A journalist holds the blood-covered camera belonging to Palestinian photojournalist Mariam Dagga, a journalist who freelanced for AP since the start of the war and who was killed in an Israeli strike on Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip. Photo by AFP
Paris: More than 250 media outlets in over 70 countries staged a front page protest Monday highlighting the deaths of scores of journalists in Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, the Reporters Without Borders media freedom group said.
"At the rate journalists are being killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, there will soon be no-one left to keep you informed," the group's general director Thibaut Bruttin said in a statement.
The protest was taken up on the website front pages of publications including Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera, British news site The Independent, French newspapers La Croix and L'Humanite and Germany's TAZ and Frankfurter Rundschau, according to Reporters Without Borders.
Some 220 journalists have been killed during Israel's Gaza campaign, according to RWB data.
The protest was staged one week after five journalists -- some working for Al Jazeera, Associated Press and Reuters -- were killed in Israeli strikes on the Nasser Hospital in Gaza's Khan Yunis city. Earlier in August, six journalists were killed in another Israeli air strike outside the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City.
Media participating in Monday's action "demand an end to impunity for Israeli crimes against Gaza's reporters, the emergency evacuation of reporters seeking to leave the Strip and that foreign press be granted independent access," the RWB statement statement.
RWB says it has filed four complaints at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes it says the Israeli army committed against journalists in Gaza over the past 22 months.
International media have been denied free access to the Gaza Strip since the war broke out.
A few selected outlets have embedded reporters with Israeli army units operating in the Palestinian territory, under condition of strict military censorship.
