States Must Dramatically Step Up Protections for Journalists in Exile
October 25, 2025
October 25, 2025 – Palestine –
The Gaza Strip has become one of the world’s most restricted zones for international journalism, as the State of Israel persistently bars foreign reporters and fact-finding teams in what Euro-Med describes as a “systematic policy to erase evidence of genocide and war crimes.”
The organization states that journalists and independent investigators are routinely denied entry or removed from Gaza, while foreign forensic teams and autopsy specialists are prevented from accessing mass-death sites, critical equipment, and victims’ remains. This approach, Euro-Med says, aims to ensure that crime scenes are destroyed or obscured before they can be formally documented.
Euro-Med notes that the Israeli Supreme Court recently extended state approval before any independent journalists can enter Gaza, signaling a formalization of the media blockade. The group argues that with at least 250 journalists and media workers killed, and the blockade of independent oversight, Israel is controlling not just the reality on the ground but the global narrative about it.
Human rights groups say this systematic exclusion compounds the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. With little independent observation, killings, mass displacement, infrastructure destruction, and reports of famine conditions are harder to verify or attribute. Some experts say the result is a de facto information blackout. The blocking of journalists, investigators, and forensic teams also directly undermines obligations under international humanitarian law to allow impartial scrutiny and access to evidence.
For press-freedom advocates, the implications are profound. They warn that beyond immediate violence, the removal of independent witnesses prevents accountability, encourages impunity, and weakens the media’s ability to function as a monitoring pillar in conflict zones. Without independent documentation in Gaza, victims may lose the ability to tell their own stories, and the world may never see a complete record of what happened.
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