Frey is a journalist known for his reporting on the Israeli occupation in the West Bank for several outlets, including Haaretz and YNET, according to CPJ’s review of his work.

“Israeli authorities’ arrest of journalist Israel Frey underscores authorities’ growing intolerance of freedom of expression since the start of the war on October 7, 2023,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Israeli authorities must immediately release Frey and all detained Palestinian journalists, and end their ongoing crackdown on the press and dissenting voices.”

After the news that five Israeli soldiers were killed by an explosive device in northern Gaza, Frey tweeted that “The world is a better place this morning without five young men who participated in one of the most horrific crimes against humanity.” 

Frey’s attorneys, Riham Nassra and Michal Pomeranz, told CPJ that the tweet does not legally constitute support for terrorism, describing the incident as a “political arrest.”

The State Attorney’s office responded to CPJ’s emailed request for comment with a copy of the court document about the case. The police and the Ministry of National Security issued a joint statement saying they would “deal firmly with anyone who incites or expresses support for the enemy.”

This is the third time Frey has been investigated, he told CPJ on Tuesday, before his arrest, adding that “In previous instances, it was alleged that my posts contained incitement, but the files were closed.” 

On October 16, 2023, Frey went into hiding after his home was attacked the previous day by a mob of far-right Israelis after he expressed solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.

CPJ has documented Israeli authorities’ arrests of 85 Palestinian journalists since October 7, 2023, the start of the Israel-Gaza war. In that same time period, this is the first time Israeli authorities have arrested and opened an investigation against an Israeli journalist for expressing an opinion.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

“Media freedom is often a casualty of war, and Israel’s recent war with Iran is no exception. We have seen Israeli authorities use security fears to increase censorship, while extremist right-wing politicians have demonized the media, legitimizing attacks on journalists,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Despite hopes that we will see a ceasefire in Gaza this week, Israel’s government appears relentless in its determination to silence those who report critically on its military actions.”

After Haaretz newspaper published an interview with Israeli soldiers who said they were ordered to shoot at unarmed Gazans waiting for food aid, a mayor in southern Israel threatened to shut shops selling the popular liberal paper. This follows the government’s decision last year to stop advertising with Haaretz, accusing it of “incitement.”

Authorities are also pushing ahead with a bill to dismantle the public broadcaster, Kan, and shutter its news division, the country’s third-largest news channel. Meanwhile, government support has seen the right-wing Channel 14 grow in popularity.

The hostile climate fueled by Israel’s right-wing government has emboldened settler violence against journalists. On July 5, two Deutsche Welle (DW) reporters wearing press vests were attacked by Israeli settlers in Sinjil, West Bank — an incident condemned by Germany’s ambassador and the German Journalists’ Association, which called it “unacceptable that radical settlers are hunting down media professionals with impunity.” Reporters from AFP, The New York Times, and The Washington Post were also present. Palestinian journalists had to flee.

“War is a dangerous time for civil rights – rights that Netanyahu’s government is actively undermining as it moves toward dismantling democracy,” Haaretz Editor-in-Chief Aluf Benn told CPJ.

‘Broadcasts that serve the enemy’

During the Israel-Iran war of June 13 to 24, anti-press government actions included:

• A June 18 military order requiring army approval before broadcasting the aftermath of Iranian attacks on Israeli military sites. Haaretz reported that this order was illegal as it was not made public in the official government gazette or authorized by a parliamentary committee.

• On June 19, security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called on Israelis who see people watching “Al Jazeera broadcasts or reporters” to report their sightings to authorities. Israel shut down the Qatari-based outlet in May 2024, and six of its journalists have been killed while reporting on Israel’s war in Gaza. Many Arabs in Israel still watch Al Jazeera broadcasts, and former Israeli officials have appeared on the network since the shutdown. 

“These are broadcasts that serve the enemy,” Ben-Gvir said. 

• On June 20, Ben-Gvir and communications minister Shlomo Karhi issued a directive that broadcasting from impact sites without written permission would be a criminal offense.

When Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara demanded that the ministers explain the legal basis for their announcement, the ministers said she was “trying to thwart” their efforts to ensure that foreign media “don’t help the enemy target us.”

• On June 23, Haaretz reported that the police’s legal adviser issued an order giving officers sweeping powers to censor journalists reporting from the impact sites.

