3 Oct 2025 | Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Yemen
Salim Mohammed was working in an adjacent building when Israeli missiles struck the headquarters of two major Yemeni newspapers on 10 September 2025. The 40-year-old investigative journalist and father of three survived, but watched helplessly as colleagues gathered to watch a Gulf Cup youth football match between Yemen and Saudi Arabia died under the rubble of the main building.
“The explosions were massive. I felt the earth shake,” Salim recalls from Sanaa, where he now works without his camera, laptop, or personal equipment — all buried in the partially destroyed building. “I saw people fall to the ground, smoke covering everything. All my colleagues were under the debris. Some of their bodies remained there for days.”
The airstrikes on the offices of 26 September [named after the starting date of the civil war in the 1960s] and Al-Yemen newspapers killed at least 31 journalists, according to the Houthi-run government, in what local and international media rights organisations described as one of the deadliest attacks on journalists in recent decades. The incident highlights the precarious situation facing Yemeni media workers trapped between Israeli military operations, Houthi authoritarianism, and rival armed factions.
Israel claimed the strike deliberately targeted Houthi media centres, a justification that sparked local and international outrage over civilian casualties masked as military operations. The Committee to Protect Journalists‘ Middle East programme director Sarah Qudah called the strikes “a deeply concerning escalation that expands Israel’s war on journalism beyond the genocide in Gaza.”
“This latest wave of killings is not only a grave violation of international law, but also a terrifying warning to journalists across the region — there is no safe place,” Qudah added.
Hisham Mohammed, a sports journalist since 2004 and father of five who also survived the attack, emphasises that newspaper employees are not participants in political conflict but rather civil servants who have adapted to Yemen’s changing power structures over the past decade.
“We are government employees who previously worked under Ali Abdullah Saleh’s rule, then Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, and currently under Houthi administration,” Hisham explains. “We don’t create editorial policy — we implement it according to the directives of whoever holds power.”
The targeted building housed the newspaper’s archives dating to 1962 and is now completely destroyed. Hisham currently works from home using WhatsApp and other mobile applications to file stories.
Living under permanent threat
The September strikes were not merely an attack on a workplace but a warning to remaining journalists working in Houthi-controlled media institutions, who now operate under constant terror.
Walid Ghalib, 46, a father of six who works in local news at the official Al-Thawra newspaper in Sanaa (who requested his real name to be withheld), describes the pervasive fear: “We constantly worry we’ll be the next target. Previously, during years of Saudi and Emirati airstrikes, we received multiple threats of bombing our newspaper headquarters. We would evacuate our offices whenever we heard reports of potential targeting.”
“Now, after the Israeli strikes and the targeting of our colleagues, some of us only spend three hours at the newspaper headquarters—usually from 4 to 7pm. Others have decided to stay home,” Walid adds.
He emphasises the lack of alternatives: “There is no substitute for this work. There is no longer independent journalism like before. We work according to what newspaper management requests, which in turn follows the directives of the ruling authority.”
Hisham Mahmoud, 38, former editorial director of investigations at 26 September newspaper in Marib city—controlled by the internationally recognized government—presents a bleak picture of eroding journalistic independence in Yemen. Having moved between Sanaa, Taiz, and Marib throughout his career, he witnessed firsthand how editorial freedom disappeared.
“I worked as an investigative journalist at the official Al-Thawra newspaper in Sanaa since 2012. After the Houthis seized Sanaa in late 2014, new editorial policies were imposed on the newspaper, our salaries were cut by more than 70%, and I couldn’t continue,” Hisham recalls.
He moved to Taiz, his birthplace, and attempted to write about the war raging through the city’s streets between Houthis and other local factions. “I didn’t side with anyone, not my governorate’s residents and neighbours, nor those bombing them in my reports. I focused on the humanitarian suffering the war inflicted on citizens. But that didn’t please the newspaper leadership in Sanaa, and I was fired in early 2017.”
Hisham then moved to Marib, where he was appointed investigations director for the government-created version of 26 September newspaper in 2018. However, he faced similar exclusion due to views misaligned with imposed editorial direction.
“Every party in the Yemeni war wants journalists to be mouthpieces. Independent media has been completely killed, and real content is not allowed. This transforms journalism into a tool for mobilization and incitement, destroying what remains of opportunities for societal peace,” Hisham explains.
