Although Israeli military operations have officially come to
an end in Gaza,
access for journalists has improved only marginally. Despite a December 31 ruling
by Israel's Supreme Court (on the fifth day of military operations) to allow
eight journalists to enter Gaza each time the Erez crossing was opened, the government
failed to implement the ruling for 18 consecutive days--or in other words, until
it declared a unilateral cease-fire.
Excluding journalists that have been embedded with Israeli
troops, Israel has granted only eight journalists access into Gaza each day
since the cease-fire was declared on January 18 (of those eight, six are chosen
through a lottery and two are picked by Israel's Government Press Office),
bringing the total to 24 out of more than 1,000 journalists trying to gain
access to Gaza from Israel. On January 16, at least two additional journalists
also managed to enter Gaza
through the Egyptian-administered Rafah crossing.
On November 6, Israel
instituted a ban on the entry of international journalists into Gaza. For more than three
weeks of the conflict, the task of getting news out of Gaza to a worldwide audience fell on the
shoulders of local Palestinian reporters and less than a handful of foreign
reporters who were in the territory before the ban was instated. (More
about the blanket ban on foreign journalists, a two-year ban on Israeli
journalists, and the conditions that local journalists have had to work under
can be found here
and here.)
The Israeli government has maintained since early November
that restricting the entry of foreign journalists into Gaza is for their own safety. The Foreign
Press Association (FPA) in Israel
called the claim "patently ridiculous." Such an assertion is also belied by Danny
Seaman, director of Israel's
Government Press Office, who stated that the presence of foreign media is a
"fig leaf" for Hamas and that Israel
would not assist in such an effort. In a different statement, he described
foreign journalists as "unprofessional" individuals who take "questionable
reports at face value without checking [them]." On yet another occasion, he
claimed that it was not incumbent upon Israel
to grant journalists access into Gaza,
and that "they should have been there in the first place."
In an interview with the BBC, Israel's
ambassador to the United Kingdom
implied that the failure to allow journalists into Gaza was the result of infighting within the
FPA, a charge it denies vehemently.
The reasons or rationales for denying trained war
correspondents access into Gaza
to report the news obfuscate the consequence of the ban: A legitimate news
story continues to be underreported. The Israeli government must immediately
allow unfettered access for journalists in the Gaza Strip.
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