Israel has a close grip on access to Gaza – for foreign help and journalists
At the southern end of the Gaza border with Israel, we enter the war zone.
The dusty roads cross a sterile desert near the Egyptian border. Israeli soldiers with boredine keep the checkpoint. Israeli military managers tell us not to take their photos.
Our convoy of Humvees overflows with cameras, like a dozen journalists from around the world – all wearing vests and headsets with the ball tests – are transported to a parking lot at around 200 meters.
After two years of war, it is always the only way outside journalists who are authorized inside Gaza by the soldiers of Israel: escorted or “integrated” for a few hours. CBC News and other media organizations have made countless requests for freer access, none has been approved.
That day, however, after weeks of criticism by international agencies, NGOs and foreign governments, Israel wants to send a message, to explain why help may not reach the Palestinians hungry in Gaza.
“So, if someone asks why it happens, I can tell you that it is waiting for the UN,” said a cogat spokesperson, the help distribution agency from Israel, which cannot be appointed.
It is not the fault of Israel, he said. It leaves nearly 300 aid trucks per day. But then the pallets are seated for weeks.
“All this is only waiting for them,” he said.
Indeed, there are bags of rice and corn, as well as fish cans, stacked in the parking lot. The boxes labeled from UNICEF, the Red Cross and the Global Food Program are under the hot sun.
The integrated classification of the food security phase, which monitors hunger levels, warned that the crisis in parts of Gaza has reached the most serious level. Israel rejected the report.
The UN says that it is because of countless bureaucratic requirements imposed by Israel on importation, and its reluctance to ensure adequate security along the roads which it patrols inside Gaza.
“It is not because we are sitting drinking tea and waiting for someone to tell us that we are not doing our job,” said Olga Cherevko, with the UN OCHA distribution agency. “It is because we are faced with massive obstacles and obstruction and access is our biggest challenge.”
Few independent witnesses
Access is also the biggest challenge in the media.
Israel says Gaza is too dangerous for external journalists to be authorized to be authorized independently and a risk of security for its war effort. The association of the foreign press asked the Supreme Court of Israel, only to see this rejected while the judges agreed that Gaza posed “concrete security problems”. A second hearing has been postponed for a year.
Normally, it is journalists and media organizations who decide whether the risks of a conflict zone are worth welcoming such as Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq. Israel himself systematically authorized journalists in Gaza during the previous wars.
This time, the world has found itself with few independent witnesses – and many questions.
Is there really widespread In Gaza, as the NGO experts and NGOs report? Israel denies that there is a famine, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling for the affirmations of the contrary “Blood defamation.”
How can we know If 66,000 people have died since October 7, 2023, as the Gaza health officials claim? Israel rejects all figures from civil servants such as the unreliable propaganda of Hamas.
The absence of foreign journalists in Gaza has Palestinians wondering if the world has lost all interest.
“We are forgotten, no one sees us,” said Abdullah al-Komi in the center of Gaza.
Tehilla Shwartz Alshuler does not think so. She is an expert in media politics at the Israel Democracy Institute who maintains that Israel’s strategy has turned.
“When you do not authorize the media or transparency inside, the light will come out through other cracks. And these cracks could be biased or could cause even greater damage,” she said.
247 dead journalists: the UN
Local journalists have become the eyes and ears of most major media organizations, including CBC News.
“I saw people burning. People dying before my eyes. Hunger people, so these are skeletons,” said Ghada al-Kurd, who deposited stories for BBC, Der Spiegel and others.
But she is not only an observer. It is a Gazan who has experienced many of the difficulties she reports and wants “the world to see”.
Al-Kurd had to move eight times itself, while writing on the moved population of Gaza. It is slim 12 kilos from the same malnutrition which here affects many Palestinians. She watched friends die.
“Am I traumatized, and I don’t even know?” She asked.
“We lose parents, friends, colleagues, and we don’t have time to cry. We just tell them goodbye. And then we turn the page.”
With international journalists prevented from freely reporting from Gaza, CBC News joined other members of the European Union of Radio Radio (EBU) to pool resources and expertise in the field inside the territory to document the hunger crisis.
Many local journalists have no chance of turning the page before they are also killed. The United Nations Human Rights Office says that at least 247 died in Gaza since October 7, 2023, a number they say “should shock the world”. The committee to protect journalists calls it “the deadliest conflict for journalists” since 1992, when the organization began to keep registers.
Some journalists are deliberately targeted by Israel, who accuses them of working for Hamas – generally without providing any evidence. Colleagues call it an attempt to scare them in silence.
“We know that it is a threatening message to journalists from Gaza, to stop covering here,” said producer Hassan Salmi, “because this army is angry with any voice to get out of Gaza Strip.”
Israeli journalist Nir Hasson agrees. He writes for the Haaretz newspaper.
“We cannot excuse destruction, death, famine and displacement to Gaza. We cannot explain it, so we do what we can so that the world does not see it,” he said.
The Israeli media also made the eyes of Gaza. It often avoids the coverage of events affecting Palestinians during the war – such as civilian dead or food shortages – or emphasizes the official government versions of the situation.
And that seems to be the way the majority of Israelis love it. A survey carried out by the Achord center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in May revealed that 64% believe that it is not necessary to show a wider image concerning the fate of civilians in Gaza.
“Israeli media have become very nationalist,” said Shwartz Alshuler. She says that since October 7, newspapers and television networks have chosen to offer “comfort to the public” and “local pride” instead of the coverage they may not want to see.
So now, when angry demonstrators are walking in Madrid or Montreal, or when the world leaders rumble Israel and recognize Palestine, “most of the public is really surprised by the indignation that Israel is confronted,” she said. “They don’t understand where it comes from.”
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