Arrests and kidnappings across battle lines
Beyond bombardment, Yemeni journalists face systematic repression from warring factions. On 23 September 2025, the human rights group SAM Organization for Rights and Liberties documented the kidnapping of journalist Majed Zayed in Sanaa, noting it came two days after he posted a patriotic song celebrating the Yemeni flag on Facebook, coinciding with the anniversary of the 26 September Revolution. The organisation confirmed his fate remains unknown.
In May 2025, Reporters Without Borders documented the detention of eight journalists by Houthis in Hodeidah city — one of the broadest arrest campaigns since the 2022 UN-brokered ceasefire under the Stockholm Agreement.
Independent journalist Mohammed Al-Mayahi was kidnapped from his home in September 2024 and sentenced in May 2025 to 18 months imprisonment by a Houthi court on charges of harming national security. He was fined five million rials ($10,000) and forced to sign a pledge never to write again.
In internationally recognised government-controlled areas, conditions appear no better. The Yemeni Journalists Syndicate condemned the Southern Transitional Council militia’s raid on Aden Al-Ghad newspaper headquarters in Aden on 27 September 2025, and the arrest of editor-in-chief Fathi bin Lazraq before his later release and the newspaper’s forced closure. The syndicate considered this a violation of press freedom, holding the Transitional Council fully responsible.
In June, the State Security Prosecution in Hadramawt issued arrest warrants for journalists Sabri bin Makhashin and Muzahim Bajabir over Facebook posts criticising local authority corruption. Despite the Interior Ministry’s decision to release Bajabir, the Hadramawt governor refuses to implement the order.
Multiple repressive laws
According to human rights activist Tawfiq Al-Humaidi, president of SAM Organization for Rights and Liberties, Houthis have exploited the “Anti-Normalization with Israel Law” passed in December 2023 to suppress any dissenting voice.
“The law was expanded to include anyone expressing discontent with living conditions or criticising the group’s performance—transforming from a political law into a tool for criminalising opinion. The concepts of treason and betrayal were broadened to muzzle mouths and prosecute journalists outside the legal framework,” Al-Humaidi explains.
He says that those working in official media in Houthi-controlled areas are government employees subject to group-loyal leadership, following directives from Al-Masirah channel — the Houthis’ strongest media arm — which determines general direction for other institutions.
“In a country suffering the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, Yemeni journalists are besieged from all sides: aerial bombardment targets them, arbitrary arrests from de facto authorities, and persecution from the internationally recognised government. Between the Houthis’ and the government’s jaws, between incitement rhetoric and battlefields, truth is lost and free pens are broken,” Al-Humaidi adds.
The convergence of military strikes, authoritarian repression, and economic collapse has created an environment where journalism in Yemen has become, as survivor Salim Mohammed describes, “a profession written in ink but paid for in blood”.
The 10 September attack represents a chilling expansion of threats facing regional journalists. For Yemeni media workers specifically, it compounds years of systematic persecution, arbitrary detention, and forced self-censorship under multiple armed authorities claiming legitimacy.
As freedoms recede and journalism transforms into a mobilisation tool, truth remains the greatest casualty in Yemen. Journalists who once documented their country’s rich history and diverse voices now operate in fear—unable to report freely, unable to remain silent, and increasingly unable to survive.
11 Aug 2025 | Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine
Since 7 October, 2023, Israel’s military campaign across the Gaza Strip has claimed the lives of more than 260 Palestinian journalists and media workers: men and women, who carried nothing but their cameras, microphones, and notebooks. They were not on the battlefield, they were the battlefield. Targeted, hunted, threatened and killed alongside their families in what can only be described as a deliberate campaign to silence the truth.
Anas al-Sharif and Mohamed Qreqeh, along with five more colleagues from Al Jazeera were the new victims of truth. They did not die because they were caught in “crossfire” or in a tragic accident. Anas al-Sharif and his colleagues were killed because he refused to be silenced. Because they exposed the atrocities and crimes of the Israeli military against innocent civilians in Gaza. They reported on the massacres, on the weaponisation of starvation and thirst, and on the relentless bombardment of residential neighborhoods.
Anas paid his life as a price for his truth-telling, and so did many other colleagues. They all met the same fate.
Before them, their parents and families were also killed. These were not isolated incidents. They are part of a systematic pattern.
