Journalists in Danger

The International Press Institute (IPI), the global network of editors, media executives and leading journalists, strongly condemns the detention without charges of Reuters photographer, Suhaib Jadallah Salem, on 22 May 2002, and five other journalists who are being held by Israeli authorities and denied basic civil and human rights.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply concerned about an incident yesterday in which a Reuters television cameraman came under gunfire in the West Bank town of Hebron.

Following the latest Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel, journalists have been banned from six autonomous Palestinian towns in the West Bank.

The International Press Institute (IPI), the global network of editors, media executives and leading journalists, strongly condemns the killing of the freelance photographer and journalist, Imad Abu Zahra, and the wounding of the official Palestinian Wafa news agency photographer Said Dahla on 11 July 2002.

The International Federation of Journalists, the world’s largest journalists’ organisation, today protested over the detention of two Moroccan journalists by the Israeli military after they had interviewed Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat.

“After targeting Palestinian journalists, the Israeli army is now preventing Arab journalists from doing their work,” RSF Secretary-General Robert Ménard said on 10 July 2002. “Four months after Operation ‘Rampart’, attacks on press freedom in the Palestinian territories are continuing unabated,” he added.

A delegation of journalists’ leaders that visited Palestine and Israel last month is calling for a joint Palestinian-Israeli initiative to break the impasse over issuing press cards to journalists in the region.

Palestinian free-lance photographer Imad Abu Zahra died this morning from gunshot wounds he sustained yesterday in the West Bank town of Jenin. Said Dahla, a photographer for the official Palestinian news agency WAFA who was accompanying Abu Zahra, was also wounded.

Reporters Without Borders called on the Israeli government again today to free five imprisoned Palestinian journalists after one of them, Agence France-Presse (AFP) photographer Hussam Abu Alan (photo), had his ‘administrative detention’ for allegedly supporting ‘terrorists’ extended for five months on 23 July.