“This directive, which primarily targets foreign media and joins a wave of police and ministerial efforts to obstruct news coverage, is unlawful and infringes on basic rights,” Tal Hassin, an attorney with Israel’s biggest human rights group, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), told CPJ.

ACRI petitioned the Attorney General, arguing that the police adviser did not have the legal authority to issue such an order. It has not received a response.

Journalists censored, detained, and abused

CPJ subsequently documented at least four incidents involving journalists who were abused and blocked from reporting.

• On June 20, police stopped a live broadcast from Tel Aviv by Turkish state-owned broadcaster TRT’s correspondent Mücahit Aydemir, although he told the officers he had the required permits, including authorization from the military censor. For several days afterwards, Aydemir received “unsettling phone calls” from unknown Hebrew-speakers, he told CPJ.

• On June 21, privately owned Channel 13’s journalist Ali Mughrabi and a camera operator, who declined to be named, citing fear of reprisals, were expelled from a drone crash site in Beit She’an, northern Israel, despite showing their press accreditation. During a live broadcast, Deputy Mayor Oshrat Barel questioned their credentials, shoved the cameraperson, and ordered them to leave. She later apologized.

“What we’re experiencing isn’t just about the media — it’s about citizenship,” Mughrab, an Israeli citizen of Palestinian origin, told CPJ.

• On June 22, a civilian police volunteer squad, led by far-right activist and rapper Yoav Eliasi, known as “The Shadow,” detained three Jerusalem-based, Arab Israeli journalists and one international journalist, after separating them from their non-Arab colleagues outside a building in Tel Aviv that had been damaged by an Iranian strike.

Mustafa Kharouf and Amir Abed Rabbo from the Turkish state-owned Anadolu Agency, Ahmad Gharabli, with Agence France-Presse news agency, and another journalist who declined to be named, citing fear of reprisal, were held for three hours.  

Kharouf told CPJ, the unit asked them who was “Israeli” and allowed the non-Arab journalists to leave. 

“One officer accused us of working for Al Jazeera, even though we showed official press credentials,” said Kharouf.

“When I showed my ID, they told me I wasn’t allowed to film because I’m not Israeli – even though they treat us like Israelis when it comes to taxes,” Gharabli told CPJ.

Armed volunteer squads have rapidly grown from four before the October 2023 Hamas attack to around 900 new units, an expansion that “had negative effects on Arab-Jewish relations,” Dr. Ark Rudnitzky of Tel Aviv University told CPJ in an email. Squad members “tend to suspect an Arab solely because they are Arab,” he said.

“It was clear they targeted the journalists because they were Arab,” said Israeli journalist and witness Oren Ziv, who wrote about the incident.

The Central District Police told CPJ via email that the journalists were “evacuated from the building for security reasons related to their safety and were directed to alternative reporting locations.”

• On June 24,  Channel 13 correspondent Paz Robinson and a camera operator who declined to be named were reporting on a missile strike in southern Israel’s Be’er Sheva when a woman shouted that he was a “Nazi” and “Al Jazeera” and blocked him from filming, screaming, “You came to celebrate over dead bodies.”

“After I saw the woman wasn’t backing down, I decided to leave. I’m not here to fight with my own people. I’m not a politician. I came to cover events,” Robinson told CPJ.

Earlier in the war with Iran, CPJ documented eight incidents in which 14 journalists faced harassment, obstruction, equipment confiscation, incitement, or forced removal by the police.

The Israel Police Spokesperson’s Unit told CPJ via email that police “made significant efforts to facilitate safe, meaningful access for journalists” during the war with Iran.  “While isolated misunderstandings may occur…case was addressed promptly and professionally.”

CPJ’s emails to the Attorney General, Israel Defense Forces’ North America Media Desk, Ben-Gvir, and Shlomo requesting comment did not receive any replies. 

Kholod Massalha is a CPJ consultant on Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory and a researcher with years of experience in press freedom and freedom of expression issues.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Mohamed Mandour.

Israel’s weaponisation of starvation is how genocides always end.

I covered the insidious effects of orchestrated starvation in the Guatemalan Highlands during the genocidal campaign of General Efraín Ríos Montt, the famine in southern Sudan that left a quarter of a million dead — I walked past the frail and skeletal corpses of families lining roadsides — and later during the war in Bosnia when Serbs cut off food supplies to enclaves such as Srebrencia and Goražde.

