Arabic English

Qatar Press Center calls for international intervention to allow injured journalists to travel for treatment

The Qatar Press Center renews its strong condemnation of the continued Israeli intransigence and the occupation forces’ refusal to allow injured journalists to travel for treatment outside Gaza. The Center confirms that the Israeli occupation forces deliberately target journalists and media professionals while they are performing their work, by bombing their locations and places of residence, and they also deliberately prevent them from receiving treatment despite the deterioration of their health and their exposure to serious health conditions that may lead to their death, which requires international intervention to allow the injured journalists to travel for treatment and save their lives.

The Center notes the Israeli occupation’s procrastination for 40 days in granting approval for colleague Fadi Al-Wahidi to travel for treatment outside Gaza, despite the seriousness of his condition, as he was permanently paralyzed after being shot in the neck on October 9 after an Israeli aircraft fired on the Al Jazeera team in Gaza. The occupation forces also refused to allow travel for colleague Ali Al-Attar, who was injured on October 7 by shrapnel in his head as a result of an Israeli occupation bombing that targeted a site near Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the city of Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.

It is noteworthy that international organizations concerned with press freedom have recorded more than 186 murders of journalists in Gaza and the West Bank committed by the Israeli occupation forces since October 7, 2023 until now. In a related context, Ismail Al-Thawabta, Director of the Government Media Office in Gaza, called for international intervention to allow wounded journalists to travel abroad for treatment.

Al-Thawabat stressed that the Israeli occupation forces are committing war crimes against journalists in the Gaza Strip directly and deliberately, calling for the opening of the crossings in order for wounded journalists to leave for treatment. Al-Thawabta noted that hospitals are unable to accommodate the large numbers of wounded, pointing out that the situation in northern Gaza is catastrophic in every sense of the word.

Al-Thawabat called on the Security Council and the international community to pressure the occupation by all means, as the entry of goods and commodities into the northern Gaza Strip continues for the 200th consecutive day. He explained that there are more than 100,000 urgent surgeries that must be performed in the northern Gaza Strip, stressing the need to sound the alarm and the need for the international community to intervene, in light of the exhaustion suffered by medical teams in various parts of the Gaza Strip. Activists and human rights activists launched a campaign demanding that fellow journalists Fadi Al-Wahidi and Ali Al-Attar be allowed to receive treatment outside the Gaza Strip, and Al-Wahidi’s family went on an open hunger strike for the same purpose.

Heba Al-Wahidi, the mother of Al Jazeera cameraman in Gaza, colleague Fadi Al-Wahidi -: said that she fears losing her son's life at any moment. She announced a hunger strike and stopped taking her cancer medication, in protest against the Israeli occupation forces preventing her son Fadi from traveling outside the Gaza Strip for treatment. She appealed to the international community to intervene to save her son, who was injured in an Israeli bombardment in Jabalia camp, north of the Gaza Strip, more than a month ago.

For his part, the director of the Middle East desk of Reporters Without Borders, Jonathan Dagher, called for allowing Al-Wahidi and Al-Attar to leave Gaza for treatment.

Dagher said - in an interview with Al Jazeera -: that the lives of Al-Wahidi and Al-Attar are now in danger, describing what is happening to them as a "crime", while stressing - at the same time - that "the international community has failed to prevent the massacre of journalists in Gaza." Aidan White, chairman of the Ethical Journalism Network and former secretary general of the International Federation of Journalists, described what journalists are being subjected to in Gaza as “horrifying.” Professor Michael Lynk, professor of international law and former UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, said: International humanitarian law makes a strict distinction between combatants and civilians, who should not be subject to attack by armies.