The Israel Police has been systematically clamping down on press freedom since the beginning of the Iran war. Like in the weeks following October 7th, journalists suffer from prevention of access to emergency scenes, targeted harassment and even violence from citizens as well as the police. In many cases, these are journalists whose only crime appears to be that they performed journalistic work while being Arab, but the police's heavy hand also harms the freedom of Jewish journalists.

On the morning of Saturday the 14th of June, after the first missiles fired from Iran hit Israel, police who arrived at the scene in Rishon LeZion prevented Samir Abdelhadi and Areej Hakroush from broadcasting from the impact area. Abdelhadi is a correspondent for the Turkish news agency Anadolu while Hakroush reports for Al-Ghad channel, an Egyptian channel with Emirati ownership.

In a video of the incident, a policewoman is heard telling Hakroush "you don't have press credentials" while moving her away from the scene. A passerby, who said her parents were injured in the attack, cursed the journalist in Hebrew and Arabic and among other things sent her to Gaza. Other passersby joined her in cursing. In a conversation with the Committee to Protect Journalists, Hakroush said that those surrounding her pulled her hair and physically attacked her using the network's filming equipment.

In a conversation with The Seventh Eye, Samir Abdelhadi says that he and Hakroush were not the only ones whose work was harmed by the police actions at the scene.

According to him, he arrived at the location around noon and entered without any problem ("there was a nice policeman"). However, when he went out to bring the microphone he had forgotten in his car, he was not allowed to return to the scene. "On the way back a policewoman caught me," he recounts and identifies her as the policewoman who also appears in the above documentation removing the Al-Ghad reporter from the scene, "I told her 'I was inside, my equipment is there, the cameraman', she tells me, 'No, you're not going in'."

Abdelhadi says that after she saw him call the police spokesperson, the policewoman agreed to examine the press card he received from The Union of Journalists in Israel. "I showed her the card, she started turning it around to look. Like what for? The name is written, my photo. And she goes back and forth, trying to provoke me so I'll tell her 'Yalla' and shout. I kept my cool, kept my cool, kept my cool, until finally I told her 'If you don't know how to read I'll read it to you'."

After several more exchanges, Abdelhadi received permission to enter, but then he saw that the police were preventing two more journalists from entering the scene, this time they were journalists from the Saudi Al-Arabiya network, which is considered in the Arab world as supportive of Israel. The network's reporter was eventually allowed to enter, but the policewoman prevented the cameraman who accompanied him because he arrived at the scene without credentials.

"I told her 'Listen, do you think everyone inside has GPO credentials and press cards? There are people here who are not journalists, why are you letting them in? Because these are Arabs and these are Jews?' She told me 'That doesn't concern you and move away'." At this stage, Abdelhadi recounts, and even though he had never held a professional camera in his hands, he took the equipment of the Saudi network's cameraman and volunteered to fill his place.

According to him, the police also prevented the Turkish TRT network reporter from entering the scene and only after she mentioned to them that she was an American citizen and threatened to contact the embassy, was her entry permitted.

This harsh treatment of journalists comes following repeated calls by Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to act against foreign media. Karhi, known for his inflammatory language, has published several statements against foreign media since the beginning of the campaign and called on security forces "to stop broadcasts that harm state security, even when it's not Al Jazeera and Al-Mayadeen," channels that were banned from broadcasting from Israel under an emergency order that was enacted at Karhi's urging after the start of the October 2023 war.

"Against enemies, or those who assist them, we must act quickly and sharply - without blinking and without hesitation," Karhi wrote. Minister Ben-Gvir shared Minister Karhi's calls on social networks and added his own calls for action. Among other things he wrote a "letter" to the Shin Bet chief: "Use your authority against foreign broadcasts that endanger state security - the police will assist you."

The responsibility for action against such broadcasts, for example of precise locations of missile hits, is not given to the Communications Ministry or the National Security Ministry but to the censor and the Shin Bet, however the remarks by Karhi and Ben-Gvir, and additional politicians, contributed to inflaming public hostility against journalists, Arabs and Jews alike.

