The legal fight to open Gaza to foreign press has failed. It’s time to change course
As Israel’s Supreme Court continues enabling the government’s foreign media ban, Palestinian journalists are paying the price. Further legal efforts are futile.
For over two years, the Foreign Press Association (FPA) has been battling Israel’s government in the Supreme Court over its sweeping ban on the independent entry of foreign journalists into the Gaza Strip. Throughout that time, the Israeli government has not wavered from its position — and the court has proven unwilling to force its hand.
The latest hearing in this Kafkaesque affair took place on Jan. 26. In a statement submitted to the court, the government’s attorney, Jonathan Nadav, argued that “the entry of journalists still poses a security risk, both to the journalists themselves and to military forces.” Neither the retrieval of the last Israeli hostage’s body, nor the limited opening of the Rafah border crossing, he stressed, justify any change in this policy.
The FPA — which represents roughly 400 foreign journalists based in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories — first appealed to the Supreme Court in Dec. 2023, and again in early 2024 after its first appeal was rejected. The court has since granted the state no fewer than 10 extensions to submit its response, effectively allowing the government to sidestep the issue altogether.
This time, the court’s patience with the state appeared to have run out. Justice Ruth Ronnen pressed state representatives to clarify what concrete changes on the ground would be required for the ban on foreign media access to be rescinded. “You can no longer say it’s the same risk,” she said, referring to the ceasefire that had been in place for over three months. “You must explain what else must take place for journalists’ entry to be permitted. It’s not enough to claim security concerns without explaining them.”
Nadav replied that he could provide further details only in a closed-door session — a request the court accepted, while denying Gilad Shaer, the attorney representing the FPA, access to the information presented to them in secret. After the closed session, the court once again declined to issue a ruling, instead instructing the state to submit another update within two months.
“The FPA is deeply disappointed that the Israeli Supreme Court has once again postponed ruling on our petition,” the organization said in an official statement in response to the court’s non-decision. “There are no security arguments that justify Israel’s blanket ban on allowing foreign journalists independent access to Gaza at a time when humanitarian aid workers and other officials are being allowed into Gaza. The public’s right to know should not be reduced to an afterthought.”
Tania Kraemer, a correspondent for Deutsche Welle in Jerusalem and the FPA’s current chairperson, wrote to members the day after the hearing, notifying them that the court had scheduled the next proceedings for March 31, and that the organization’s lawyers planned to appeal the decision. Yet in an update sent to members following a Feb. 4 board meeting, there was no indication of any concrete next steps beyond an intention to “run a social media campaign if we have the capacity.”
One can almost sympathize with the beleaguered FPA in this situation, caught for over two years between an obstinate Israeli government and a feeble Supreme Court. Yet that sympathy quickly gives way to anger and despair upon scrolling through the organization’s statements page, now filled with a seemingly endless series of near-identical declarations of “disappointment” with the government, “dismay” at yet another delay by the court, “hope” that the judges will “stand firmly against the state,” and, inevitably, “outrage and shock” at the ongoing killing of Gazan journalists.
Rather than changing its approach, the FPA continues to play by the rules and defer to the Supreme Court, despite there being no indication that it will ever force the government’s hand. In doing so, the FPA not only fails to achieve its goal of lifting the ban on press access to Gaza, but also helps legitimize the external perception of a good-faith “judicial review” — a cornerstone of Israel’s self-professed liberal democracy.
‘The FPA board is weak, and Israel knows that’
A similar court case outside the realm of press access offers a useful precedent. Last September, four Israeli human rights groups — Gisha, HaMoked, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, and Physicians for Human Rights–Israel — took the extraordinary step of withdrawing an urgent petition to the High Court that demanded the immediate entry of sufficient humanitarian aid into Gaza. Filed in May, the petition had languished for more than three months without a hearing, as the court repeatedly declined to exercise judicial review over a policy that had led to mass starvation.
Explaining their decision, the organizations said they could no longer participate in what had become a “futile proceeding” that allowed the state to continue acting without oversight while invoking the mere existence of judicial review as proof of accountability. “[This is a process] from which only the state derives benefit,” Gisha’s lawyers wrote in their request to withdraw the petition. “It continues to wield unrestrained force, to starve innocent people, and to deny them life-saving humanitarian aid … while outwardly washing its hands of responsibility.”
