All wars are dangerous to cover, but Gaza holds a place of its own among modern conflicts for the peril faced by journalists. Some 200 journalists have been among the estimated 63,000 people killed since the Gaza war began -- an overwhelming majority killed by the Israeli military.
Those deaths helped make the past two years the deadliest period for journalists since the Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit, started keeping records in 1992.
The deaths are one more layer of the agonizing human tragedy in Gaza. Families and neighborhoods have been destroyed, and many brave journalists have lost their lives while attempting to help the world understand the war. Nearly all of these journalists have been Palestinian because Israel has barred outside media from entering Gaza.
That ban is outrageous and self-defeating. Israel's leaders and defenders often argue they are held to a different standard during wartime from other nations, and they are sometimes correct.
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But the refusal to allow international journalists to cover the war on the ground is an example of the Israeli government's failing to follow a standard many other governments, especially democracies, follow. The United States allowed reporters to cover the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ukraine allows journalists in to cover its war with Russia.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government seem to believe that keeping foreign journalists out of Gaza advances their narrative. In Israel it may help serve that purpose by giving some Israelis an excuse to dismiss coverage of Gazan suffering as Palestinian propaganda. Globally, though, the policy has spectacularly failed: Thanks to social media and the work of those brave Palestinian journalists, people can see the mass killing, severe hunger and wholesale destruction in Gaza, and it has prompted an outcry.
Keeping out the international media indicates that Israel's leaders are trying to conceal the war's full horror. ... It evokes the failed attempts by American leaders to bury the truth during the Vietnam War.
Hamas is hardly a model of open information. It has long behaved as a brutal totalitarian government in Gaza that threatens, punishes and sometimes kills people who attempt to speak the truth.
The Gaza of the future deserves a free press wholly different from what Hamas and Israel have permitted.
Israel has responded to criticism of the deaths of Gaza's journalists by arguing that some of them are Hamas agents. At the very least, some media outlets are affiliated with Hamas or other extremist groups, such as Islamic Jihad.
But it is unacceptable for Israel to smear the many courageous journalists doing vital work under almost impossible circumstances by suggesting they are combatants. Israel has offered little, if any, evidence for its claims, while cynically keeping out international journalists.
Israel's government has often complained that the world has relied for information on the Gaza Health Ministry and other agencies controlled by Hamas. If the Israeli government wants to let the world judge for itself, it should let in the media.
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