Israeli police bar foreign journalists critical of Israel: Report

Israeli police monitor foreign journalists who criticize Israel and recommend barring them from entering the country, Israeli daily Haaretz said Tuesday.

“Israeli police monitor articles by foreign journalists and recommend denying entry to reporters critical of Israel,” the paper said, citing documents.

Haaretz said one of the documents it obtained included a review of articles by Italian journalist Alessandro Stefanelli, who was denied entry to Israel last July.

The review was carried out by the Israeli police's Judea and Samaria District unit in charge of nationalist crime, the newspaper said.

Stefanelli, a freelance journalist, has published articles in The Atlantic, Libération in France, and La Repubblica and La Stampa in Italy.

The Italian journalist contacted the Israeli Embassy but received no explanation for the decision, the newspaper said.

He later attempted to enter Israel from Jordan through the Allenby Bridge, also known as the King Hussein Bridge, where he was detained and questioned by Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority. After five hours, he was told he was barred from entering and was sent back to Jordan.

According to Haaretz, the interrogation document given to Stefanelli said he had been transferred to “the care of security officials because he was required to undergo a security investigation.”

The Population and Immigration Authority cited a police document recommending that he be denied entry because he had accused Israel of “apartheid” in the occupied West Bank.

‘Apartheid regime’

The police document described Stefanelli as “a journalist and photographer who provides one-sided coverage of Israel,” the newspaper said. The document contained links and screenshots of three of his articles and one post on his X account.

The first link led to Stefanelli’s photo essay on the lack of bomb shelters and protected areas in unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Negev in southern Israel, Haaretz said.

The second link did not lead to an article, but police said Stefanelli accused Israel of creating “an apartheid regime” in the West Bank.

The third link led to a short article published in the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto on environmental pollution and labor rights violations in the Nitzanei Shalom industrial zone near Tulkarem in the northern West Bank.

Israeli media had covered the industrial zone in several articles highlighting discrimination against Palestinian workers and environmental risks there, Haaretz added.

Stefanelli denied all the allegations against him.

“These accusations are ridiculous in the extreme – they put me on the same list as terrorists,” he told Haaretz.

“These are photos that any other photographer could have brought from the West Bank. I have trouble understanding how a police officer in a democracy can write such things. You can only prepare a document like that if you know some judges will buy it,” the journalist added.

*Writing by Lina Altawell in Istanbul