An Israeli journalist revealed that the Military Control Unit of the occupation army launched the largest attack on the freedom of the press in the past year, shattering the record in the number of media materials that it has banned.
An article published by the Israeli magazine +972 stated that the military censorship amounted to its highest level in 2024, as it prevented the publication of 1635 fullest articles, and parts of 6265 articles were blocked.
The executive director of the magazine, Haji Matar, stated in his article that the military censorship – an intelligence unit in the Israeli army – intervened in about 21 news reports in one day in the average during 2024, that is, more than the weak peak, which amounted to about 10 daily interventions during the process of holding the Gaza Strip in the Gaza Strip in 2014, and more than 3 times the average at other times of the war of 6.2 per day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ah0voibj08
Gaza war
It is likely that the main reason behind this unprecedented rise in censorship is the devastating war launched by Israel in Gaza, in addition to its conflicts in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.
According to the article, the Israeli media last year submitted 20,770 news articles to the military sergeant for its review, which is nearly twice the total of the previous year, and 4 times the number in 2022.
The sergeant entered 38% of these materials, with a rise of 7% of the previous peak recorded in 2023, while fully rejected 20% of them, an increase of 18% over the same year.
Matar said that the paradox is that the International Day of the Freedom of the Press – which falls on May 3 of each year – comes this time in an unprecedented attack on what the media publishes and at a bleak stage in the Israeli press.
He added that last year, Israel ranked 101th out of 180 in the Freedom of Press Index for Reporters Without Borders, and this ranking has now declined to 112.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nber53q-3vu
Targeting Gaza journalists
This evaluation – from the point of view of Matar, a journalist and political activist, reflects the state of the press inside Israel, without taking into account the mass killing of journalists in the Gaza Strip.
It was quoted by the New York Journalists’ Protection Committee – a non -governmental organization aimed at protecting freedom of the press and defending the rights of journalists – that at least 168 Palestinian journalists and media who were killed in Gaza by the Israeli army during the war, a number that exceeds any other violent conflict recorded in recent decades. But other organizations indicate that the number reaches 232.
The author of the article pointed out that Israel is dealing with journalists working in the media in Gaza as legitimate military targets, and claimed on more than one occasion that other journalists killed them were linked to Hamas, but as usual, it did not provide any evidence for that.
But journalists in Gaza are not only at risk of death from the Israeli bombing, but also suffer from hunger, thirst and homelessness often, as Matar, who claims that they are also facing a repression of Hamas itself because of their criticism of it or for covering the protests against it.
At the same time, Israel systematically used to arrest and imprison Palestinian journalists from Gaza and the West Bank alike, and often without charges of charges, as a form of punishment for the critical press coverage of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sstmudwjocc
Also island
The writer stated that this repression accelerated its pace during the current war, and this was manifested in preventing the media, such as Al -Jazeera and Al -Mayadeen channels, from working in Israel.
The government also followed the free press inside Israel, where it took steps to close the public channel “Can”, and financially strangled the daily liberal Haaretz newspaper, and deliberately weakened the ancient media, while financing new media loyal to it from the public treasury, such as channel 14. Moreover, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu imposed strict restrictions on media work.
But Matar believes that the severe blow to the Israeli press did not come from government control, but rather what he described by the betrayal of the news rooms for its basic mission, which is to inform the public opinion of the truth of what is happening around it.
The Israeli journalists – even those who once expressed their remorse not to cover what was happening in Gaza in the previous wars – accused them of obstruction to hospitals that are bombed and children who are starving and the mass graves that the world sees daily.
Instead of being witnesses to the truth of what is happening in the war, or to deliver the voices of journalists residing in Gaza – not to mention their solidarity with them – most Israeli journalists have been involved in war propaganda efforts to the extent of joining the fighting forces in the Strip.
Matar considered this a collusion with Israeli journalists, not a cohology, who were subjected to him from military censorship.
