Foreign press group slams Hamas for ‘excessive’ new fees

An umbrella group representing foreign journalists working in Israel and the Palestinian territories on Wednesday condemned Hamas for increasing registration fees for armored cars used by journalists covering the Gaza Strip.

In a sharply worded reproach of the “excessive” new measures posted on its website, the Foreign Press Association said it was “deeply disturbed” to learn of the upped prices.

In the past, authorities in Gaza applied the same fee for armored cars as for other vehicles with the same size and type of engine, namely NIS 2,100 ($538) a year for a diesel vehicle.

Hamas officials are now impounding foreign news organizations’ armored cars and demanding NIS 4,000 a year.

“In July last year, representatives from the FPA met with Hamas officials in Gaza, including the deputy minister for transport, and it was agreed that the usual 2,100 shekel fee would be applied, with the deputy minister citing the PA’s own Transport Ministry legal guidelines. That agreement is not being respected,” the statement released on the group’s website said.

“We call on the Hamas authorities to respect their own laws and previous commitments. News organizations are prepared to pay the legal fee to operate vehicles on Gaza’s roads, but will not submit to excessive fees that appear to have no basis in law,” the FPA said.

Formed in 1957 by a group of journalists, the FPA is a nonprofit organization that aims to assist foreign reporters in covering news from Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Gaza. It says that its mandate is “to clarify bureaucratic problems and to protect our interests.”

During the 2014 Israel-Hamas war, the FPA condemned Hamas for attempts to intimidate journalists and interfere with their coverage of the fighting in Gaza.

“The FPA protests in the strongest terms the blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods employed by the Hamas authorities and their representatives against visiting international journalists in Gaza over the past month,” the August 2014 statement said. “The international media are not advocacy organizations and cannot be prevented from reporting by means of threats or pressure, thereby denying their readers and viewers an objective picture from the ground.”

As well as targeting journalists in Gaza, the FPA said it was aware that Hamas had also been taking steps to vet those media personnel it doesn’t approve of and to prevent them from reporting in Gaza. “Such a procedure is vehemently opposed by the FPA,” the statement said.

The FPA asserted that “in several cases, foreign reporters working in Gaza have been harassed, threatened or questioned over stories or information they have reported through their news media or by means of social media.”

A numbers of reporters working in Gaza reported on Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure for military means, but said they were only able to do so once out of the Strip, for fear of Hamas reprisals.

A report by India-based NDTV in early August 2014 on Hamas assembling and firing a rocket next to a hotel used by journalists was filed hours after the reporter left Gaza, because “Hamas has not taken very kindly to any reporting of its rockets being fired,” he wrote.

A week after the FPA complaint, a Hamas spokeswoman told Lebanese TV that the terror group contacted those whose work was “immoral” and made them change “one way or another,” and also booted out journalists who sought to “film places where missiles were launched.”