Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Kawthar Salam is a Palestinian journalist from Hebron. She worked for Al-Ittihad, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida and Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper. The Israeli organization, Gush Shalom, published a diary of its experience in Hebron on its website. She also co-produced three films with Israeli television stations. Salam has spoken about human rights violations committed by the Israeli army, has named specific soldiers, and filed legal complaints against them. It also classifies Jewish settlement activists as well as soldiers on its website as terrorists.
Kawthar said she was attacked by Israeli soldiers on several occasions and filed a lawsuit after an incident in which her arm was broken. Two incidents of abuse against Salam were documented in a 2001 Human Rights Watch report, "The Storm Center: A Case Study of Human Rights Violations in the Hebron District." After death threats from Israeli soldiers, settlers and what she considered "Islamic extremists", she applied for and was granted political asylum in Vienna, Austria on December 5, 2002. The International Press Institute (IPI) and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) applied for asylum on her behalf. .
Kawthar's 2000 reports of Israeli military corruption led to internal investigations of two Israeli officers. Before she was granted asylum in Austria, Daniel Seaman, director of the Israeli government press office, stated that Salam would not be allowed to work as a journalist under Israeli jurisdiction. According to IPI, the only clear reason for this action was that “she is a critical Palestinian reporter and that the army and Israeli settlers “do not recognize her work.” According to IPI, Kawthar quoted that “Seaman threatened to arrest her if she came to his office to renew her press card again.” Aidan White, Secretary General of the International Federation of Journalists, intervened on Kawthar’s behalf and described the rules under which she was stripped of her journalistic credentials as “a wholly inappropriate form of racial discrimination against all Palestinians.”
In 2003, Kawthar was one of 28 male and female writers in 13 countries to receive a Hillman/Hammet grant from Human Rights Watch "in recognition of their courage in the face of political persecution."
In late 2011, the Administrative Authority of the Palestinian Community in Austria decided to deprive Kawthar Salam of going to the community headquarters in Vienna and prevent her from covering the activities supervised and organized by the community, due to her publishing on her blog “news reports and fabricated articles that included a package of lies, unrelated to With the media professionalism and not based on facts, it aims to offend Palestinian militant figures and undermine their reputation,” according to the commission’s statement. Kawthar responded by criticizing the commission and considering it unrepresentative of the Palestinian community in Austria.
The Palestinian ambassador to Austria, Salah Abdel Shafi, denounced a report written by Kawthar Salam, citing a story in Ha'aretz newspaper that he demanded, through a telephone conversation with the Israeli ambassador, to "expand the military operation against Gaza and strike and eliminate Hamas." Abdel Shafi said he would sue Kawthar Salam, and that he had already "initiated legal procedures".
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