By Staff, Agencies Seventy international media and civil society organizations have called on the apartheid "Israeli" entity to grant unhindered access to the Gaza Strip, which has been subjected to a near-total media blackout amid Tel Aviv’s ongoing genocidal war against the coastal enclave. The organizations, including the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, BBC, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, issued their plea in an open letter addressed to the entity on Thursday.
Hailing from more than 26 countries, the signatories highlighted that no independent media access to Gaza has been permitted since the war began in October last year.
The brutal military onslaught has so far claimed the lives of nearly 38,350 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and has turned almost the entirety of the Palestinian territory into a scene of utter devastation.
“Nine months into the war, international reporters are still being denied access to Gaza except for rare and escorted trips arranged by the 'Israeli' military,” the letter read.
“This effective ban on foreign reporting has placed an impossible and unreasonable burden on local reporters to document a war through which they are living.” The undersigned also noted that more than 100 journalists had been murdered since the start of the war, and those who remained were working in conditions of extreme deprivation.
“The result is that information from Gaza is becoming harder and harder to obtain and that the reporting which does get through is subject to repeated questions over its veracity,” they said.
Commenting on the letter, whose release was organized by the non-governmental Committee to Protect Journalists [CPJ], CEO Jodie Ginsberg said, "Israeli" Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “describes 'Israel' as a democracy.
His actions with regard to the media tell a different story.” International journalists, she added, “should be given independent access to Gaza so they can judge for themselves what is happening in this war – rather than being spoon-fed with a handful of organized tours by the 'Israeli' military.”