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.
19 Feb 2025 | Israel, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Palestine
Israeli authorities are silencing Palestinian culture and history in a censorship surge that could soon include left-wing Jewish opponents of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, academics have said.
Last week, Israeli police raided the Educational Bookshop in East Jerusalem, one of the most prominent Palestinian cultural institutions in the occupied territory. Two of its owners, Mahmoud Muna and Ahmad Muna, were arrested on suspicion of “disturbing the public order”, interrogated, detained for 48 hours, then placed under house arrest for five days.
“I assume the next stage will be the Israeli left,” Menachem Klein, an Israeli political scientist and emeritus professor at Bar Ilan University, told Index after this event. “We are on the way to an authoritarian regime during ongoing wartime and it is easy to use emergency rules to silence freedom of expression.”
During the raid, detectives allegedly inspected books using Google Translate and took away ones they deemed to be possible incitement to terrorism because they contained words such as “Palestine” or “Hamas”.
One of the books presented as proof of possible incitement was a children’s colouring book titled From the River to the Sea, which was allegedly found in the store’s warehouse. The phrase, which has proved controversial, is used by some to imply that Israel should be replaced by a Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Critics have labelled this confiscation laughable – in a comment piece, Haaretz ridiculed that a children’s colouring book is being “considered a ticking time bomb”. But government supporters have said that the book does constitute incitement.
There has so far been no criticism of the raid from any major Israeli opposition leaders, but a member of the Knesset (MK) for the left-wing Democrats party has allegedly filed a query in parliament questioning the police’s actions. Prominent Israeli authors and cultural personalities have also spoken out about it. However, the absence of broader political opposition means the authorities are unlikely to be deterred in the future from widening their targets on cultural institutions.
“We’ve undergone a change in Israel whereby anyone who incites to terrorism has to pay a price regardless of whether he is Arab or Jewish,” said Shamai Glick, head of the right-wing organisation B’tsalmo, told Index. He argues that authorities did not go far enough and should close the bookstores.
This recent intimidation comes amid crackdowns on Israeli films that are critical of the government, especially those dealing with alleged crimes related to the mass displacement of Palestinians during what Israelis term the 1948 War of Independence and Palestinians term the Nakba, or “catastrophe”.
In December, Israel’s Minister for Culture and Sport Miki Zohar threatened to halt government funding for the Tel Aviv Cinematheque after it showed films deemed to be pro-Palestine at Solidarity Human Rights Film Festival 2024.
One of these films was the previously-censored Lyd, which depicts the 1948 expulsion of that town’s Palestinians and imagines what Lyd would be like if not for the Nakba. Two months prior, the police had banned a screening of Lyd in Jaffa after Zohar said the movie was “inciting and mendacious” and “slanders Israel and Israeli soldiers”.
Cutting government funding to a cultural institution in Israel is a death sentence, as there is little private investment in the arts. In a letter to the Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, Zohar wrote that the Solidarity Festival had shown films that “are against the state of Israel” and which “disparage the soldiers of the Israel Defense Force[s]”, according to the Jewish Independent. Smotrich has set up a committee to determine whether the festival violated funding laws.
Lyd co-director Rami Younis said the recent raid on the bookstore should be seen as an escalation of national cultural censorship. “This is another syndrome of the rise of fascism. Are books the enemy? We’ve seen regimes in the past that declared books and songs the enemy. And they’re all dark regimes and this is where Israel is heading.”
“If it’s not stopped, it will get much worse very soon,” he said.
The government has also started deploying a little-used British Mandate-era law dating back to 1917, which allows the Culture and Sport Ministry to review films before they are shown at cinematheques, thereby stopping screenings of contentious films.
According to Haaretz, the Israeli Culture and Sport Ministry’s Film Review Council warned cinematheques in November not to screen filmmaker Neta Shoshani’s documentary film 1948: Remember, Remember Not, as it had not been granted the council’s approval. The film, compelling and thought-provoking, looks at the War of Independence / Nakba through testimonies and interviews with Israelis and Palestinians. The film lost several screenings as a result, but ultimately was approved by the council.
In response to the request, cinema directors said they had not been asked to clear films with the council previously. Normally, the council sets age ratings rather than undertaking political censorship.
Filmmakers and festival organisers in Israel are now being deterred from showcasing work that is critical of the government. The coalition’s threatening behaviour towards art and culture that raise questions about Israel’s foundation, probe Palestinian displacement or allege violations by the Israel Defense Forces mean that many cultural workers are steering away from controversial topics.
“When they threaten, you don’t feel like taking a chance,” Shoshani recently told The Jewish Independent. “There is a chilling effect,” she said.
“This means that culture in Israel is rapidly becoming non-critical and doesn’t go to [controversial] places simply because there is no one to fund this type of film. If I enter controversial realms, I won’t get funding and at the end of the day, we all have to make a living. So clearly people exercise self-censorship even though they don’t admit it.”
“This is something that happens under every dictatorial regime,” Shoshani added. “In a fascist regime, culture becomes propaganda and not culture. Gradually, Israeli culture is becoming like that.”
In response to criticism that the Israeli government is impinging on free expression, Zohar’s office said: “We will continue to defend freedom of expression but we won’t let extremist and delusional elements incite and harm under the sponsorship of the state of Israel.”
The censorship of Shoshani’s film also demonstrates how the Israeli state is attempting to stop the public from seeing archival footage and important documentation produced by researchers. The public broadcaster Kan (also known as the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation), which funded the film, has not aired it for more than a year, due to what it describes as wartime sensitivities. “It will be screened soon,” a spokesperson said. Minister of Communications Shlomo Karhi has allegedly pressed Kan to scrap the film entirely, according to Israeli news website ICE (Information, Communication, Entertainment).
But Benny Morris, a leading Israeli historian who appears in Shoshani’s film and who was born in 1948 himself, told Index that it is the government that is distorting and covering up the real events of the War of Independence.
Cultural censorship is also only the beginning of a wave of restrictions on free expression in Israel. The coalition government is currently pushing through other anti-democratic bills, including one designed to restrict the speech of academics, and another that would effectively reduce the ability of Palestinian citizens of Israel to vote in elections and decrease their Knesset representation.
“Yes, there is a government effort to censor and lie about 1948, about Israeli war crimes in that war and hence influence how Israelis see their history,” said Morris. “Along with other subversions by the government of Israeli democratic norms, they are threatening Israel’s culture and historiography and trying to replace truth with propaganda.”