"You speak Arabic, that's immediately Al Jazeera, that's the enemy"

The next day, on the 15th of June, after an Iranian missile hit a residential building in Bat Yam, caused its collapse and many casualties, things got worse. Many journalists arrived at the location, including Al-Ghad reporter Razi Tatur and his cameraman Iyad Abu Shalbak. In a conversation with The Seventh Eye, Tatur says he arrived at the scene together with a crew from the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation Kan. While the Kan people broadcast in Hebrew, he broadcast next to them in Arabic.

"Suddenly, while I'm broadcasting in Arabic, a Border Police officer arrives, closes in on us and puts his hands on the camera and pushes me," says Tatur. "The police officers in blue separate between us and move him away, but the incident didn't end."

According to him, he and his cameraman were asked to move away and they followed the instruction, however meanwhile, "another Border Police officer arrives and asks us 'Where are you from?'. He heard me speaking Arabic. I'm on air, I tell him 'I'll finish the broadcast and answer you, we have GPO credentials, I'm not running away'. But he calls others. They start gathering around me, trying to cut the broadcast cable, saying 'Stop the broadcast!' and start pushing us with all their strength, amid calls at a scene where people are... you know what their feelings are. He starts calling us 'terrorist! terrorist!'. I don't see blue police officers anymore, only Border Police taking over the incident. They take our equipment. They dismantle it and take the camera and the stand."

Tatur says he tried to contact the commander but received no response. After he left the place he filed a complaint with the police regarding an assault by Border Police and confiscation of equipment. About three hours later, the police Arabic spokesperson contacted him and invited him back to the scene to collect his equipment. The equipment indeed returned to his hands, but not for long.

On the same day, Al-Arabiya Saudi network journalists Marwan Atamna and Muhammad Al-Sharif were attacked by passersby who shouted "Arabs out" at them and threw objects at them. In a video of the incident, a man is heard calling toward Atamna "this is private property" and instructing him to leave the place. "Home! Home!" he shouts, while Atamna asks him "don't touch."

In a conversation with The Seventh Eye, Atamna says that already at the scene in Rishon LeZion he encountered hostility from passersby who heard him speaking Arabic and cursed. "Israelis, for them Arabic is Al Jazeera. They don't know anything except Al Jazeera. You speak Arabic, that's immediately Al Jazeera, that's the enemy," he says.

But while the incident in Rishon LeZion ended with only a verbal confrontation and two punctured wheels in the car that served him and his crew, when he arrived in Bat Yam he encountered actual physical violence.

Due to logistical problems, Atamna recounts, after several hours of broadcast from the scene itself they were forced to move to a back position in a nearby parking lot, next to their car, to charge the equipment and continue broadcasting.

"We're talking specifically with nice people," he recalls, "a lady with a Russian accent who says 'Look how hard it is', and we try to comfort her and interview her and hear what she has to say, and then people start trickling in who it turned out later were checking your accent and where you're from until they discover you're broadcasting in Arabic.

"While I'm in a live broadcast a person or two arrive and say 'This is private property'. I'm broadcasting and don't want to stop so I tell the studio while I'm walking away that we need to finish and that we're being asked to leave and we make our way out. I try to explain that people are angry and that emotions are mixed, and then they start surrounding the camera and cursing. I start hurrying, and curses and slurs and shouts turn into objects thrown at us.

"They start throwing all kinds of objects at us, everything in hand, anything they find in the parking lot. And more people join, I don't know where they came from, and then you have a commotion of dozens of people who suddenly gather and join like a herd and start gathering courage and throwing even more objects.

"We reach the car and meanwhile they continue to push and shout and I shout back 'Don't push! Don't use hands! Look, we are leaving!', and they continue cursing 'You are the enemy, you broadcast the images to the enemy so they know to target us' and all that nonsense. You could see by the look in their eyes that these are people who didn't want to talk and didn't want to understand who you're broadcasting to and don't care. Just hatred for what you are and what you represent. Hatred for the language, hatred for the culture."

