The Government Information Office in Gaza has strongly denounced the recent visit that was made by a group of Arab journalists to the Israeli occupied territories and their meeting with Israeli officials describing it as “a violation of the Federation of Arab Journalists’ resolution on media normalization.”
In a press release on Friday the Information Office considered such visit as extremely serious “in light of the increasing frequency of Israeli attacks against Palestinian journalists and after the general secretariat of the Federation of Arab Journalists announced a few months ago the launch of a campaign to criminalize and reject all forms of normalization with the occupation.”
The Information Office said that such visit did not reflect the collective position of Arab journalists who refuse to have media ties with the Israeli occupation and support efforts to boycott it.
It urged the unions of journalists in the Arab countries whose nationals who work as journalists recently visited Israel and the occupied territories and met with Israeli officials to take disciplinary measures against them.
A group of seven Arab journalists who live in European countries paid a three-day visit last Monday to Israel. The visit was arranged by the Israeli embassy in France.
The journalists are Egyptian Lebanese Algerian and Moroccan nationals employed by the i24 news network Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly and other Arabic-language media outlets in France and Belgium.
