The Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate said on Thursday that the Israeli military and government continued throughout 2025 a systematic policy of targeting Palestinian journalists through arbitrary abductions, administrative detention, physical assaults, interrogations, equipment confiscation, and expulsion, in a deliberate effort to silence Palestinian coverage and dismantle the national media landscape.
The Syndicate’s Freedoms Committee documented forty-two abductions of Palestinian journalists— men and women—during 2025.
These abductions occurred across the occupied West Bank, including Jerusalem, and inside the 1948 territories, as well as at military roadblocks, border crossings, during field coverage, and in home invasions.
According to the committee, the decline in abduction numbers compared with 2023 (64 cases) and 2024 (58 cases) does not reflect any improvement in Israeli conduct.
Instead, it signals a shift from quantitative to qualitative targeting, with abductions and imprisonment increasingly focused on the most influential journalists, repeated abductions of the same individuals, expanded use of administrative detention without charge or trial, and the use of physical and psychological violence as a tool of intimidation.
The committee documented dozens of cases in which journalists were abducted while performing their professional duties, including covering military invasions, illegal paramilitary Israeli colonizer attacks, and humanitarian work.
These incidents, it said, demonstrate that arrest has become an immediate tool to clear the field of witnesses and prevent the transmission of facts.
The year 2025 also saw a marked rise in home invasions targeting journalists, with abductions carried out in front of their families in what the committee described as an attempt to break them psychologically and socially, turning abduction from a punitive measure into a form of collective punishment affecting entire households.
The committee warned that Israel’s expanded use of administrative detention against journalists represents one of the most dangerous forms of repression, as it is imposed without clear charges, denies journalists the right to defense, and effectively turns them into prisoners of conscience with no defined release date—an act that violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
The report also recorded targeted repression of Palestinian women journalists through abductions, interrogation, and expulsion, including the re‑arrest of several of them, in what the committee described as evidence of systematic gender‑based violence within the broader apparatus of repression.
These findings, the committee added, align with documented testimonies from foreign women journalists who reported severe abuses inside Israeli detention facilities, placing these violations within the category of grave abuses that may amount to international crimes.
The committee further documented numerous cases in which journalists were beaten, threatened at gunpoint, dragged, humiliated, and had their cameras, phones, and professional equipment confiscated—often without being returned after release—actions that directly obstructed their ability to continue reporting.
The targeting extended beyond field reporters to include academics, media professors, and widely followed journalists, signaling that Israel is no longer targeting news coverage alone, but the broader ecosystem of knowledge production and public awareness shaped by Palestinian journalism.
The Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate called on the international community and human rights organizations to uphold their legal and moral responsibilities, urging the United Nations and the Special Rapporteurs on freedom of opinion and expression to intervene urgently and hold Israeli officials accountable for violations against Palestinian journalists.
The Freedoms Committee affirmed that Palestinian journalism will continue to fulfill its professional and national role despite all forms of repression, and that targeting journalists will not succeed in silencing the truth or erasing documented abuses.