One of the people threw a pole he found in the area at Atamna, and he was lightly injured in the pelvic area. According to him, there was a Border Police vehicle in the area and he started shouting for help but to no avail because the crowds gathered around them quickly. Atamna and the cameraman got into the car and the crowd started surrounding them, banging on the car doors and trying to break the mirrors. Eventually they managed to escape from the place.

Atamna says the incident occurred on one of the first days he returned to field work, after four years of office work. According to him, he heard from his colleagues about what was happening in recent years but didn't imagine how much "the hatred became abyssal for everything spoken in Arabic, everything that looks Arabic, everything that broadcasts in Arabic." Atamna attributes this directly to the incitement of the current government, and to the commanding spirit of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

However, as mentioned, not only Arab journalists suffer from restrictions. In the WhatsApp group of The Union of Journalists in Israel designed to help journalists in distress, many reporters, Jews and Arabs alike, have complained in recent days about police officers preventing them from doing their work. "I asked One of the district police officers 'Why are you behaving like this? Are we enemies of the people?', he answered 'Yes'," wrote a journalist in the group.

"You want to know who films for Al Jazeera? Jews"

On the evening of the 15th of June, Abdelhadi arrived at Louis Promenade in Haifa to film the bay area, where Iranian missiles fell. According to him, suddenly he and his colleagues noticed a person who documented them while claiming they work for the Qatari Al Jazeera channel. Within a few minutes the journalists received a warning from a passerby that police were looking for them and that they should flee. "I told him 'We are reporters, we are not spies of the Iranians'," Abdelhadi remembers.

The police indeed arrived, but according to Abdelhadi they behaved properly, listened calmly to his explanations that there were no Al Jazeera journalists at the location and accepted it with understanding.

"We sat with the police, laughed a bit, they were nice and left," he recalls. "Suddenly we see all over the media 'Al Jazeera reporters are roaming freely in Haifa', 'They need to be arrested'. Both from 'Yedioth Ahronoth', but also Channel 12, Channel 13, Channel 14, everyone shamed us, all the channels even the leftists, the rightists, everyone everyone everyone, without distinction. They didn't call, didn't even check, they immediately saw the video and started spreading it."

Abdelhadi says he called the police spokesperson angrily and warned him that he must clarify the facts of the incident. "I told him 'If it's forbidden to film, say it's forbidden, besides that you want to know who films for Al Jazeera? Jews'."

According to him, the Arab journalists in Israel, like him, don't dare pass materials to Al Jazeera for fear of harassment. "I told Anadolu, 'If I see my image broadcast on Al Jazeera I stop filming'. And they told me 'Don't worry, we don't work with Al Jazeera in Israel'." Abdelhadi emphasizes that those who actually film the raw materials used by Al Jazeera are Jewish cameramen, employees of international news agencies that supply materials to hundreds and thousands of media outlets around the world, including the Qatari network.

"Everyone who films for Al Jazeera is Jewish," says Abdelhadi, "they ask him where he's from and he says AFP. He's Jewish with a kippah, with everything, so he's not suspicious. But Samir, who is Arab, who works with the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation and with Turkish Anadolu, he's suspicious. Actually Samir guards state security more than everyone and when a missile fell near a sensitive area in Tel Aviv I and the i24News reporter ran like crazy along the entire axis to prevent people from filming. I won the Brave Journalist Award. On October 7th, I was among the first to enter the area and saved many people, I accompanied the families of the hostages from day one and they shame us. The police, instead of protecting us, shame us."

The next morning Abdelhadi wanted to return to the filming location in Haifa but received a warning from his colleagues not to do so. "They told me 'There are many of Ben-Gvir's people standing on the promenade and they even brought a bus full of settlers'."

Abdelhadi decided not to return to the promenade. Journalist Razi Tatur, who was staying at a nearby hotel, called him and suggested he join him. "It's safer here," Tatur told Abdelhadi, but he refused.

In retrospect, it turned out that even the hotel where Tatur was staying was not a safe place.