Starvation was weaponised by the Ottoman Empire to decimate the Armenians. It was used to kill millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor in 1932 and 1933.

• READ MORE: Gaza babies face starvation as Israel blocks entry of baby formula
• Other Chris Hedges Report articles

It was employed by the Nazis against the Jews in the ghettos in the Second World War. German soldiers used food, as Israel does, like bait. They offered three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to lure desperate families in the Warsaw Ghetto onto transports to the death camps.

“There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several days to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman writes in The Ghetto Fights. “The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.”

And when crowds became unruly, as in Gaza, the German troops fired deadly volleys that ripped through emaciated husks of women, children and the elderly.

This tactic is as old as warfare itself.

Ordered to shoot
The report in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that Israeli soldiers are ordered to shoot into crowds of Palestinians at aid hubs, with 580 killed and 4,216 wounded, is not a surprise. It is the predictable denouement of the genocide, the inevitable conclusion to a campaign of mass extermination.

Israel, with its targeted assassinations of at least 1400 health care workers, hundreds of United Nations (UN) workers, journalists, police and even poets and academics, its obliteration of multi-story apartment blocks wiping out dozens of families, its shelling of designated “humanitarian zones” where Palestinians huddle under tents, tarps or in the open air, its systematic targeting of UN food distribution centers, bakeries and aid convoys or its sadistic sniper fire that guns down children, long ago illustrated that Palestinians are regarded as vermin worthy only of annihilation.

The blockade of food and humanitarian aid, imposed on Gaza since March 2, is reducing Palestinians to abject dependence. To eat, they must crawl towards their killers and beg. Humiliated, terrified, desperate for a few scraps of food, they are stripped of dignity, autonomy and agency. This is by intent.

Yousef al-Ajouri, 40, explained to Middle East Eye his nightmarish journey to one of four aid hubs set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The hubs are not designed to meet the needs of the Palestinians, who once relied on 400 aid distribution sites, but to lure them from northern Gaza to the south.

Israel, which on Sunday again ordered Palestinians to leave northern Gaza, is steadily expanding its annexation of the coastal strip. Palestinians are corralled like livestock into narrow metal chutes at distribution points which are overseen by heavily armed mercenaries. They receive, if they are one of the fortunate few, a small box of food.

Al-Ajouri, who before the genocide was a taxi driver, lives with his wife, seven children and his mother and father in a tent in al-Saraya, near the middle of Gaza City. He set out to an aid hub at Salah al-Din Road near the Netzarim corridor, to find some food for his children, who he said cry constantly “because of how hungry they are.”

On the advice of his neighbour in the tent next to him, he dressed in loose clothing “so that I could run and be agile.” He carried a bag for canned and packaged goods because the crush of the crowds meant “no one was able to carry the boxes the aid came in.”

Massive crowds
He left at about 9 pm with five other men “including an engineer and a teacher,” and “children aged 10 and 12.” They did not take the official route designated by the Israeli army. The massive crowds converging on the aid point along the official route ensure that most never get close enough to receive food.

Instead, they walked in the darkness in areas exposed to Israeli gunfire, often having to crawl to avoid being seen.

“As I crawled, I looked over, and to my surprise, saw several women and elderly people taking the same treacherous route as us,” he explained. “At one point, there was a barrage of live gunfire all around me. We hid behind a destroyed building. Anyone who moved or made a noticeable motion was immediately shot by snipers.

“Next to me was a tall, light-haired young man using the flashlight on his phone to guide him. The others yelled at him to turn it off. Seconds later, he was shot. He collapsed to the ground and lay there bleeding, but no one could help or move him. He died within minutes.”

He passed six bodies along the route who had been shot dead by Israeli soldiers.

Al-Ajouri reached the hub at 2 am, the designated time for aid distribution. He saw a green light turned on ahead of him which signaled that aid was about to be distributed. Thousands began to run towards the light, pushing, shoving and trampling each other. He fought his way through the crowd until he reached the aid.

“I started feeling around for the aid boxes and grabbed a bag that felt like rice,” he said. “But just as I did, someone else snatched it from my hands. I tried to hold on, but he threatened to stab me with his knife. Most people there were carrying knives, either to defend themselves or to steal from others.

