* Caption-:* Photo credit: ©Anadolu / Funeral ceremony for Palestinian journalists Saeed Al-Taweel and Mohammad Sobh, killed in Israeli strikes, in the Gaza Strip, October 10, 2023
By Quentin Chevry
youtube.com/@theflagpost
September 01, 2025
I join the appeal launched by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), supported by 40 French journalists’ societies, including L’Humanité, Blast, ARTE, AFP, mediapart.fr and many others. Together, we denounce the persecution and smear campaigns against our brothers and sisters in Gaza, and we ask an essential question: what does Israel want to hide by imposing closed doors in Gaza?
Since October 7, 2023, the date of the Hamas attack and the outbreak of the war, Gaza has become the site of the deadliest conflict for the press in modern history. More than 220 journalists, the vast majority of them Palestinians, have been killed. Some have fallen while doing their jobs, others in indiscriminate strikes, sometimes with their families, others in targeted attacks. Behind these figures, there are faces and a fundamental freedom murdered.
This tragedy is accompanied by a clear political strategy: to deny the international press access to Gaza. For nearly two years, no independent coverage has been possible, no direct testimony has been able to cross the borders of this bombed strip of land. This closed-door session deprives the world of the truth of the facts, silences Palestinian speech and gives the Israeli army power over the narrative of the war.
Nothing can justify such invisibilization. Yet this lockdown has been accepted without any real reaction by Israel’s Western allies, the United States and the European Union. This silence is culpable. It endorses an impunity that undermines the right to information around the world.
By joining this call, I want to remind you that defending journalists in Gaza means defending the right of peoples to be informed, to understand what is at stake in this war, to refuse to erase a reality. Without a free press, there is no shared truth. Without journalists, there is no collective memory.
At the rate at which journalists are falling under the bombs, there will soon be no one left to tell the story. That is why we call for an immediate end to attacks on journalists, the opening of Gaza to the international press without military supervision, and the effective protection of Palestinian journalists who risk their lives every day to carry out their mission.
Freedom of the press is non-negotiable. It is an essential condition for any democracy, for all justice, for any humanity. To silence it in Gaza is to try to impose oblivion. We are not resigned to this…
