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 newspapers. The Israeli organization, Gush Shalom, published a diary of its experience in Hebron on its website. She has also co-produced three films with Israeli television stations. Salam spoke about human rights violations committed by the Israeli army, and worked to name specific soldiers and file legal complaints against them. It also classifies Jewish settlement activists, along with 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 of the abuses against Salam were documented in a 2001 Human Rights Watch report, "The Center for the Storm: A Case Study of Human Rights Violations in the Hebron District." After death threats from the Israeli military, 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 on her behalf. .
Kawthar's 2000 reporting on 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 the International Press Institute, the only apparent reason for this action was that “she is a critical Palestinian reporter and that the Israeli army and settlers do not recognize her work.” According to the International Press Institute, Kawthar reported that “Seaman threatened to arrest her if she came to his office to renew her press card again.” Aidan White, General Secretary 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 "an entirely inappropriate form of racial discrimination against all Palestinians".
In 2003, Kawthar was one of 28 writers in 13 countries who received the Hillman/Hammett 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 frequenting the community’s headquarters in Vienna and prevented her from covering the activities supervised and organized by the community, due to the publication on her blog of “news reports and fabricated articles that included a package of lies, unrelated to With media professionalism and not based on facts, it aims to offend militant Palestinian personalities and undermine their reputation,” according to the commission’s statement. Kawthar responded by criticizing the commission and considering it not representative of the Palestinian community in Austria.
The Palestinian ambassador to Austria, Salah Abd al-Shafi, denounced a report written by Kawthar Salam, quoting a report in the Haaretz newspaper, according to which 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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