DAWN and 18 other organizations have joined forces to support Representative Jim McGovern and his colleagues in urging the Biden-Harris administration to call on Israel to grant independent access to Gaza for U.S. and international journalists. This request highlights the urgent need for transparency, accountability, and press freedom amid the ongoing conflict.
Despite over 4,000 journalists traveling to Israel to cover the war, Israel's restrictions have effectively barred foreign reporting from Gaza, placing an unreasonable burden on local journalists. The signatory organizations emphasize the critical importance of a free press in documenting the realities of the conflict and advocate for immediate action to uphold press freedoms by international obligations.
Read the full letter here:
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October 21, 2024
Re: Congressional letter to the White House and State Department calling for international media access to Gaza
We, the undersigned, support Representative Jim McGovern and his colleagues in asking the Biden-Harris administration to urge Israel to allow independent access to Gaza for U.S. and international journalists, in the interest of transparency, accountability, and press freedom.
While more than 4,000 international journalists have traveled to Israel to cover the ongoing war, Israel continues to deny them access to Gaza except for rare and tightly controlled military-led press tours to the war-torn territory. This effective ban on foreign reporting has placed an impossible and unreasonable burden on Palestinian reporters in Gaza to document an ongoing war through which they are living.
In response to this situation, more than 70 media and civil society organizations called on Israel in July to give journalists independent access to Gaza. The organizations – which include The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, BBC, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Washington Post – stressed that no independent media access to Gaza has been permitted since the start of the war in October 2023.
More than 128 journalists have been killed since the start of the war, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Those who remain in Gaza are working in conditions of extreme deprivation and face intimidation, violence, and arrest by Israeli authorities.
Many have lost their limbs, homes, or families. They work in an eviscerated media landscape: amongst the large-scale destruction of media offices and equipment, persistent internet shutdowns, and cyberattacks on the media. The result is that information from Gaza is becoming harder to obtain and the reporting that does get through is subject to questions over its veracity. This creates a vacuum for propaganda and mis- and disinformation, and undermines the public's right to know about the devastating impact of the Israel-Gaza war.
A free and independent press is the cornerstone of democracy and freedom of expression. We, therefore, ask that the U.S. government urge Israel to uphold its commitments to press freedom by providing foreign media with immediate, independent access to Gaza and abide by its international obligations to protect journalists as civilians.
Signatories
- Action Corps
- Amnesty International USA
- Association of Foreign Press Correspondents
- Coalition For Women In JournalismCode Pink
- Committee to Protect Journalists
- Courage Foundation
- DAWN
- Defending Rights & Dissent
- Essential Information
- Free Press
- Freedom of the Press Foundation
- Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University
- MPower Change Action Fund
- National Association of Science Writers
- PEN America
- Radio Television Digital News Association
- Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
- Society of Professional Journalists
