2020-04-15

 In a time of growing information, image and news flow, journalists play an increasingly important role with their tasks by being the eye of truth, and the eye aims at the truth.

The “Media-Center” regrets what was done to the photojournalist Moaz Al-Amarna on Friday, November 15, 2019, during an anti-settlement action in the village of Surif in Hebron, where the occupying army shot him, resulting in a serious eye injury.

It also condemns in the strongest possible terms what journalists’ colleagues suffered today during the solidarity march with Amarneh, which the Occupation Army violently suppressed with tear gas. This resulted in injuries to some journalists and hours of arrests, which is evidence of the intransigence of the Israeli authorities and of systematic actions. By targeting journalists and media professionals, they are trying to prevent them from following events relating to violations by the occupying powers and from broadcasting their brutal practices against the Palestinian people.

Nowadays, in the age of fast-moving media and news, more and more cases of journalists being prevented from fulfilling their duties to be the eye of the truth and spreading the truth. The prevention of journalistic fieldwork, when reporting on the aforementioned events, is a violation of international humanitarian law and the Israeli authorities are responsible for it. Even though journalists are in a context of struggle and conflict, they have the right to protection and security. The most dangerous thing to which media professionals are exposed is direct violence and they are aware of this.

It is noteworthy that in the last two years the risk of direct targeting in the media has increased significantly, as several cases of direct targeting of journalists, as cases of bombings and shootings of journalists, have led to deaths while they were reporting various events in the West Bank and Gaza.

The “Media-Center” holds the Israeli authorities responsible for the safety of journalists and calls on the judicial and media institutions to make efforts to limit the harm done to journalists by documenting these practices, continuing investigations into successive violations and deliberate harm done by the army to media professionals and prosecuting their perpetrators legally and internationally.