Ramallah -03/ 05/2021. The Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA) warmly congratulates all fellow journalists in Palestine and around the world on the occasion of World Press Freedom Day, May 3, and hopes that the coming months and years will witness an improvement in the state of media freedoms in Palestine.
On this occasion, MADA Center condemns all attacks against journalists from all sides, especially the Israeli attacks on journalists and media institutions, and the sharp escalation of Israeli attacks during last April in East Jerusalem following a demonstration by right-wing extremist Israelis who chanted “Death to the Arabs”, after the Palestinians confronted the Israeli plans to displace Jerusalemites in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. During which many journalists were subjected to various attacks aimed at preventing them from covering those events and blocking Israeli practices against Jerusalemites and journalists from the eyes of the world.
MADA Center confirms that the continuation of such attacks poses a serious threat to media freedoms. Therefore, the international community is required to exert more pressure on the government of Israel to stop its soldiers' attacks on Palestinian journalists, bring them to trial, put an end to their impunity, and allow journalists to carry out their professional duties with complete freedom. It is worth to be mentioned that MADA Center had documented a total of (408) violations during the past year, the Israeli authorities committed (215), equivalent to 53%.
MADA Center also renews its continuous demands to release the 17 journalists detained in Israeli prisons, the most recent of them is the freelance journalist Qutayba Qasim, who was arrested while he was going to pray at Al-Aqsa Mosque on April 23, and the director of the G-Media Center, Alaa Al-Rimawi, who is on hunger strike for 13 days.
Those journalists are still detained in Israeli prisons, 28 years after the United Nations General Assembly approved the 3rd of May as the International Day for Freedom of the Press, which confirms that the Palestinian territories continue to suffer from widespread violations of freedom of expression, media freedoms are still the target of escalating attacks, workers in the media sector pay a heavy price for their insistence on covering the events, and are subjected to daily violations by the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian security services in the West Bank and Gaza.
MADA Center believes that these violations have left and still a negative effects on journalists, the media scene, and the freedom to access information, and that the lack of safety in journalistic work turns a journalist's life into fear and kills his creativity.
MADA Center also renews its call for the international community to exercise real and effective pressure on Israel to stop its continuous attacks on journalists, and calls on the authorities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to stop all forms of violations against media freedoms, and to provide a safe working environment for journalists.