Boxes were emptied
“Eventually, I managed to grab four cans of beans, a kilogram of bulgur, and half a kilogram of pasta. Within moments, the boxes were empty. Most of the people there, including women, children and the elderly, got nothing. Some begged others to share. But no one could afford to give up what they managed to get.”

The US contractors and Israeli soldiers overseeing the mayhem laughed and pointed their weapons at the crowd. Some filmed with their phones.

“Minutes later, red smoke grenades were thrown into the air,” he remembered. “Someone told me that it was the signal to evacuate the area. After that, heavy gunfire began. Me, Khalil and a few others headed to al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat because our friend Wael had injured his hand during the journey.

“I was shocked by what I saw at the hospital. There were at least 35 martyrs lying dead on the ground in one of the rooms. A doctor told me they had all been brought in that same day. They were each shot in the head or chest while queuing near the aid center. Their families were waiting for them to come home with food and ingredients. Now, they were corpses.”

GHF is a Mossad-funded creation of Israel’s Defense Ministry that contracts with UG Solutions and Safe Reach Solutions, run by former members of the CIA and US Special Forces. GHF is headed by Reverend Johnnie Moore, a far-right Christian Zionist with close ties to Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.

The organisation has also contracted anti-Hamas drug-smuggling gangs to provide security at aid sites.

As Chris Gunness, a former spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) told Al Jazeera, GHF is “aid washing,” a way to mask the reality that “people are being starved into submission.”

Disregarded ICC ruling
Israel, along with the US and European countries that provide weapons to sustain the genocide, have chosen to disregard the January 2024 ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which demanded immediate protection for civilians in Gaza and widespread provision of humanitarian assistance.

Ha’aretz, in its article headlined “‘It’s a Killing Field’: IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid” reported that Israeli commanders order soldiers to open fire on crowds to keep them away from aid sites or disperse them.

“The distribution centers typically open for just one hour each morning,” Haaretz writes. “According to officers and soldiers who served in their areas, the IDF fires at people who arrive before opening hours to prevent them from approaching, or again after the centers close, to disperse them. Since some of the shooting incidents occurred at night — ahead of the opening — it’s possible that some civilians couldn’t see the boundaries of the designated area.”

“It’s a killing field,” one soldier told Ha’aretz. “Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force — no crowd-control measures, no tear gas — just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”

“We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces,” the soldier explained, “I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire. There’s no enemy, no weapons.”

He said the deployment at the aid sites is known as “Operation Salted Fish,” a reference to the Israeli name for the children’s game “Red light, green light.” The game was featured in the first episode of the South Korean dystopian thriller Squid Game, in which financially desperate people are killed as they battle each other for money.

Civilian infrastructure obliterated
Israel has obliterated the civilian and humanitarian infrastructure in Gaza. It has reduced Palestinians, half a million of whom face starvation, into desperate herds. The goal is to break Palestinians, to make them malleable and entice them to leave Gaza, never to return.

There is talk from the Trump White House about a ceasefire. But don’t be fooled. Israel has nothing left to destroy. Its saturation bombing over 20 months has reduced Gaza to a moonscape. Gaza is uninhabitable, a toxic wilderness where Palestinians, living amid broken slabs of concrete and pools of raw sewage, lack food and clean water, fuel, shelter, electricity, medicine and an infrastructure to survive.

The final impediment to the annexation of Gaza are the Palestinians themselves. They are the primary target. Starvation is the weapon of choice.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This article is republished from his X account.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Israeli soldiers have said that they were ordered to open fire at unarmed Palestinian civilians desperately seeking aid at designated distribution sites in Gaza, a report in the Ha’aretz newspaper has revealed.

The report came as 70 Palestinians were killed across the Gaza Strip — mostly at aid sites belonging to the widely condemned Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) — in the last 24 hours.

Soldiers said that instead of using crowd control measures, they shot at crowds of civilians to prevent them from approaching certain areas.

• READ MORE: Israeli soldiers ‘ordered’ to shoot at unarmed Gaza aid seekers
• Human rights ‘godfather’ Ken Roth on genocide, Trump and standing up for democracy
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

One soldier, who was not named in the report, described the distribution site as a “killing field,” adding that “where I was, between one and five people were killed every day”.

The soldier said that they targeted the crowds as if they were “an attacking force,” instead of using other non-lethal weapons to organise and disperse crowds.

