from MEMO
When Israel barred international journalists from Gaza in October 2023, the explanation was for their “safety” claiming that reporters could not be protected in an active war zone. One year after the one-sided ceasefire, Israel’s excuse has been invalidated, yet the ban remains. Leaving behind, unchecked, the largest graveyard on earth, and an occupying army still refusing to let the world’s press see what is buried in it.
In April 2026, the Foreign Press Association, joined by the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, and the Union of Journalists in Israel, petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court to end the military’s ban on foreign reporters entering Gaza, arguing that a “ceasefire” was in place, all captives had been released, and there was no substantiated threat to journalists. The government opposed the petition, this time invoking the war with Iran as a new justification. The excuses kept changing. The ban didn’t.
Three died together in January 2026, after the “ceasefire,” documenting a genocide. The message was clear: with foreign correspondents locked out, murder Palestinian journalists and bury war crimes with the children under the rubble.
The same Israeli script plays in the West Bank, where the threat is Jewish mobs, the state empowers. When journalists reported on Zionist Youth violence in Jannatah near Bethlehem in August 2026, soldiers declared the area a “closed military zone” and ordered the media out, while the youth mobs who attacked them, continued their rampage. In Hebron, the army designated a Palestinian rights defender’s home as a closed military zone after he complained of harassment by illegal Jewish settlers, sealing off the area and preventing journalists from documenting evidence of criminal activities.
This was always the plan. Controlling the discourse required controlling the witnesses: keep the press out, murder the journalists carrying those “threatening” cameras and let the Zionist Goebbels spew its hasbara to fog the truth. Chief among the Israel-first talking points was the claim that Israel’s civilian-to-combatant kill ratio in Gaza was better than America’s in Iraq or Afghanistan. It was a statistic tailor-made for cable news, precise-sounding, authoritative, and impossible to independently verify, because those who could have checked it were either excluded by the same news outlets from challenging the claim, banned from entering Gaza, or already murdered.
That is why the Israeli documentary NAZA received the attention it did. Its title comes from the Hebrew military acronym Nezek Agavi, a chilling term for the number of civilians expected to be killed and factored into Israeli intelligence assessments when making targeting decisions in Gaza. The film was made by Oscar winners Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. The film is based on testimony from twenty-four Israeli military and intelligence officers who spoke on camera anonymously. “There was once approval to kill 500 people for one human target,” one former Israeli soldier says in the film. Meanwhile, Israel’s military did not stay quiet, and instead of disputing, not just denying, it waged a witch hunt to identify the 24 Israeli soldiers and officers, most from intelligence units, who were interviewed in the film with their faces hidden...
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