At a rare press conference for foreign media on August 10, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he had ordered the IDF to allow journalists to enter the Gaza Strip independently, for the first time since 2014.
But more than 80 days later, the head of the IDF’s foreign press division has yet to receive such an order from the prime minister.
The subject has come up at nearly every briefing delivered by Netanyahu’s spokeswoman, Shosh Bedrosian.
“You want us to report on the happenings inside Gaza, but you don’t allow us, as independent journalists, to go inside Gaza,” a PBS reporter said. “In press conferences, you say we are allowed in, but then the IDF blocks our entrance at the checkpoint. When will we have unrestricted access despite the risks inside?”
Bedrosian has either avoided the questions or ignored the word “independent,” saying that journalists can visit Gaza while embedded with the IDF.
The administration’s stalling has legal limits, however.
A risky but necessary move
The Foreign Press Association complained to Israel’s High Court of Justice that the ban on media access “violates fundamental democratic rights” and that the government had already been given too many extensions. The court agreed, and on October 23 it ruled that the government had 30 days to update its position on whether to allow journalists into Gaza independently.
Five days later, Bedrosian finally revealed that the policy will change and journalists will be allowed into the Israeli-controlled portion of Gaza “soon.”
Lifting the ban is a risky move for Israel, which implemented it for both security and political reasons. Embedding select reporters with the IDF allowed Israel to keep them safe in a dense urban environment, where terrorists can and do attack without warning.
Coverage of Israel has been dogged by bias and inaccuracy for decades. Why, the thinking goes, should the government reward the media with access that will doubtlessly result in more negative coverage?
Ultimately, though, it’s past time for Israel to acknowledge that its policy of exclusion has been ineffective.
Blocked access gives Gazan 'journalists' control of the narrative
Blocking access to Gaza has meant that reporting fell to “journalists” like Abdallah Aljamal, the Gaza correspondent for The Palestine Chronicle, whom the IDF killed while rescuing three Israeli hostages he was holding in his home.
He was no outlier.
While the Associated Press and CNN fired Oct. 7 infiltrator Hassan Eslaiah, who was photographed being kissed by Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, after an HonestReporting investigation revealed his terror ties, The New York Times rehired Gazan stringer Soliman Hijjy on October 8, 2023, despite being aware that his Arabic social media posts praised Adolf Hitler.
Just three weeks ago, ABC News interviewed Gaza Civil Spokesman Mahmoud Bassal, an active Hamas operative, as “an emergency responder searching for missing Gazan civilians.” It apparently did not cross the interviewers’ minds to do the most basic due diligence a journalist can – a background check on those being interviewed.
Had they done a check, they would have found that Bassal was an active member of the Zeitoun Battalion of the Izz-ad Din-al Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, directly involved in planning and carrying out terrorist attacks.
Gazan stringers have fed top media outlets incorrect and biased information throughout the war, while biased organizations like the Committee to Protect Journalists blamed Israel for the deaths of active terrorists who may have moonlighted as reporters but were killed while doing their day job.
It is true that, according to the CPJ, nearly 200 journalists and media workers have been killed during the ongoing Israel-Hamas War. However, an analysis of these names shows that at least 40% of those killed had an affiliation with terror groups (including working for terror-run media organizations) and that several had participated in active combat against Israel.
With the embedding of Hamas forces in civilian areas, it is tragic but inevitable that civilians, including journalists, will be killed during military activities. This is not, however, evidence of intentional targeting of journalists.
Aside from using local stringers as proxies, Hamas has done everything it can to take advantage of the journalism vacuum. Propaganda chief Abu Obeida employed 1,500 content creators who served in every Hamas battalion and brigade, outfitting them with GoPro cameras, camera protection kits and batteries, and a team of video editors to cut propaganda videos. He crafted every hostage video and release ceremony to maximize their impact.
International journalists need to reckon with truth on the ground
The result has been massive damage to Israel’s reputation, which might have been avoided if the war against Hamas had been covered firsthand by professional journalists – whatever their agendas – and not by stringers whose lives depend on promoting Hamas narratives.
Officials involved in Israeli public diplomacy have expressed concern that images of devastation emerging from Gaza will reignite negative reporting about Israel and protests throughout the United States and major cities across the globe. But the ban hasn’t stopped such reporting and protests from proliferating during the war, so how could lifting it make things any worse?
If anything, it could force journalists entering Gaza for the first time to reckon with some uncomfortable contradictions.
Why is Hamas interrogating alleged “collaborators” in hospitals if all of Gaza’s hospitals have been destroyed, and
Hamas is not using hospitals as its headquarters?
How did 27,000 high school students take matriculation exams if the schools of Gaza were destroyed?
Why are Gaza’s markets fully stocked with food mere weeks after a famine was declared?
It’s time for Netanyahu to recognize that controlling the media narrative is impossible, and that the hard questions that come with open press access are preferable to the easy wrong answers that come with restriction.
The writer is the executive director and executive editor of the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting, and former chief political correspondent and analyst of The Jerusalem Post.