International Journalism Festival

• That is the hallmark of a dictatorship, not a democracy.” As well as restrictions on media access to Gaza, particular broadcasters face other restrictions.
• At the start of April Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had proclaimed he would “act immediately to stop” Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera’s operations inside Israel.
• Israel’s parliament passed a bill allowing it to close Al Jazeera’s office in Israel, block its website and ban local channels from using its coverage.
• The CPJ said on April 20 that at least 97 journalists and media workers were among the more than 34,000 people killed since the war began.

Access to Gaza

• However, journalists’ organisations and the correspondents themselves have been lobbying for access to Gaza for months now.
• The BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen, also speaking in Perugia, confirmed that it had been a really difficult story to cover, principally, “because the main meat of it – which is what’s happening in Gaza, we can’t get close to”.
• This has given journalists access to the West Bank and enabled coverage of settler violence against the local Palestinian population, but not to Gaza.
• CNN’s Clarissa Ward was the first foreign journalist who made it into Gaza without the army, and she did this by accompanying an aid convoy supported by the United Arab Emirates in December 2023.

Israeli media coverage

• Within Israel, the media are mostly publishing the IDF version of events unchallenged.
• According to Israeli journalist and activist Anat Saragusti: “Hebrew-speaking Israelis watching television news are not exposed at all to what’s going on in Gaza.
• In the same article, cultural commentator and academic David Gurevitz claimed the numbers of Palestinians killed remains an abstract concept for many Israelis: “The Israeli audience isn’t capable of accommodating two kinds of pain together, seeing and identifying with the human victim of the other side as such, and the media follow suit.” This argument was backed up this month by Israeli journalist Yossi Klein who wrote: “The most taboo number in Israel is 34,000.

Professor Colleen Murrell receives funding from Ireland's regulator Coimisiún na Meán to research and write the annual Reuters Digital News Report Ireland.