PARIS: More than 250 media outlets in over 70 countries staged a front page protest Monday highlighting the deaths of scores of journalists in Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, the Reporters Without Borders media freedom group said.
“At the rate journalists are being killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, there will soon be no-one left to keep you informed,” the group’s general director Thibaut Bruttin said in a statement.
The protest was taken up on the website front pages of publications including Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera, British news site The Independent, French newspapers La Croix and L’Humanite and Germany’s TAZ and Frankfurter Rundschau, according to Reporters Without Borders.
Some 220 journalists have been killed during Israel’s Gaza campaign mounted in retaliation to Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack, according to RWB data.
The protest was staged one week after five journalists — some working for Al Jazeera, Associated Press and Reuters — were killed in Israeli strikes on the Nasser Hospital in Gaza’s Khan Yunis city. Earlier in August, six journalists were killed in another Israeli air strike outside the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City.
Israel said the strike on the Nasser hospital killings had targeted a Hamas camera. But the attack drew international condemnation. Even US President Donald Trump, a key Israeli ally, said he was “not happy.”
Media participating in Monday’s action “demand an end to impunity for Israeli crimes against Gaza’s reporters, the emergency evacuation of reporters seeking to leave the Strip and that foreign press be granted independent access,” the RWB statement statement.
RWB says it has filed four complaints at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes it says the Israeli army committed against journalists in Gaza over the past 22 months.
International media have been denied free access to the Gaza Strip since the war broke out.
A few selected outlets have embedded reporters with Israeli army units operating in the Palestinian territory, under condition of strict military censorship.
The Hamas 2023 attack killed 1,219 people in Israel, according to an AFP tally based on official data. Some 47 people remain hostage in Gaza out of 251 originally abducted, though only around 20 are believed to be alive.
Israeli’s retaliatory campaign has killed at least 63,459 people in Gaza, according to figures from the Hamas-run government’s health ministry considered reliable by the United Nations.
International media protest over journalist deaths in Gaza
https://arab.news/wbfg3
International media protest over journalist deaths in Gaza
- More than 250 media outlets in over 70 countries staged a front page protest Monday highlighting the deaths of scores of journalists in Israel’s war on Gaza
- “At the rate journalists are being killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, there will soon be no-one left to keep you informed:” RWB general director
Jailed French journalist files appeal in Algeria’s top court: lawyers
- Gleizes was arrested in May 2024 after traveling to Tizi Ouzou in northeastern Algeria’s Kabylia region — home to the Amazigh Kabyle people — to write about the country’s most decorated football club, Jeunesse Sportive de Kabylie
ALGIERS: French journalist Christophe Gleizes, sentenced to seven years behind bars in Algeria on terror-related charges, has filed an appeal seeking a new trial with the country’s highest court, his lawyers said Sunday.
“Christophe Gleizes registered an appeal at (the court of) Cassation” on Sunday, the deadline for filing, his French lawyer Emmanuel Daoud told AFP in a message, declining to comment further.
Gleizes’ Algerian lawyer Amirouche Bakouri made a similar announcement on Facebook.
Earlier this month, an Algerian appeals court upheld the seven-year prison term for the sportswriter, who was first convicted of “glorifying terrorism” in June.
Gleizes was arrested in May 2024 after traveling to Tizi Ouzou in northeastern Algeria’s Kabylia region — home to the Amazigh Kabyle people — to write about the country’s most decorated football club, Jeunesse Sportive de Kabylie.
In 2021, he had met in Paris with the head of the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie (MAK), a foreign-based group designated a terrorist organization by Algiers earlier that year.
At this month’s appeal hearing, Gleizes had said he did not know the MAK had been listed as a terrorist organization, and asked the court’s forgiveness for his “journalistic mistakes.”
The court’s decision to uphold his sentence was denounced by the rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF), as well as the French government.
Gleizes’s jailing comes at a time of diplomatic friction between Paris and Algiers that began last year when France officially backed Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara region, where Algeria backs the pro-independence Polisario Front.
He is currently France’s only journalist imprisoned abroad, according to RSF, and French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to work toward his release.
Mother makes plea
The mother of the jailed journalist Christophe Gleizes wrote a letter to Algeria’s president requesting he pardon her son from his seven-year sentence on terror-related charges.
“I respectfully ask you to consider granting Christophe a pardon, so that he may regain his freedom and his family,” Sylvie Godard wrote in the letter, which was dated December 10 and seen by AFP on Monday.
“Nowhere in any of his writings will you find any trace of statements hostile to Algeria and its people,” she wrote in her letter to President Abdelmadjid Tebboune.
