After this month’s fighting between Israel and Gaza´s Hamas, Messaging app WhatsApp has blocked the accounts of dozens of Palestinian journalists, reporters said.
Shortly after a ceasefire went into effect at 2:00 am on Friday (2300 GMT Thursday) ending 11 days of deadly conflict, two journalists in AFP´s Gaza City bureau received notices from WhatsApp in Arabic informing them their accounts had been blocked.
Other journalists, in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank as well as Gaza, said their accounts had also been blocked.
A crew from Qatar-based satellite news channel Al Jazeera said their accounts had later been restored after they lodged complaints with WhatsApp owner Facebook The vice-president of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, Tahseen al-Astall, said “around 100 journalists” in Gaza had seen their accounts blocked.
As a necessary part of reporting on both sides of the conflict, Gaza journalists receive Hamas statements, including via WhatsApp, even though the Palestinian militant group has been blacklisted by the European Union and the United States, accused of belonging to “groups and entities involved in terrorist acts”. The Arab Centre for the Development of Social Media said the blocking of WhatsApp accounts was not an isolated incident.
In a new report, the group, based in Israel´s third city Haifa, documented 500 cases in which Palestinian “digital rights” had been violated between May 6 and May 19.
The reporter said “Content and accounts were removed, reduced and restricted, hashtags were hidden, and archived content deleted,” Israeli airstrikes and artillery fire on Gaza killed 253 Palestinians, including 66 children, and wounded over 1,900 people in 11 days of conflict from May 10, the health ministry in Gaza says.