“We communicate with them through fire,” he continued, noting that heavy machine guns, grenade launchers and mortars were used on people, including the elderly, women and children.

The increased attacks, particularly those targeting aid-seekers, come as Gaza’s government Media Office said at least 549 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces while trying to get their hands on emergency aid in the last four weeks.

‘Evil of moral army’
Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara described what was happening in Gaza was more than the genocode.

“It is the evil of the most moral army in the world,” he said.

Israeli forces continued their attacks across the Gaza Strip on Friday, killing at least three Palestinians in an attack on Khan Younis, in the south, while also heavily bombing residential buildings east of Jabalia in the north.

Medical sources also said a Palestinian fisherman was killed, and others wounded, by Israeli naval gunfire off the al-Shati refugee camp, while he was working.

Gaza’s Ministry of Interior responded to the attacks with a statement, accusing Israel of “seeking to spread chaos and destabilise the Gaza Strip”.

Malnutrition soars
Gazans have continued to desperately seek aid provided by the US and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, despite the hundreds of people killed at its sites, as malnutrition soars in the territory.

Two infants have died this week due to malnutrition and the ongoing blockade on Gaza.

For weeks now, health officials in the enclave have raised the alarm over the critical shortage of baby formula, but aid continued to be obstructed.

The two infants were buried on Thursday evening, after they were pronounced dead at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. Medical staff said the cause of death was a lack of basic nutrition and access to essential medical care.

One of the infants, identified as Nidal, was only five months old, while the other, Kinda, was only 10 days old.

Mohammed al-Hams, Kinda’s father, told local media that children are dying due to severe malnutrition, sarcastically labelling them “the achievements of Netanyahu and his war”.

“Not a second goes by without a funeral prayer being held in the Gaza Strip,” he continued.

Malnutrition ‘catastrophic’
On Wednesday, Gaza’s Ministry of Health said the humanitarian situation in Gaza had reached “catastrophic” levels, noting that there had been a sharp increase in malnutrition among children, particularly in infants.

According to Palestinian official figures, at least 242 people have died in Gaza due to food and medicine shortages, with the majority of them being elderly and children.

Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 61,700 Palestinians since October 2023. The war has levelled entire neighbourhoods, and has been called a genocide by leading rights groups, including Amnesty International.

In Auckland last night, visiting Palestinian journalist, author, academic and community advocate Dr Yousef Aljamal spoke about “The unheard voices of Palestinian child prisoners”.

Dr Aljamal, who edited If I Must Die, a compilation of poetry and prose by Refaat Alareer, the poet who was assassinated by the Israelis in 6 December 2023, also described the humanitarian crisis as a “catastrophe” and called for urgent sanctions and political pressure on Israel by governments, including New Zealand.

Soldiers admit Israeli army is targeting aid seekers       Video: Al Jazeera

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

We’re joined by Israeli journalist Gideon Levy as we continue our conversation on the Israeli-Lebanon ceasefire. We take a look at the mood within Israel, where Levy characterizes the Israeli public as “sour” about what is seen as a premature deal. “They would like to see more blood, more destruction in Lebanon,” says Levy. “Israel wants wars.” This retributive stance is still being felt in Lebanon, adds writer Lina Mounzer, who says Lebanese people are “very terrified of the day after” and do not feel that they have been awarded peace, despite the terms of the ceasefire. Meanwhile, the Israeli government has unanimously voted to sanction the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, claiming that its editorials “have hurt the legitimacy of the state of Israel and its right to self defense.” Haaretz has criticized the move, which comes just months after Israel banned the international media outlet Al Jazeera, as anti-democratic. Levy, a columnist for Haaretz, says the sanction makes it clear that Israelis cannot take the freedom of speech “for granted anymore.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

“We deplore the Israeli government’s attempt to silence a respected Israeli outlet like Haaretz by hurting their advertising and subscription revenue,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg. “Israel’s increasing deployment of restrictions on critical media is further disturbing evidence of its efforts to prevent coverage of its actions in Gaza.”

On Sunday, November 24, Israel’s government unanimously approved a proposal by Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi to cease all government advertising and communications with Israel’s oldest print newspaper. 

Karhi proposed the boycott on October 31 as some ministries suspended ties with Haaretz in response to comments by the newspaper’s publisher Amos Schocken, who called for sanctions against Israel, which he described as imposing a “cruel apartheid regime” on Palestinians. 

