Faizel Patel, Radio Islam News – 04-05-2018
Human Rights Watch says it concerned that Israeli soldiers may be targeting journalists that cover protests in the Gaza strip.
The organisation was speaking to Radio Islam from New York on World Press Freedom Day about the attacks on journalists across the globe.
On 6 April, a 30-year-old Palestinian journalist was shot by Israeli forces during a mass demonstration along the Gaza border.
Yaser Murtaja, a photographer with the Gaza-based Ain Media agency, was shot in the stomach in Khuza’a in the south of the Gaza.
Murtaja was hit despite wearing a blue flak jacket marked with the word “press”, indicating he was a journalist.
Human Rights Watch communications director Emma Daly says journalists reporting on important protests in Gaza and being targeted as part of the action is extremely problematic.
“There’s been a real problem, particularly in Gaza where people trying to report safely from Gaza and the way that Israel is supposedly investigating a number of these incidents, which they should indeed, because it’s very concerning to think that soldiers might actually have targeted journalists who were simply there to cover a protest.”
Daly says in the past ten years there has been a refusal by law enforcement officials and the military to see journalist’s as neutral observers but rather as legitimate targets.
0 Comments