West Asia - North Africa

Hamas is planning to enforce a 12-year-old Palestinian press law designed to silence dissident journalists amid a crackdown that has raised fierce protests from the local media. "We are all bound by this 1995 press law, and its articles carry the force of the law," said a statement from what was described as Hamas's "information ministry" in the Gaza Strip, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP)...

Palestinian journalists on Sunday announced a series of protests to demand that Hamas and Fatah stop targeting them. The announcement, made during several journalist demonstrations, came after a crackdown on newsmen in both the Fatah-controlled West Bank and the Hamas-run Gaza Strip. Embattled Palestinian reporters said such attacks had become the norm in the Palestinian territories. “Both Hamas...

Members of the Hamas Security Force beat up journalists covering a demonstration Friday held by the rival Fatah movement, briefly arresting four of them and confiscating their cameras in a sign of growing intolerance for political opposition, Arabnews.com has reported. The Hamas men fired guns over the heads of the protesters and scuffled with Fatah members, who threw stones and bottles at a...

The staff at a fledgling weekly newspaper in Yemen accused of damaging national security face death sentences if convicted. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) Thursday warned that the recent charges brought against Al-Shar’a (The Street) and a raid on the newspaper’s office signalled a disturbing attack on independent media in the country. IFJ condemned the Yemeni government for...

Two Moroccan journalists who published a secret government document about terrorist threats against Morocco have been handed down prison sentences. Abderrahim Ariri, publisher of the Moroccan weekly Al-Watan Al An, and Mustafa Hormatallah, a journalist for the paper, were convicted Wednesday by a criminal court in Casablanca of “concealing items derived from a crime” under article 571 of the...

Palestinian cameraman Imad Ghanem who was badly injured in gunfire by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip last month is still waiting to be allowed to leave Gaza and go to Egypt to be fitted with artificial legs. One month after asking Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak to investigate the circumstances in which Israeli soldiers fired on Ghanem on July 5 in the Gaza Strip, Reporters sans Frontières...

The partition of the Palestinian Territories resulting from the Islamist party Hamas’ takeover in the Gaza Strip in June has eroded media diversity. Broadcast media that are affiliated to Fatah or support it have stopped operating in Gaza, while pro-Hamas journalists are exposed to threats in the West Bank, controlled by the Palestinian Authority, Reporters sans frontières (RSF) has said....

An Iraqi photographer working for the Associated Press (AP) was kidnapped in Diyala province on Tuesday, while another journalist working for state-run al-Sabah newspaper has been reported missing, acording to reports. An armed group intercepted the car of AP photographer Talal Ahmed Abdullah in central Baquba, 60 kilometres north of Baghdad, and took him to an unknown location, the independent...

An Iranian journalist has been arrested after he presented himself to a Tehran court in response to a summons. Neither Soheil Assefi's family nor his lawyers know where he is being held or with what he is charged. Officials from the prosecutor's office searched his home on July 31, taking personal documents and his computer's hard disk. Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has called for the release of...

The editor of the Arabic-language weekly Nichane and its sister French-language weekly TelQuel, has been charged with “disrespect for the king” under article 41 of the Moroccan press law. Ahmed Benchemsi received a summons from the Casablanca judicial police for the first time on August 4 after the latest issue of Nichane had been seized from news stands on the orders of Prime Minister Driss...