This is how Israel’s war on Palestinian journalism works: first, it eliminates the voice; then it erases the family; and finally it seeks to bury the story.
I know this because I am living it. I am a journalist who has reported for years from Gaza City, and my own family there has been threatened. My home has been surrounded by fear like many more, reminding us that our reporting comes at a cost. These are not random acts of intimidation. They are part of the same machinery that murdered Anas and Mohamed, a machinery designed to frighten Palestinian journalists into silence.
It doesn’t stop at bullets and bombs. Israel wages an incitement campaign against Palestinian journalists, smearing them with baseless accusations and without presenting a shred of credible evidence.
The aim is clear: to strip us of legitimacy in the eyes of the world so that when we are killed, our deaths can be rationalised, excused, and forgotten.
These accusations are amplified when parts of the Western media adopt Israel’s unverified narrative – sometimes word for word – while those same foreign correspondents are themselves barred from entering Gaza.
Yes, Israel has kept international journalists out of Gaza since the start of this war. It is not only silencing Palestinian voices, it is preventing the world from seeing the truth through the eyes of all journalists.
This unprecedented media blockade means the only witnesses left inside Gaza are Palestinian journalists, who are being systematically hunted.
By killing them, Israel is not just destroying the local press, it is choking off the world’s last source of first-hand account from the Strip.
Some will call this a tragedy for Gaza. But it is more than that. It is a tragedy for journalism everywhere.
Each time a Palestinian journalist is killed for doing their job, a bullet tears through the very heart of global press freedom.
When one government can murder reporters with impunity, threaten their families, smear their reputations, and block the international media from entering, it sends a message to every repressive regime on the planet: You too can kill the story by killing the storyteller.
What happens in Gaza does not stay in Gaza. If Israel’s campaign to silence journalists succeeds here, it will embolden governments worldwide to use the same tactics: violence, intimidation, and narrative control to shield themselves from accountability.
The chilling effect will ripple far beyond the Gaza Strip and Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Journalists covering corruption, human rights abuses, atrocities and war crimes, will all feel the shadow of what is happening in Gaza.
Freedom of the press is not a slogan. It is the breath of democracy, the safeguard against tyranny, the public’s last line of defence against lies, manipulation and corruption.
In Gaza, that breath is being suffocated. And if the world does not act; if governments, media organisations, and press freedom advocates do not unite to hold Israel accountable, then the suffocation will spread.
Anas is gone. Mohamed is gone. Too many of my colleagues are gone. I do not know how much longer those of us still reporting from Gaza can keep going under this level of threat. But I do know this: as long as we have breath, we will speak. We will write. We will record. Because the truth is worth more than our fear, and the story of Gaza must not be buried with its journalists.
Silencing Palestinian journalists is not just an assault on Gaza’s truth. It is an assault on the world’s right to know. And the day we allow that assault to succeed is the day press freedom dies everywhere.
[Editor’s note: The IDF claims that al-Sharif had been a member of Hamas since 2013. Al-Sharif and Al Jazeera had previously called these claims “baseless”.]
15 Jul 2025 | Iran, Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features
Fatemeh Jamalpour: The cost of truth in Iran
When I was invited to co-write a story with an Israeli journalist, I asked myself: what could we possibly have in common? After 46 years of political hostility between the Islamic Republic and the State of Israel, it turned out we shared more than I expected. We are both inheritors of our countries’ proxy wars – and we both carry a shame that isn’t ours. It’s the shame of war-driven leaders, the shame of bombed hospitals and civilians buried beneath flags. Somehow, in that shared grief, shame became a point of connection.
Beyond the battlefield, we share something else: the impact of censorship and propaganda. Both governments declared the recent 12-day war – which left more than 930 people dead – a victory. But every civilian killed is not a victory; it’s a human life lost. In Iran, clerics have openly called for executions and mutilations of those who dare to criticise the Supreme Leader. Any dissent – even a tweet suggesting the Islamic Republic bears responsibility for the war – can lead to interrogation, summons or surveillance. In today’s Iran, truth has a cost – and more and more, that cost is freedom.
