Reposted from Haartez, July 31, 2025
The foreign press corps in Israel has been battling – unsuccessfully – since the Gaza war began in October 2023 to be permitted access to the Strip in order to report on the conflict and the humanitarian situation there from the ground.
Appearing on the Haaretz Podcast, CNN’s Jerusalem correspondent Jeremy Diamond breaks down the status of the legal and public fight by international journalists to enter Gaza, noting that “never before in Israel’s history has the Israeli government blocked access to Gaza for this amount of time. We reached that milestone months and months ago, and we have been calling on the Israeli government to allow us into Gaza to be able to do our jobs.” [Listen to the podcast here]
The issue has taken on a new urgency, he added, as starvation in Gaza worsens, and he, his fellow journalists, and news organizations feel the immediate need to assist and relieve the Palestinian journalists who have been doing “heroic work under extraordinarily difficult circumstances” reporting until now.
“The primary motivation for our call is not that they aren’t presenting a fair and accurate picture of what’s happening. It’s because they shouldn’t have to shoulder that burden on their own. We have watched as every single person in Gaza has been impacted by the starvation of this man-made crisis that is happening inside the Gaza Strip, and that includes our fellow journalists inside of Gaza who have been surviving, sometimes by stirring salt into water to be able to give them some energy to be able to continue to go on and do their jobs,” Diamond said.
In his conversation with host Allison Kaplan Sommer, Diamond also discussed a recent harrowing experience under threat from settlers in the West Bank, as well as his experience transitioning to his post in Jerusalem after covering Donald Trump as CNN’s White House correspondent.
Covering Trump’s campaign and presidency, he said, “prepared me for many of the slings and arrows that I’ve faced here as Jerusalem correspondent – but more importantly, it prepared me to cover any story that I cover fairly, fearlessly and always driven by a sense of accountability.”
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