Israel on World Press Freedom Day – more censorship and killing
JVL Introduction
On World Press Freedom day, May 4, the Israeli/Palestinian magazine +972 marked the occasion with a tribute in their newsletter The Landline to the sacrifices made by journalists battling to tell the world the truth about Gaza and the West Bank and a call for ongoing support for their work.
We publish it below this longer article by Haggai Matar, detailing the ramping up of Israeli censorship, military and otherwise.
He says:
Beyond the unprecedented spike in military censorship, this year’s World Press Freedom Day arrives as a grim milestone for Israeli journalism. In 2024, Israel ranked a dismal 101 out of 180 (a drop of 4 places from the previous year’s ranking) in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index; that ranking has now dropped even further to 112. This evaluation only reflects the state of journalism within Israel, without factoring in the mass killing of journalists in Gaza.
NWI
This article was originally published by +972 Magazine with Local Call on Fri 2 May 2025. Read the original here.
Breaking new records, Israel sees unprecedented spike in media censorship
In 2024, Israel’s military censor banned 1,635 articles from publication and partially redacted another 6,265 — part of a wider assault on freedom of press.
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112th among 180 countries? The “only democracy in the Middle East” is in some bad company. And has Reporters without Borders duly factored in its murdering of Palestinian journalists?
Just how much weight RWB gave to the murder of journalists in Gaza is not clear. However they made explicit reference to it in their country page on Israel in their report https://rsf.org/en/country/israel and it obviously contributed to Israel’s further downgrading.