Schocken was also criticized for referring to Palestinian “freedom fighters.” He has since clarified his use of the term, saying, “freedom fighters, who also resort to terror tactics — which must be combated. The use of terror is not legitimate.”

On November 4, the newspaper published an editorial distancing itself from Schocken’s remarks.

Karhi said on November 24 that the publisher of a newspaper could not call for sanctions against Israel and “support the enemies of the state in the midst of a war” and still receive government funding. 

“We advocate a free press and freedom of expression, but also the freedom of the government to decide not to fund incitement against the State of Israel,” he said.

Haaretz has described the move as an attempt to “silence a critical, independent newspaper.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

During the annual Jerusalem Day Flag March, which commemorates the June 5 capture of East Jerusalem by Israeli forces in the 1967 war, Israeli settlers and far right protesters assaulted Palestinian freelance journalist Saif Kwasmi, who contributes to the local news agency Al-Asiman News, and Israeli journalist Nir Hasson, a reporter for the Israeli daily Haaretz, according to the journalists’ employers, and Kwasmi and Hasson, who spoke to CPJ in person and on the phone on June 5 and 6, respectively.

“Israeli security forces stood idly by while protesters harassed and assaulted Palestinian and Israeli journalists who were reporting on the march. Not only did they fail to do their duty, but they blamed Palestinian journalist Saif Kwasmi for protecting himself from aggression,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martìnez de la Serna. “We call on Israeli authorities to investigate these incidents, identify the culprits and hold them to account.”  

Kwasmi told CPJ that he was filming the closure of local shops in Jerusalem’s Old City after Israeli police ordered the businesses to shut down during the march.

“I was wearing my vest marked with the word ‘press’ and the card given to us by the police spokesperson. A group of young Israeli settlers started to harass us and tried to attack (Palestinian journalist) Diala Jweihan. They began to push me and tried to snatch my cell phone. I had to protect myself and tried to push them away from us because there were more than 20 settlers assaulting us,” Kwasmi said.

Kwasmi explained that the Israeli border police officers did nothing to assist them until they realized that an Israeli journalist (Nir Hasson) was also under attack. Only then did they begin to push settlers away. 

“An Israeli police officer started hitting me and took me to a side street to arrest me. I told him that I am a journalist and produced my card. They escorted the journalists outside of the Old City and to a place for journalists,” Kwasmi explained. 

Later that day, two border police officers approached Kwasmi at Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate and questioned him for about half an hour about his work and his reason for being there. A police commander and a member of the domestic intelligence service Shin Bet subsequently joined them and accused Kwasmi of incitement, a claim that he denied. Kwasmi told them he is a journalist and holds a card from the Israeli Journalists’ Union, but they told him that in order to work as a journalist he needs permission from the Israeli Government Press Office.    

A witness from CPJ who was at the march saw Israeli radical activist Yedydya Epstein, who is famous for disrupting the work of Al-Jazeera reporters in Israel, on the scene filming the questioning of Kwasmi and urging the police to arrest him.

For his part, Haaretz reporter Nir Hasson told CPJ that, hours before the start of the march, a group of Israeli settlers were marching on Jerusalem’s Old City terrorizing the locals and attacking the journalists systematically to prevent them from covering the attacks on the local residents.

“At some point the settlers attacked Saif and two other journalists in front of Israeli border police officers who just stood there and did nothing at first so I had to step in to stop the attack. I was pushed to the ground and beaten by the settlers. I didn’t sustain any serious injuries,” Hasson said.

Hasson added that the Israeli police didn’t allow journalists to work freely and failed to protect them.

“They gathered all the journalists in a place away from settlers instead of stopping the attackers. They prevented journalists from covering what was happening to the local residents,” he said.  

According to CPJ research, Israeli police officers briefly detained and assaulted Kwasmi in Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque in April 2024. 

CPJ had documented numerous assaults on journalists since the start of the Israel-Gaza war on October 7.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

It’s not surprising for authorities to take phones and computers into custody when they are investigating a journalist – in fact, it’s become routine. CPJ’s prison census, a snapshot of journalists in prison on December 1, 2022, lists examples from Iran, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Vietnam, and India, as well as Russia. 

Little is generally reported about what happens next. We don’t know what Russian authorities did with Afanasyev’s devices, for example. But we do know that widely available forensic tools have been used to examine journalists’ phones in order to convict them in Myanmar and search for their sources in Nigeria.

