Middle East & North Africa

Qatari security forces on May 5, 2016, detained three journalists for the state-run Danish Broadcasting Corporation, one of the detained journalists, Niels Borchert Holm, told the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Israel Defense Forces arrested photojournalist Hazem Naser on April 11, 2016 at a checkpoint near Nablus, a city in the West Bank, according to news reports. The Palestinian journalist was arrested for alleged Hamas-related activity, an Israeli security official told CPJ. As of May 17, 2016 no charges had been brought against Naser and his…

New York, May 18, 2016 – The Committee to Protect Journalists today condemned a rebel group’s attempted assassination of a Syrian journalist working for state media in Aleppo. The May 14 attack, the latest example of armed groups on all sides of the conflict targeting journalists, left four journalists and media workers seriously injured.

Washington, May 16, 2016–A criminal court in Cairo sentenced Ali Abdeen, a photographer for the news website El-Fagr, to two years in jail, according to his outlet. Abdeen, who was sentenced on May 14 alongside 50 others, was convicted of inciting illegal protests, obstructing traffic, and publishing false news, according to news reports and the…

Israeli soldiers arrested 21-year-old Palestinian journalist Musaab Khamees Qafesha from his home in the southern West Bank town of Hebron on March 29, 2016, and held him at the Etzion detention center, in the southern West Bank, for eight days, before transferring him to Ofer Prison, south of Ramallah, according to news reports.

New York, May 12, 2016–The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Sudanese authorities to release Ahmed Zuheir Daoud, a journalist who has been detained for nearly a month without charge. Daoud was arrested on April 13 while reporting on student protests for Al-Midan, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Iman Othman Ali, told CPJ yesterday.

Washington, May 11, 2016 — The Committee to Protect Journalists today strongly condemned an Egyptian court’s recommendation to sentence three journalists to death. They were convicted of helping to smuggle secret documents to Qatari intelligence officers and the Qatari broadcaster Al-Jazeera. The journalists include two Al-Jazeera employees.

Three Spanish freelance journalists flew back to Madrid on May 8, 2016, 10 months after Islamist militants abducted them from the Syrian city of Aleppo in July 2015.