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January 07, 2025 – Palestine –
An international media association has denounced the Israeli government’s continued refusal to lift its ban on unrestricted media access to Gaza, despite the ceasefire in the embattled enclave.
The Foreign Press Association (FPA) issued a statement on Tuesday expressing its “profound disappointment” with the government, which had told the Supreme Court two days earlier that the ban should be maintained due to “security reasons”.
Israel, which has barred foreign journalists from independently entering Gaza since the war started in October 2023, was responding to an FPA petition seeking free and unfettered access for foreign journalists to the devastated territory.
The organisation, which represents journalists from international news organisations working in Israel, Gaza and the occupied West Bank, pledged to submit a “robust response” to the court in the coming days.
“Instead of presenting a plan for allowing journalists into Gaza independently and letting us work alongside our brave Palestinian colleagues, the government has decided once again to lock us out. This comes even when a ceasefire is now in place,” the FPA statement said.
The Israeli government, which has allowed only a limited number of journalists embedded with its military to work in Gaza on a case-by-case basis, said its court submission was “based on the position of the defence establishment”, noting that allowing journalists into the enclave could hinder the search for the remains of the last Israeli captive.
The FPA submitted its petition to the court in September 2024. The court has granted several extensions to the government.
Last month, it set January 4 as a final deadline for the government to present a plan for media access to Gaza.
The International Federation of Journalists has reported that Palestine was the deadliest place to work as a journalist in 2025, reporting that 56 Palestinian media professionals were killed over the course of the year.
Since the war broke out, nearly 300 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza, according to Shireen.ps, a monitoring website named after Al Jazeera’s veteran correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed in the occupied West Bank in 2022.
Photo: Protest organised by the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, highlighting media workers killed by Israeli attacks two years into the genocidal Gaza war [File: Zain Jaafar/AFP]
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