Israel: Stop starving Gazan journalists to silence the truth
The Israeli government is deliberately using starvation as a weapon against the people of Gaza, including journalists and media workers, who are the only ones bearing witness to the atrocities amid Israel’s ban on foreign media. The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) joins the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) in demanding that governments across the world, the United Nations General Assembly and the international community take urgent action to halt Israel’s human rights violations in Gaza, including restrictions on humanitarian aid and life-threatening danger that journalists are being exposed to. The Federations reiterate their call on the Israeli government to allow foreign journalists to access the enclave and to stop infringing the public’s right to know.
The hunger crisis in the besieged Gaza strip has reached new and astonishing levels of desperation, with a third of the population not eating for multiple days in a row. This is the grim conclusion delivered by a senior official of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), Ross Smith, on 21 July. Gazans are dying from a lack of humanitarian assistance every day, and this could be prevented if Israel were to exercise the necessary political will.
Among those being starved are Gazan journalists and media workers, the only ones that have been reporting on Israel’s atrocities in the enclave since 7th October. The Israeli government’s ban on foreign media, citing “security concerns”, not only prevents journalists from doing their work, but deprives the public of its right to freedom of expression, which includes the right to receive and impart information without interference from public authorities and regardless of frontiers.
Agence France-Presse’s (AFP) journalists’ union, the Societe des Journalistes (SDJ), warns in a statement that its colleagues in Gaza are at serious risk of starvation and demands urgent intervention to evacuate them. “We risk learning of their deaths at any moment, and this is unbearable for us […] We refuse to see them die.”
The IFJ’s Vice-President and President of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate (PJS), Nasser Abu Bakr, appealed to the world to save the lives of more than two million people in Gaza living without food, water or shelter under bombardment, including journalists who continue to report despite crimes and famine. Abu Baker called on the media “to report on the unprecedented tragedy that are the genocide and the starvation taking place in Gaza”.
IFJ General Secretary Anthony Bellanger said: “It is imperative that the Israeli government stops weaponising starvation against the people of Gaza. Local reporters are the only ones bearing witness to Israel’s atrocities, and starving them to death means silencing the truth, which is considered a war crime according to the International Criminal Court. We urge governments across the world, the United Nations General Assembly and the international community to intervene to halt this human-made catastrophe and to put pressure on the Israeli government to allow foreign journalists to enter Gaza and facilitate the evacuations of local journalists in need.”
“We welcome the complaint against the Belgian government filed on Tuesday 22 July by a group of NGOs to denounce its inaction in the face of the massacre of civilians and journalists in Gaza by the Israeli army,” added EFJ General Secretary Ricardo Gutiérrez. “We call on European civil society to step up these legal actions against States that refrain from taking retaliatory measures against the State of Israel, thereby violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The EFJ calls on the EU to reconsider its decision not to suspend the association agreement with Israel, to impose an arms embargo and to take legal action against ongoing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and the West Bank”.
According to IFJ data, over 171 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since 7th October 2023.