Tatur says he came to the city at the request of Al-Ghad channel to document the area an Iranian missile hit the fuel facilities in the bay and decided to position himself at the Crown Plaza hotel where he saw many journalists, including from international media outlets that are not Arab. Tatur set up with his cameraman Abu Shalbak a broadcast position on the balcony facing the bay, and began broadcasting.

"While we're in a live broadcast, at ten at night, the police take the entry cards to the rooms from the hotel staff, break into the rooms, enter with large forces as if there's a real threat, and ask us to stop the broadcast," he says.

According to him, after they stopped the broadcast, the police officer at the location told them they must dismantle the filming equipment. They complied with this request as well. The equipment was dismantled and handed over to the police officers, but they remained with them in the room for a long hour. Alongside the Al-Ghad crew there were also a crew from the Turkish TRT network and a journalist from another Turkish media outlet called IHA.

In addition, there was also a Jewish photographer in the area, Maya Levin, who according to Tatur directed her still camera lens in the same direction they directed their video camera lenses. The police, he notes, did not address her.

In a conversation with The Seventh Eye, Levin confirms this. "I left my room to collect food at the desk, and on the way I see three police officers and a religious guy going up. Later it became clear to me that he works at the hotel. I saw them advancing toward the journalists' room, and I say to them 'Hello'. The policewoman sees I have a camera on me and she says 'You're also one of them'. I said 'Yes, one of whom?' and continued on.

"I brought the food and on the way back I saw them at the door of the room. I asked them what they were doing and they told me 'You're not involved', I told them 'I'm also a journalist and I'm interested in what's happening to the journalists next to me', and then they started asking me who I take photos for and I saw that one of the police officers was holding GPO credentials in his hand, many credentials, apparently they took the credentials from everyone.

"I asked him 'What's happening here? Is there a reason you're coming to harass journalists?' and they said 'No, we're doing a check here, don't interfere'." Levin says she called the police spokesperson and he claimed that it was a routine check, after yesterday it became clear that there were Al Jazeera cameramen not far from the hotel.

"At this stage I go out to the balcony, see that they're taking down their cameras," Levin continues. "Some time passes, the police are still there, and the officers start shouting at them about a photo they took. They tell them 'You're not allowed to photograph us during an operation. You're invading our privacy'."

Tatur says he decided to photograph the police officers because after the incident in Bat Yam, where he was attacked by police officers, he stopped trusting the police. "I started worrying," he recalls, "they take the equipment and I thought they would arrest us. I took a video of how they broke into the room and confiscated equipment, and it spread like wildfire in Arab media, in Israel and abroad. The police, while they in the room, they saw the video on their phones and they started claiming it's forbidden. I told them 'How will I know you won't attack me?', they told me 'You're a terrorist, we'll sue you. This reached Hezbollah's channel'.

"They took me aside, all the cameramen in one room and me in another room, alone. I said to myself okay, I sat, opened television. I'm watching Channel 12 and a police officer approaches me and tells me 'switch to Channel 14'."

After another long hour, the police officers received instructions to leave the hotel with the confiscated equipment. The next day Tatur received a phone call from Haifa police to come immediately for questioning. In the interrogation room Tatur was accused of directing his camera lens toward an area forbidden for filming, in the port, violating the censor's orders.

"I said we have no intention of committing a censorship violation, that we wanted a general view of Haifa city, to film the missiles, that's what interests the media. In the end the policewoman tells me 'You're forbidden to film in Haifa, and if you bring other equipment to film in Haifa we will take further measures'."

Tatur's filming equipment remains in police hands to this moment, and meanwhile he is forced to sit at home without the ability to make a living. "This is persecution in every respect," he says, "this is Ben-Gvir's media campaign. This is an attempt to intimidate Arab journalists, to prevent Arab media from doing their work."

Abdelhadi also feels this way. According to him, he has an interest to act as requested by the authorities so as not to broadcast something that might harm security.

"In the end, it's my wife and my daughter who live in Haifa, my family. A missile could fall in a really dangerous place and my whole family will go," he says. "I want to protect myself and my family."

A response from the police has not yet been received.