
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,” confides the journalist, whose brother was killed in the war. “I’m scared all the time,” he concludes.
