Ankara has denounced the “ugly attack” that resulted in the smashing of a camera on a Turkish team operating in East Jerusalem.
Reporters working for a Turkish channel have accused Israeli police of abusing one of their colleagues; video from the event purports to show an officer using his rifle barrel to smash a journalist’s camera.
The video team was covering events from East Jerusalem’s Old City, as Israeli security forces and Palestinians clashed on Friday near the Al Aqsa Mosque, for Türkiye’s TRT news source.
TRT said that while the team was covering events in the volatile region, “the Israeli police physically interfered with the TRT news team, breaking their camera with the barrel of a gun.” At the time, the team was “reporting on Israeli forces blocking and using force against Palestinians heading to Al Aqsa Mosque.”
A short video that was uploaded to the internet shows some Israeli officers standing in the street just before someone smashes the camera lens out of frame.
Although the Israeli military has previously declared that it “has never, and will never, deliberately target journalists,” the officials have not yet responded to the accusations.
Later, Fahrettin Altun, an aide to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, denounced Israel for the “ugly attack,” alleging that its soldiers were still “massacring” residents and journalists and “preventing members of the press from performing their duties.”
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Israel persists in breaching international law and disobeying all regulations and guidelines, utilising all forms of armed forces, including soldiers and police. In a social media message, he wrote, “I condemn the attack by the Israeli police on the TRT News team in Jerusalem and I wish the TRT family a speedy recovery.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports that since October 7, at least 42 journalists and media workers have been killed in the most recent round of hostilities between Israel and Hamas, making it the deadliest conflict for reporters since the organisation started gathering statistics in 1992. According to the CPJ, Palestine workers in Gaza accounted for the great bulk of those killed, with the fatalities of four Israeli reporters and one Lebanese national also reported.
For its side, the Israeli Foreign Ministry asserted that a number of Palestinian freelance photojournalists employed by prominent Western news agencies had been “embedded” with Hamas and were therefore involved in the organization’s attacks.
After the horrific October 7 attack by the Palestinian militant group, which claimed over 200 captives and murdered almost 1,200 Israelis, predominantly civilians, Israel declared war on Hamas. Since then, the IDF has carried out weeks of airstrikes on Gaza and initiated a physical invasion of the territory, killing nearly 12,000 Palestinians—more than 5,000 of them children—according to local authorities.
According to the enclave’s health ministry, Israeli soldiers have also conducted operations across the occupied West Bank, resulting in at least 195 Palestinian deaths and over 2,500 injuries.
