NEW YORK, December 16, 2025 (WAFA) - The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Palestine said that, over the past two years, Israel has intensified its repression against journalists, human rights defenders, anti-occupation activists, as well as local and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), severely undermining a range of human rights of Palestinians, including right to freedom of expression, assembly, and association.
“Across the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the space to monitor and document human rights violations and abuses, seek accountability for injustices, or organize and advocate for human rights, is steadily shrinking.”
Between 7 October 2023 and 14 December 2025, the UN Human Rights Office in the Occupied Palestinian Territory has verified “the killing of 289 journalists in Gaza by Israeli military operations, including incidents where there were strong indications that Palestinian journalists were deliberately targeted on account of their work.”
Israeli security and military forces have also detained at least 202 Palestinian journalists from both Gaza and the West Bank between 7 October 2023 and 31 October 2025, according to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, 41 of whom remained detained as of 31 October 2025.
OHCHR said: “Most were held under administrative detention, which in the context of Israel’s occupation of Palestine results in arbitrary deprivation of liberty and exposes detainees to torture and other ill-treatment, and enforced disappearance.“
It added that since 7 October 2023, at least 85 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody.
The UN Human Rights Office in the Occupied Palestinian Territory said, “As Palestinian journalists face these grim prospects, Israel continues to impose a blanket ban on international journalists’ independent access to Gaza, and undue restrictions on the work of international media outlets in the West Bank.”
In April 2024, Israel passed a law allowing authorities to shut down foreign media outlets deemed a threat to national security— and later issued military orders to forcibly close Al Jazeera’s offices in Ramallah and block its broadcasts, said OHCHR.
OHCHR said, “The shrinking space for independent journalism forms part of a broader clampdown on human rights defenders, anti-occupation activists, and civil society organizations, which has intensified since 7 October 2023.”
“Israel’s 2016 counter-terrorism law and the 1945 Defense (Emergency) Regulations continue to be used against Palestinian NGOs to justify raids of their offices, constrain funding and operations, and arrest staff. The law’s vague language, sweeping definitions, and expansive powers granted to the State have facilitated unjustified restrictions on Palestinians engaged in human rights work, including peaceful advocacy and mobilization.”
It added, “Israel is imposing unjustified restrictions on the work of international NGOs. In March 2025, an Israeli interministerial decision effectively revoked the registration of all international NGOs operating in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, imposing a re-registration process for temporary permits under new, crippling conditions. This poses a new impediment to the operation of the UN-led humanitarian response in Gaza, and the work of many Palestinian civil society organizations across the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which rely on cooperation with international NGOs.”
OHCHR said that the physical space available to Palestinians also contracts. In Gaza, most Palestinians are confined to less than half of the space of the strip, hemmed in by an arbitrary redeployment line where Israeli ground forces remain positioned.
In the West Bank, Israel is forcibly displacing Palestinians at an unprecedented rate, emptying entire Palestinian communities of their Palestinian residents and clearing the way for ever-expanding Israeli settlements.
The geography is being redrawn— and so are the limits of what Palestinians are allowed to say or do about it, said OHCHR.
Ajith Sunghay, head of the UN Human Rights Office in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, said: “These violations are creating fear and despair and leave Palestinians with no avenues to convey the reality of their lives to the world, to seek justice for decades of discrimination, violence and oppression, and to defend a future in which their human rights are finally protected and fulfilled.”
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