Loop. The WhatsApp messaging app blocked the accounts of dozens of Palestinian journalists following recent clashes between Israel and the Islamist organization Hamas that rules the Gaza Strip, reporters said.
Shortly after the ceasefire that ended an 11-day deadly conflict took effect on Friday at 2:00 a.m., two journalists from the AFP agency’s Gaza office received WhatsApp announcements in Arabic informing them that their accounts they were blocked.
Other journalists, in Jerusalem, Gaza and the occupied West Bank, also said their accounts were blocked.
A team from the Qatari news channel Al Jazeera claimed that their accounts were reopened after they complained to Facebook, the owner of WhatsApp.
The vice president of the Palestinian Journalists Union, Tahseen al-Astall, noted that “around 100 journalists” in Gaza had their account blocked.
As part of a balanced coverage of the conflict, journalists in Gaza receive through WhatsApp communications from the Palestinian Islamist organization, despite the fact that it is on the list of the European Union and the United States of “groups and entities involved in acts terrorists “.
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