Quote:
Originally Posted by moe.ron
The first priority in denying access to Gaza by foreign reporters have little to do with safety. It's about controlling information. They learned from the debacle in Lebanon and the mistakes US made in Iraq/Afghanistan and decided that they will tell the media what's going on. By doing this, if a correspondent reported something in Gaza, there is no way to confirmed it if no foreign journalists are in there.
For instance, the UN school bombing, the Israel government said that there was cache of weapons and that is why it's targeted. UN want an open investigation of course. What do the international press do about it, they can't investigate it to confirm that there are weapons there. So, information handled.
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In the 2007 example, they provided aerial photographs of the mortar launcher on the school. Most recently though the different sides are giving differing accounts.
Really though, unless you could have press literally everywhere, you're going to run into the same problem, even with international press in Gaza. Unless you had a reporter on that particular scene to either see rockets fired from the playground or an empty playground 24 hours a day, the press is still in the same position of seeking information from one side or the other.
ETA: I linked to the Muhammad al-Durrah case earlier. It's an extreme example, but it shows what I mean. At the time the foreign press could be wherever they wanted apparently and yet coverage was less that completely objective.
EATA: Did you see that there was already an Israeli Supreme Court decision about this? The court ruled that they should let the press in, but the military has yet to honor the decision. I would think that this would be remedied through the usual political channels in Israel as it would be in the US.
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