The Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA), has published a new report on Monday, 29 July, indicating a rise in media violations in Palestine for the first half of 2019.
MADA has evaluated a total of 330 of media violations during the first half of this year. This new report unveils a dramatic increase in media violations by 19 per cent, compared to the same period in 2018.
Besides the figures and numbers regarding the violations, the report also entails a monthly listing of the documented abuses.
Founded in 2006, MADA is a Palestinian NGO, which aims to promote and defend the right to freedom of expression and opinion. The organisation is primarily known for their monthly and annual reports, in which they address the violation of freedom of the press in Palestine.
The documented violations include Palestinian and Israeli authorities as well as Facebook. 45 per cent of violations were committed by Israeli authorities, followed by Palestinian authorities with 35 per cent and Facebook with 20 per cent.
The geographic distribution of the violations shows an inequality between Israeli and Palestinian. As MADA has monitored the majority of abuses committed by Palestinian authorities took place in Gaza, compared to Israeli authorities, where the majority of violations were engaged in the West Bank.
Furthermore, the report states that the majority of Israel’s media violations are psychical attacks, compared to the major violations by the Palestinian authorities, which are headed by arrests and detention.
The violations committed by Facebook, include the shutdown of 65 pages and accounts belonging to Palestinian journalists and authors. According to MADA, the owner of the accounts received a message stating “Hello, thank you for responding, we will ask you to reply with attaching a picture of yourself with one of your identity card elements”. After doing so, they have received the reply that “there is an unknown error”.
Since 2016, Facebook and the Israeli government have made an agreement upon the future monitoring of Facebook posts. This agreement resulted in a censorship campaign against Palestinian activist, who opposed or addressed the Israeli occupation in a facebook posting.
Overall, the report shows that there is a substantial increase in media violations compared to the same time span of the past eight years.