An ARD team says it was temporarily detained and threatened by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. The incident was described on Sunday evening on “tagesschau.de” and “BR24”: Correspondent Jan-Christoph Kitzler was on his way back from an interview with a Palestinian employee and a German employee when they were stopped by Israeli soldiers south of the Palestinian border. city of Hebron.
Accordingly, the soldiers allegedly behaved extremely aggressively towards the journalists and weapons were kept in the team vehicle on several occasions. Bayerischer Rundfunk, which runs the ARD Tel Aviv studio, views the incident as an attack on press freedom. When asked, the Israeli military said it was reviewing the report.
Violence against Jewish settlers as the topic for the article
“The soldiers threatened us with their weapons and asked us if we were Jews. Our colleague was insulted as a traitor,” says correspondent Kitzler. According to the report, the ARD team was traveling to report on radical Jewish settlers’ violence against Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Only after more than an hour did the situation improve after additional soldiers and police were called in.
Studio manager: “Behavior unacceptable”
“This is the second incident for us within a week. Our team clearly identified themselves as accredited press representatives and was located far away from military security areas,” said ARD studio head Christian Limpert. “We cannot accept the actions of the Israeli army.”
The Foreign Press Association in Israel had already called on the Israeli military to ensure the safety of journalists in late October and reported two incidents in the West Bank in which soldiers harassed reporters. In one of them, ARD employees were also affected.
Source: Krone
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