Israel media report accuses troops of indiscriminate killing of Gaza civilians

WASHINGTON: When US President Donald Trump berated an Australian reporter for asking an unpleasant question, his colleagues took that as a warning.

With the administration planning to slash correspondent visas and issuing not-so-veiled warnings, foreign journalists find themselves under pressure in the United States.

Earlier this week, a journalist from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation asked Trump about his business dealings while in office. Trump was visibly irritated.

“In my opinion, you are hurting Australia very much right now, and they want to get along with me,” Trump told the reporter, John Lyons. “Your leader is coming over to see me very soon. I’m gonna tell him about you. You set a very bad tone.”

The exchange was widely discussed in Washington media circles.

One foreign correspondent, who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity, said Trump’s hostility toward the media was not concentrated on foreigners.

“When Trump insults a journalist, it doesn’t matter to him whether it’s a foreigner or not,” the correspondent said.

What worries the reporter much more is the administration’s plan to slash journalists’ visas to a renewable 240-day period, down from five years — or just 90 days for Chinese media workers.

“How am I supposed to rent a flat? To get a driver’s license? To put my kids in school with a 240-day visa?” the correspondent wondered, adding that it takes time to build a network of sources in the country.

“It’s going to be a nightmare.”

Working ‘without fear’ 

Another journalist, a correspondent for a European media outlet, said that “the precariousness of foreign journalists doesn’t make them prime targets for this administration,” but “is part of a very worrying overall picture.”

The White House prefers journalists, wherever they come from, “who are committed to its stories or self-censor enough to normalize what’s happening,” the European correspondent said.

AFP contacted several foreign journalists for this article. Only a few responded, and each of them did only on condition of anonymity.

“The shortened timeframe for I-visa renewals creates a framework for possible editorial censorship in which the Trump administration can trade access for compliance in reporting,” Katherine Jacobsen with the Committee to Protect Journalism said in a statement.

Mike Balsamo, president of the Washington-based National Press Club echoed that view, adding that such actions could lead to reprisals against American journalists working abroad.

“A free press doesn’t stop at America’s borders. It depends on correspondents who can work here without fear their time will run out,” he wrote on X.

While the correspondents interviewed for this story did not notice any particular hostility from the White House itself toward them, they pointed out that political figures in Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement have not hesitated to target foreign journalists.

A close associate of Donald Trump, former ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, recently called for revoking the visa of a journalist from the German television channel ZDF.

“This radical Lefty German keeps calling for violence against people he politically disagrees with,” Grenell said on X, criticizing the journalist’s interview with influential White House adviser Stephen Miller. “He poses as a journalist in Washington, DC. His visa should be revoked. There is no place in America this type of inciter.”

A warning to foreigners 

Following last week’s assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk — a close associate of the American president — a senior official issued a broad warning to foreigners who are seen “praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event.”

“Feel free to bring such comments by foreigners to my attention,” Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said on X.

But Trump’s return to power has not been bad news for all foreign media outlets. Some news organizations who are known for sharing views similar to Trump’s in their home countries have been embraced by the White House.

British television channel GB News, whose stars include far-right leader Nigel Farage, was recently welcomed into the Oval Office, and its journalist was given a coveted seat on the US presidential plane during Trump’s visit to the UK this week.

When Trump appeared in the press box, the journalist said that the channel’s viewers had asked if he wanted to “swap jobs” with Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

DUBAI: An Israeli attack on media offices in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, on Sept. 10 that killed 31 journalists and media workers was the deadliest strike of its kind anywhere in the world in 16 years, according to media watchdog the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Thirty of those who died worked for one of two newspapers, 26 September and Yemen. The offices for both were in the headquarters of the Moral Guidance Directorate, the media arm of the Houthi-controlled government, the CPJ said.

The Houthi health ministry said 35 people in all were killed in the attack, and 131 injured.

Nasser Al-Khadri, the editor-in-chief of 26 September, the Yemeni army’s official media outlet, told the watchdog: “It is a brutal and unjustified attack that targeted innocent people whose only crime was working in the media field, armed with nothing but their pens and words.”

A child who had accompanied a journalist to work was among the dead, and 22 media workers were among the injured, he added.

The strikes occurred at around 4:45 p.m. as staff were finalizing publication of the weekly newspaper, Al-Khadri said. The attack destroyed its “facilities, printing presses and archives,” he added, resulting in “deeply painful” losses.

The CPJ described the incident as the “second-deadliest single attack on the press” it had ever recorded, after the 2009 Maguindanao massacre in the Philippines in which 32 journalists were among 58 people killed. It added that the attack on Sanaa “marks deadliest global attack in 16 years.”

Abdulrahman Mohammed Mutahar, a journalist who lives in the neighborhood where the strikes took place, told the CPJ that the assault caused “massive explosions unlike anything Sanaa had seen since 2015.”

About eight missiles reduced the headquarters of the Moral Guidance Directorate to rubble, underneath which the bodies of some of the journalists were buried, he added.

On Sept 16., the funerals of those killed on Sept. 10 were interrupted by additional Israeli strikes.

Yemeni journalists say they live in fear of both international and domestic aggressors. Yousef Hazeb, head of the National Organization of Yemeni Reporters, told the CPJ they were “paying a double price for their work,” at the mercy of “deadly Israeli airstrikes targeting journalists and media outlets,” as well as local forces, including the Houthis, “who use the war as a pretext to expand repression.”

Within hours of the Israeli strikes on Sept. 10, Yemen’s public prosecutor issued a ban on the publication of photos or videos taken at the scene of the attack.

In a message posted on social media platform X, the Israeli army said the strikes on Sanaa, and others in the northern province of Al-Jawf, were in “response to repeated attacks by the Iranian-backed Houthis.”

It added that the targets included the “Houthi Public Relations Department, responsible for distributing propaganda messages in the media, and psychological terror.”

The CPJ has classified the killing of the 31 media workers in Yemen as “murders” arising from the “deliberate targeting of journalists for their work.” The watchdog said Israel has been responsible for the killings of one in six journalists globally since 2016. It has documented the murders of 227 journalists globally in the past decade, and found Israel to be responsible for more than 16 percent of them through attacks on Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and Yemen.

The latest strikes confirms the long-standing pattern of Israeli authorities in “labeling journalists as terrorists or propagandists to justify their killings,” said Sara Qudah, the CBJ’s regional program director.

It also marks “an alarming escalation, extending Israel’s war on journalism far beyond the genocide in Gaza,” she added.

Qudah, like representatives of other press groups and human rights advocates, said strikes on news outlets and media workers violate the principles of international law.

Radio and television facilities are civilian objects and cannot be targeted, Human Rights Watch said. They cannot be considered military targets “simply because they are pro-Houthi or anti-Israel” because this does not directly contribute to military operations, it added.

The CPJ said that journalists, as civilians, are protected under the rule of international law, including those who work for state-run outlets or are affiliated with armed groups, unless they play a direct part in hostilities.

The strikes on Yemen show the continuous and repeated failure of Israeli authorities to “distinguish between military targets and journalists, justifying its assassinations by smearing journalists as terrorists or propagandists, without credible evidence,” the CPJ added.