Middle East & North Africa

New York, October 13, 2023—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the Friday shelling in southern Lebanon from the direction of Israel that killed Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah and injured six other journalists. Those wounded include two other Reuters journalists, Thaer Al-Sudani and Maher Nazeh, two Al-Jazeera TV staffers, Elie Brakhya and reporter Carmen Joukhadar, and Agence France-Press journalists Christina Assi…

New York, October 12, 2023—Algerian authorities must drop all charges against journalist Saad Bouakba and refrain from prosecuting members of the press over their work, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Thursday. At a court hearing in Algiers on Wednesday, the state prosecutor requested a five-year prison sentence and a fine of 500,000 Algerian dinars…

The smears began the day Christian Ulate began representing jailed Guatemalan journalist José Rubén Zamora: tweets accusing the lawyer of being a leftist or questioning his legal credentials. He began to fear he was being surveilled.  Ulate had taken over the case in August 2022 from two other lawyers, Romeo Montoya García and Mario Castañeda,…

New York, October 12, 2023—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Sudanese authorities to investigate and hold to account those responsible for the Tuesday, October 10 killing of Sudanese journalist Halima Idris Salim, and urges all parties to the ongoing armed conflict in the country to respect the press and guarantee journalists’ safety. “We are…

On October 5, 2023, Moroccan police arrested journalist Abdelmjid Amyay, director of local independent news website Chams Post, at a coffee shop in the northeastern city of Oujda and detained him for one night for sharing articles about corruption in the city on his personal Facebook page, according to news reports. The following day, authorities…

New York, October 9, 2023—The Committee to Protect Journalists said on Monday that it was deeply disturbed by reports that at least six journalists were among the civilians who were killed, injured or missing in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Gaza. On Saturday, two Palestinian journalists were shot dead while out reporting—Ibrahim Mohammad Lafi,…

New York, October 7, 2023—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Israel to investigate the killing on Saturday of Palestinian journalist Mohammad El-Salhi, make its findings public, and take immediate action to ensure the safety of media workers reporting on the biggest attack on Israel in years by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas. In Saturday’s assault, Hamas…

Five years have passed since the heinous murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the country’s consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, in an operation that US intelligence found to have been approved by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).

Around 3 a.m. on September 20, about 10 plainclothes police officers arrested French journalists Quentin Müller and Thérèse Di Campo in their hotel in Morocco’s largest city, Casablanca, and expelled them for their reporting on the rule of King Mohamed VI – a topic considered taboo in the country. Müller, a staff reporter with the…

Days after September floods killed thousands in the coastal Libyan city of Derna, protesters took to the streets to blame local authorities for failing to maintain the local dams. On September 19, Libya’s eastern administration ordered local and foreign journalists to leave the city of Derna by noon that day on the grounds that the…