Starting on the fifth day of the Israel-Iran war, from 17-21 June, the Iranian regime imposed an almost complete internet shutdown, as reported by global internet monitor NetBlocks. Iranians were left not only without access to news but also without emergency alerts or evacuation warnings. The entire country was plunged into darkness – like a black hole – leaving defenceless civilians uncertain whether their neighbourhoods were in danger, or if they should flee.
Amid the chaos, parliament passed a law criminalising the use of Starlink internet.
“While they had cut off our internet – and during the war, I couldn’t get any news from my family and friends because both the internet and phone lines were down – I was sick with worry for every loved one,” said Leila, a 38-year-old woman from Shiraz. “And yet, when we try to access something that is our basic right, even after paying a hundred million tomans, we’re treated like criminals. These laws have no legitimacy.”
Meanwhile, the regime began targeting journalists’ families. Several relatives of reporters working with Persian-language outlets abroad, such as BBC Persian, were arrested, threatened, and labelled “enemies of God” – a charge that carries the risk of execution.
“I barely post on social media anymore because the space is under intense surveillance by security agents, and the pressure on journalists is suffocating,” said Raha Sham, 41, a parliamentary reporter in Tehran. “Many of my colleagues have received threatening phone calls. The tone is harsh, the intent clear: delete your tweets, your stories, your posts – or face the consequences.”
Iranians now face a new wave of repression in the aftermath of the war. Across cities, new checkpoints have sprung up where security forces stop civilians and search their phone photo galleries – often without a warrant. At the same time, parliament has passed new legislation effectively criminalising anti-war activism.
“Anti-war activism is a legitimate form of civic engagement, and criminalising it is both unjust and unlawful,” a human rights lawyer in Tehran who prefers to stay anonymous told me. “What disturbs me most about the post-war crackdown is that a spirit of vengeance has taken over the judiciary. Judges now seem to think their role is to avenge those who were killed. The mindset is: ‘Our commanders have died – someone must pay.'”
But the problem doesn’t end with the state. While we’re silenced by our government, we’re also erased by much of the Western media. For many editors, it’s always about numbers, not names. They want statistics, not stories. When Western journalists do gain access, they often report only from regime-approved rallies, while just a few streets away, anti-war protests and underground art scenes go unseen.
We’re rarely shown in full light. Middle Easterners remain blurred, devout, anonymous. After years of contributing to Western outlets, I’ve learned this isn’t an accident. It’s not just regime control. It’s also the residue of a colonial gaze – still shaping coverage in 2025.
David Schutz: Control of the press in Israel
In Israel, I was under missile fire too. While everyone else huddled in shelters, glued to the news, I stood on my roof watching what looked like fireworks. But if you Google “Iranian missile hit Tel Aviv Stock Exchange” in Hebrew, you’ll find nothing – you have to know where to look to piece together the truth.
Israel’s media has always been tightly controlled: military censors, a three-second delay on live broadcasts – a well-known fact that has been confirmed by inside sources. Today it’s slicker but more repressive than ever as global opposition to Israeli policies grows. The Israeli Journalists Association said recent moves by the government “seek to eliminate free media in Israel”. But it’s worth asking whether the press here was ever truly free.
Even before 7 October 2023, it operated under a mesh of dependent commercial interests and state funding with the military and government in what journalist Oren Persico from The Seventh Eye, an independent investigative magazine focused on the media in Israel, described as a “symbiotic relationship”.
After the election of the current government in 2022, bills have been brought forward that weaken public broadcasting, including proposals to give the government increased control of the public broadcaster’s budget – effectively letting the government starve it of funds should coverage stray too far.
“Very often, journalists effectively act as representatives for the institutions they cover: legal affairs reporters serve the prosecution and the judicial system, economic reporters serve the Finance Ministry, and military reporters naturally represent the positions of the IDF [Israel Defense Forces],” Persico said.
My friend Sapir runs a WhatsApp group called Demanding Full Coverage for Gaza.
“Almost nothing about Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe gets through to the Israeli public. Not because the information doesn’t exist, but because editors don’t cover it – and when they do, briefly, the military and government have a well-honed strategy to muddy the waters,” she said.
When Haaretz reported at the end of June that Israeli soldiers had been ordered to fire on civilians at an aid centre, counter-reports appeared almost immediately in multiple outlets – often repeating the same phrasing, the same anonymous interview – claiming “Hamas gunmen” had fired on crowds. The effect was the same: to muddy the story and deny a pattern of conduct.