These repeated postponements, the NGOs noted, also assisted Israel in its legal battles in international courts. Even as the state’s representatives argued before the International Court of Justice that its legal system remained open to anyone seeking to challenge its actions, this crucial case went untouched, and the state was never required to account for its conduct.
Could the FPA emulate the example of these Israeli NGOs? Its circumstances are certainly different: Much of the FPA’s day-to-day work — facilitating access, accreditation, and communication between foreign journalists and Israeli authorities — depends on ongoing engagement with the very bodies it now challenges, making disengagement a particularly consequential step for its members.
Yet the FPA has the obligation to ask what its current approach has actually accomplished, both for its members and for the most vulnerable populations in this land. Considering how easily Israel brushes aside the FPA’s appeals to the Supreme Court — with the latter’s active assistance — the answer seems clear.
Continuing to participate in this charade serves no one except the Israeli government. It does nothing but allow Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right allies to project a democratic facade by participating in legal proceedings, secure in the knowledge that the court will provide endless postponements that prevent any meaningful change in policy.
“The FPA board is weak, and Israel knows that,” an FPA member who spoke to +972 on condition of anonymity said. “There are voices inside the FPA who have called, and are still calling, for tougher actions, such as stopping the embedding of journalists with the Israeli army [in Gaza] or boycotting the Prime Minister’s Office.” According to another FPA member, a proposal to “suggest to media company editorial leaders to agree to boycott interviews, press conferences and background briefings with army officials until foreign media is granted independent access to Gaza,” was voted down by the board.
Another FPA member, also speaking anonymously, described the ongoing appeal process as “an embarrassingly weak and pathetic evasion of journalistic responsibility by the world’s ‘leading’ mainstream media outlets as the genocidal onslaught marches onward. History will judge this embarrassing episode very harshly indeed, including the slaughter and maiming of several hundred journalists that took place in this period. And very high up on the blame list will be the major international media outlets that insulted the intelligence of gnats with this purely performative litigation.”
A matter of life and death
As long as Israel continues to bar international media from entering Gaza, Palestinian journalists on the ground remain the only eyes of the outside world documenting life under continued bombardment, displacement, and siege, at immense personal risk. Supporting their work is therefore not just a matter of professional solidarity, but of necessity.
But the very fact that Palestinian journalists have been left to shoulder this burden alone is itself an indictment. Recent developments make clear that Israel’s continued ban on foreign media access to Gaza carries life-and-death consequences.
Only a few days before the hearing, on Jan. 21, the Israeli army carried out one of the deadliest attacks on Gaza since the so-called ceasefire took effect last October, adding 11 more deaths to the roughly 500 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire during the past four months.
Among the victims were two 13-year-old boys, one killed by an Israeli drone strike in central Gaza, and one shot dead by Israeli troops in Khan Younis. Three others — Muhammad Salah Qishta, Abdel Raouf Sha’at, and Anas Ghneim — were journalists on assignment for the Egyptian Committee for Gaza Relief. They were killed after an Israeli airstrike hit the car they were travelling in while on their way to document conditions at a newly established displacement camp in the area of Al-Zahra, south of Gaza City.
The journalists, whom the Israeli army spokesperson later described as “suspects who operated a drone affiliated with Hamas,” were several kilometers from the so-called “Yellow Line” when they were struck, and could not plausibly have posed a threat to Israeli forces. And as imagesfrom the aftermath of the attack show, the vehicle was clearly marked as belonging to the Egyptian Committee.
After the massacre, the FPA issued a condemnation of Israel’s conduct. “Once again, journalists were killed by Israeli military strikes while carrying out their professional duties,” the group said. “Too many journalists in Gaza have been killed without justification, while Israel continues to deny international media independent access to the territory.”
Setting aside the question of what could possibly constitute a “justification” for killing journalists, it is clear that the FPA’s current strategy has failed to do anything to protect its Palestinian colleagues. How many more Palestinian journalists will be killed by the time the court’s latest deadline to the state arrives in late March — one that is almost certainly no less arbitrary than those that preceded it?
The time has come for the FPA to suspend its cooperation with the Supreme Court and other Israeli state institutions that enforce and legitimize the foreign media blackout in Gaza. By publicly declaring the exhaustion of the legal process, it can instead mobilize pressure from the international media community, and push member outlets to condition future cooperation with Israeli institutions on access to Gaza. Continuing down the current path — one that has produced no results for over two years, while Palestinian journalists in Gaza continue to be killed — is no longer defensible.
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