France’s AFP calls on Israel to let hungry journalists out of Gaza
French news agency Agence France-Presse is calling on the Israeli government to allow its freelance journalists to leave the Gaza Strip because of a worsening hunger crisis there.
Chetwynd was speaking a day after the journalists’ union at AFP issued a dramatic plea for help on Monday.
“Since AFP was founded in 1944,” the agency’s Society of Journalists said on X, “we have lost journalists in conflicts, some have been injured, others taken prisoner. But none of us can ever remember seeing colleagues die of hunger.”
The lack of access to food for the estimated 2 million Palestinians in Gaza has alarmed global leaders. Severe food shortages and widespread hunger continue, and Gaza health authorities say 25 children have died from “famine and malnutrition” in the past week.
On Tuesday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “malnourishment is soaring. Starvation is knocking on every door.”
He told the Security Council that Gaza was a “horror show with a level of death and destruction without parallel in recent times.”
Reporting in Gaza has been deadly throughout the more than 21 months of conflict, with at least 186 journalists killed in the embattled enclave, the great majority Palestinian, and most often because of Israeli airstrikes, according to research by the Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ.
Saeed M. M. T. Jaras/Anadolu via Getty Images
The Committee to Protect Journalists said this not only threatens the lives of the media workers in Gaza — it also leaves a widening impact on the information the world can obtain from the territory.
Israel’s government did not respond to a request for comment about the AFP’s request to allow its journalists to leave Gaza.
The push from AFP received support from French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot on Tuesday, who said he hoped the journalists could be evacuated “in the coming weeks.” Barrot also called on the Israeli government to allow the international press back into Gaza.
Israeli authorities have previously brought groups of international journalists on military-led visits to Gaza and have said that they should not go to the territory unaccompanied for security reasons.
“I ask that the free and independent press be allowed to access Gaza to show what is happening there and to bear witness,” he told France Inter radio station.