Haggai Matar
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.
The front pages of newspapers in Israel at a shop in Jerusalem during
the judicial overhaul, July 25, 2023. (Chaim Goldbeg/Flash90)
In 2024,
military censorship in Israel reached the most extreme levels since +972
Magazine began collecting data in 2011. Over the course of the year, the censor
completely banned the publication of 1,635 articles and partially censored
another 6,265. On average, the censor intervened in about 21 news reports per
day last year — more than double the previous peak of about 10 daily
interventions recorded during the last war in Gaza in 2014 (Operation
Protective Edge), and over three times the non-war-time average of 6.2 per day.
These figures
were provided by the military censor in response to a joint request from +972
Magazine and the Movement for the Freedom of Information in Israel, ahead of
World Press Freedom Day.
While the
military censor does not disclose the reasons behind each intervention,
Israel’s ongoing war of destruction in Gaza, as well as its conflicts in
Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran, is likely the main reason behind this record
surge in censorship.
The escalation
is reflected not only in the sheer volume of activity by the censor, but also
in higher rejection rate of submitted materials, and in the increased frequency
of outright bans (as opposed to partial redactions).
Under Israeli
law, any article dealing with the broadly-defined category of “security issues”
must undergo military censorship review, and editorial teams are responsible
for deciding which piece to submit based on their own judgement.
When the censor
intervenes, media outlets are forbidden from indicating that censorship has
taken place, meaning most of its activity remains hidden from the public. No
other self-described “Western democracy” has a comparable institution.
It should be
noted that, under this law, +972 Magazine is legally compelled to submit
materials for review. For more on our stance regarding military censorship,
click here.
‘The public
deserves to know what has been hidden’
In 2024,
Israeli news organizations submitted 20,770 news items to the military censor
for review — nearly double the previous year’s total, and four times the number
in 2022. The censor intervened in 38 percent of these cases, a full seven
percentage points higher than the previous peak recorded in 2023. Blanket
rejections of entire news articles accounted for 20 percent of all
interventions, up from 18 percent in 2023. In the preceding years, the average
stood at just 11 percent.
Israeli news
outlet i24 reported on Sunday that Chief Military Censor Brigadier General Kobi
Mandelblit asked the Attorney General to investigate Israeli journalists who
allegedly circumvented censorship law by sharing restricted information with
foreign media outlets. The Attorney General rejected the request.
The military
censor is not obligated by law to respond to Freedom of Information requests,
and it voluntarily provided the figures above. However, it refused to provide
additional data we requested, including: a breakdown of the data by month, by
media outlet, and by reason for intervention; details about cases where it
proactively ordered media outlets to remove content that hadn’t been submitted
for review; and any records of administrative or criminal proceedings against
censorship violations. (To the best of our knowledge, no enforcement action of
this kind has been taken so far.)
Additionally,
while the military censor would previously provide data on censorship in books
— typically those written by former members of the Israeli security
establishment — it now withholds this information. And over the past decade, it
has also been reviewing and intervening in online publications by the State
Archives. In some cases, it has even blocked the release of documents that had
already been deemed harmless by the archive’s security experts and were
previously accessible to the public. This act of “re-concealment” has faced
widespread criticism.
Last year, the
State Archives submitted 2,436 documents for censor review. While the censor
stated that “the vast majority” were approved for publication unchanged, it
consistently refuses to disclose how many archival documents it “re-concealed”
from the public.
Or Sadan, an
attorney from the Movement for the Freedom of Information and the director of
the Freedom of Information Clinic at the College of Management Academic
Studies, told +972 that while he was not surprised by the surge in censorship
last year, he was hopeful that “the publication of this data would help
minimize the use of censorship tools which, while sometimes necessary, are also
dangerous when it comes to the public’s access to information.
“Even if
certain information cannot be published during an emergency, the public
deserves to know what has been hidden from them,” he explained. “Censorship
means the concealment of information that a journalist believed the public had
a right to know. During times of war, many people already feel that they’re not
being told everything, and therefore it is appropriate to review censorship
decisions retrospectively.”
A war on free
press
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.
According to
the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 168 Palestinian journalists and
media workers have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military during the war,
more than in any other recorded violent conflict in recent decades. Other
organizations place the number as high as 232. In collaborative investigations
with Forbidden Stories, +972 revealed a pattern of Gazan journalists killed by
the army merely for operating drones, or being attacked by army drones when
clearly identified as press. Additionally, Israel treats journalists working
for media outlets affiliated with Hamas as legitimate military targets, and on
more than one occasion claimed that other journalists it killed were connected
to Hamas, usually without presenting any evidence.
But journalists
in Gaza don’t just have to contend with the constant threat of death from
Israeli bombardment, while also often suffering hunger, thirst, and
displacement. They also face suppression from Hamas itself, which pressures
journalists who criticize the organization or cover protests against it. Israel
has compounded this dire situation by blocking all foreign journalists from
entering the Gaza Strip for over a year and a half — a move upheld by the
Israeli Supreme Court that many journalists around the world condemned as both
a severe blow to press freedom and a deliberate effort to conceal what is
happening in Gaza.
At the same
time, Israel has been systematically arresting and imprisoning Palestinian
journalists from both Gaza and the West Bank, often without charges, as a form
of punishment for critical reporting. This repression has accelerated during
the war, as seen in the banning of media outlets such as Al-Mayadeen and
Al-Jazeera from operating in Israel.
The government
has simultaneously come after Israel’s own free press: moving to shut down
public broadcaster “Kan,” financially strangling the liberal daily Haaretz, and
making deliberate efforts to weaken long-established media outlets, all while
bankrolling new pro-government outlets like Channel 14 with public funds.
Beyond this, the government has imposed severe restrictions on publishing the
identities of soldiers suspected of war crimes, and ongoing incitement against
journalists by lawmakers and public figures affiliated with the Netanyahu
government have led to several violent attacks on reporters.
And yet, the
most devastating blow to Israeli journalism hasn’t come from government
censorship, but from the newsrooms’ betrayal of their core mission: to inform
the public of the truth about what is happening around them. Israeli
journalists, even those who once expressed remorse for not covering what was
happening in Gaza in previous wars, have been deliberately obscuring the bombed
hospitals, starved children, and mass graves that the world sees daily.
Instead of
bearing witness to the truth of the war, or amplifying the voices of Gaza-based
journalists (let alone showing solidarity with colleagues targeted by their
state’s army), most Israeli journalists have enlisted in the war propaganda
effort — to the point of joining combat troops and actively participating in
demolishing buildings — and freely platform direct calls for genocide,
starvation, and other war crimes. This isn’t coercion, it’s complicity. The
censor didn’t erase Gaza’s horrors from Israeli screens — the journalists and
editors did.
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