A law enforcement agent scrolling through a journalist’s unlocked phone is already a problematic scenario for press freedom. But this risk is supercharged by technology that can copy and search the entire content of phones and computers, sometimes even if they are locked. Like spyware, forensic tools can access everything on a phone or computer, but unlike spyware, such tools are in widespread, open usage in democracies as well as more repressive regimes. Their use has accelerated threats to the press while protections and public awareness lag behind.

“Mobile device forensics tools can recover deleted data, as well as lots of data that isn’t visible to the naked eye when scrolling,” Riana Pfefferkorn, a research scholar at Stanford Internet Observatory, which studies abuse in information technologies, said in an email. 

These tools are becoming ubiquitous in government agencies in countries like the United States and Australia – and they have been documented in many countries where those in power view independent journalism as a threat. In 2020, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee said that law enforcement agencies had probed cellphones 26,000 times the previous year using data extraction tools produced by the Israel-based company Cellebrite. Citing human rights concerns, Cellebrite said in 2021 that it had stopped selling to Russia and Belarus, but Russian investigative agencies continued to reference the country’s products in official reports and training materials in 2022, according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz. 

Cellebrite, which says on its website that its offerings — designed to help catch criminals — are “trusted by over 6,700 federal, state and local public safety agencies and enterprises in over 140 countries,” is only the best known player in a large market; it purchased computer forensic firm Blackbag Technologies in 2020. In 2019, researcher Valentin Weber wrote for the U.S. nonprofit Open Technology Fund that Chinese officials had instructed local firm Meiya Pico to provide digital forensics training to countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative, a trillion dollar project to promote trade by building ports and other infrastructure across Asia, Africa, and Europe.   

Forensic products differ from zero-click spyware like Pegasus, which CPJ recently called an existential threat to press freedom for providing states with the power to track journalists and their sources secretly and continuously by hacking into their phones. Spyware can penetrate remotely and invisibly, is deniable, and much more expensive. 

To operate a forensic tool, on the other hand, one needs physical access to a device. Journalists who surrender their phones and passcodes at a police station or checkpoint at least know they have been compromised, even if they have relinquished their devices under duress. 

But data extracted from a phone in a lab or police station can also be used against its owner.  

“The kinds of tools used by police are designed to extract and preserve content in a forensically sound way that will stand up in court,” said Pfefferkorn.

Legal safeguards have not caught up. In the U.S., Customs and Border Protection agents can access a database compiled from some travelers’ devices without a warrant, according to The Washington Post. Journalists have told CPJ that CBP officials have stopped them for electronic searches as they enter the country.  

Some U.S. jurisdictions protect unreported source material from seizure, but police still overreach. After San Francisco police took devices from freelancer Bryan Carmody and his fiancée in 2019, his tablet was returned to him with the passcode on a note stuck to the screen, he told CPJ at the time. Police agreed to delete information obtained from searching the devices following a challenge from his lawyers. 

As CPJ’s prison census shows, journalists elsewhere are often without any such recourse. The research is littered with examples of police seizing electronics from journalists’ family members, freelancers whose livelihood may depend on their phones, or people in war zones, where devices are a communication lifeline. Once released, journalists may fear spyware has been implanted on their devices and be reluctant to use them, if they have even been returned. If the journalist remains behind bars, they run the risk that the material extracted from the device could be used during interrogations and in building specious criminal cases.  

Since digital forensics gives local law enforcement the ability to siphon off large volumes of data from individual targets’ phones, Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies digital repression, sees significant overlap between spyware and forensics, and an equally pressing need for reform when it comes to monitoring and regulating the use of both. 

“It seems to me that law enforcement has made a distinction between the two, but I have questions as to whether that’s more artificial than real,” he said. “Given the impossibility of narrowly distinguishing what would be relevant to a particular law enforcement search…there’s a strong presumption against ever using these tools.”  

Until this viewpoint gains traction, authorities can use forensic tools to produce journalists’ own phones as witnesses against them. And journalists like Russia’s Afanasyev – along with the many others whose devices have been seized – are even more vulnerable to laws that make reporting the news a crime. 

See CPJ’s Digital Safety Kit

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Madeline Earp/CPJ Consultant Technology Editor.