“The goal is to flood the market with information so people think there’s no way to know what’s true anymore, to make them give up looking,” Sapir said.
Andrey X, an independent Israeli journalist, explained that all security-related stories must legally be cleared by military censors before publication. This can be justified on security grounds in some cases but critics argue it adds a significant challenge to media freedom. In practice, most outlets ignore this – until the government decides to enforce it retroactively, as in the case of American journalist Jeremy Loffredo, who was detained for four days and threatened with jail time over his reporting for The Grayzone, showing the locations of the military targets of Iranian missiles.
Footage of Israeli vehicles and homes hit by Israeli Hellfire missiles and tank shells on October 7 were labelled “Hamas attacks”. A government spokesman admitted 200 Hamas fighters were misidentified as civilians.
Twenty months later, Gaza is a demolished wasteland of dust and decay. The military releases sparse reports of “accidents”, just enough to recast outrage as tragic inevitability rather than accountability, enabling ongoing abuses without meaningful scrutiny.
Cable news will mention that the army had “begun food distribution”, but in such vague, antiseptic terms that few readers realise this means just a handful of stations, a framing that distorts what is actually happening and why.
Softer repression is often more powerful. Journalists fear being fired or defunded for not toeing the military spokesman’s line. Many fear public backlash even more: boycotts, pulled advertising and social media campaigns branding them traitors. Mildly subversive correspondents have faced on-air abuse – often in deeply personal terms – from their colleagues, as detailed by Persico when he spoke with me.
For Palestinian journalists, the dangers are greater still. Reporting on police or military abuses can end careers or worse. Even inside Israel, Arab reporters face social hostility, public threats and constant suspicion about their loyalty. The same event, covered by an Israeli and a Palestinian journalist, carries different risks, but that gap is always narrowing.
Each day, more people choose to shed the ideological masks their states have forced upon them in ’48 Palestine, Israel and Iran. Despite relentless propaganda and censorship, the number continues to grow. The future of our countries will not belong to war-hungry leaders – it is being shaped from the ground up, in the streets and in the digital space. In this age, every post, every story, every tweet by ordinary citizens is a quiet act of resistance – a revolution in itself.
This piece is published in collaboration with Egab, an organisation working with journalists across the Middle East and Africa
20 Feb 2025 | Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features
Following the grotesque scenes of Hamas celebrations in Gaza, we pay tribute to the journalist and human rights activist Oded Lifshitz, whose body has been identified by his family.
Although the grandfather was long retired, he was remembered by colleagues around the world as one of the first journalists to report on the notorious 1982 massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon.
Lifshitz worked for many years on the left-wing Israeli daily paper Al HaMishmar, which closed in 1995. Its slogan was “For Zionism, Socialism and Brotherhood Amongst Nations” and was often criticised by the religious right in Israel for its liberal stance.
Lifshitz, aged 83 at the time of his capture, was known as a campaigner for Israel’s Bedouin Arab community and was reported to be responsible for a high court case that returned some of their land. In retirement he worked for the organisation Road to Recovery, which helped Palestinians cross the Erez border from Gaza into Israel to receive medical treatment. He and his wife Yocheved, who was also kidnapped by Hamas but released in October 2023, were lifelong peace activists.
Lifshitz was one of the founders of Kibbutz Nir Oz, a village less than seven kilometres from the Gaza border. The kibbutz was destroyed in the attacks of 7 October 2023 and it is thought that nearly half of its 400 residents were kidnapped, killed or injured.
The National Union of Journalists general secretary Laura Davidson today paid tribute: “Our sincere thoughts are with Oded Lifshitz’s family at this difficult time. Like many, we had hoped for the safe release of the journalist committed to peace. Journalists worldwide will no doubt share their deepest condolences with his loved ones today.”
In a statement, the Lifshitz family said: “We received with deep sorrow the official and bitter news confirming the identification of our beloved Oded’s body. 503 agonising days of uncertainty have come to an end.
“We had hoped and prayed so much for a different outcome. Now we can mourn the husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather who has been missing from us since October 7.
“Our family’s healing process will begin now and will not end until the last hostage is returned.”
At Index on Censorship, we join in offering our condolences to the family of this exemplary journalist and campaigner. Sadly, he never contributed to Index. Tragically, he never will.
