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International media protest over journalist deaths in Gaza / Photo: Omar AL-QATTAA - AFP
International media protest over journalist deaths in Gaza
More than 250 media outlets in over 70 countries staged a front page protest Monday highlighting the deaths of scores of journalists in Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, the Reporters Without Borders media freedom group said.
"At the rate journalists are being killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, there will soon be no-one left to keep you informed," the group's general director Thibaut Bruttin said in a statement.
The protest was taken up on the website front pages of publications including Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera, British news site The Independent, French newspapers La Croix and L'Humanite and Germany's TAZ and Frankfurter Rundschau, according to Reporters Without Borders.
Some 220 journalists have been killed during Israel's Gaza campaign mounted in retaliation to Hamas' October 7, 2023 attack, according to RWB data.
The protest was staged one week after five journalists -- some working for Al Jazeera, Associated Press and Reuters -- were killed in Israeli strikes on the Nasser Hospital in Gaza's Khan Yunis city. Earlier in August, six journalists were killed in another Israeli air strike outside the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City.
Israel said the strike on the Nasser hospital killings had targeted a Hamas camera. But the attack drew international condemnation. Even US President Donald Trump, a key Israeli ally, said he was "not happy".
Media participating in Monday's action "demand an end to impunity for Israeli crimes against Gaza's reporters, the emergency evacuation of reporters seeking to leave the Strip and that foreign press be granted independent access," the RWB statement statement.
RWB says it has filed four complaints at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes it says the Israeli army committed against journalists in Gaza over the past 22 months.
International media have been denied free access to the Gaza Strip since the war broke out.
A few selected outlets have embedded reporters with Israeli army units operating in the Palestinian territory, under condition of strict military censorship.
The Hamas 2023 attack killed 1,219 people in Israel, according to an AFP tally based on official data. Some 47 people remain hostage in Gaza out of 251 originally abducted, though only around 20 are believed to be alive.
Israeli's retaliatory campaign has killed at least 63,459 people in Gaza, according to figures from the Hamas-run goverment's health ministry considered reliable by the United Nations.
S.Roth--BlnAP
