Hamas contines to arrest and harass journalists

From Reporters Without Borders:

A TV crew working for the German television station ARD was detained on 15 May in Jabaliya, in the north of the Gaza Strip, by Hamas security forces after covering a demonstration organised by members of Fatah, the party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Cameraman Mohammed Al-Arabid and soundman Mwatasam Rashid were questioned for an hour and their equipment was confiscated.

Two journalists working for the Sudanese satellite television station Sudan TV were detained on 24 May in Gaza City while doing a report on what life is like for the city’s population. Reporter Samir Khalifa and cameraman Ahmed Al-Ras were questioned about their employer’s identity. They were suspected for working for the state-owned Palestine Broadcasting Corporation, which is controlled by the Palestinian Authority and has been banned in the Gaza Strip since June 2007. Khalifa used to work for the PBC but had to sever all contact with the station, which now operates out of the West Bank city of Ramallah.

It has been obvious for nearly a year that Hamas does not allow journalists to operate freely in Gaza and that it is now impossible to get objective news out of that area. Hamas harassment and threats of journalists is well documented. Western journalists have all but gone; all that is left are Arabs who fear, justifiably, for their lives.

The biggest example is Ma'an News, which was the single best source for reporting a year ago. Now its reports out of Gaza are carefully designed not to offend anyone in Hamas, to the point where they will continue to report on "work accidents" as being from Israeli missiles even after the terror groups themselves admit that it wasn't.

How can the casual reader know that they simply cannot trust any news that comes out of Gaza as being objective? It is all carefully scrubbed to make a group of murderers happy, yet even the major news agencies don't put caveats in their stories (as they do whenever the Israeli censor slightly limits their reporting.)

It is yet another example of how media bias is sometimes not only from within.