Foreign press urges Israel's High Court to speed up Gaza access ruling

A conditional order, if granted, would mean the court had found the petition serious enough to require the state to formally justify why the requested relief should not be granted. It would shift the case out of the current cycle of repeated update notices and into a more advanced procedural stage, requiring a full response by affidavit and setting the matter up for a hearing on whether the state’s policy can lawfully stand.

The immediate procedural backdrop is the state’s March 26 request to postpone its update from March 31 to May 24, saying more time was needed because the court’s earlier timetable had been set before the outbreak of the then-current campaign on February 28 and that the relevant state authorities were occupied with matters tied to that campaign. The court partly granted that request on March 29, setting a new deadline of May 19.

That came after the court had already refused an earlier attempt by the petitioners to move up the March 31 date. In a March 3 decision, the panel – Deputy Supreme Court President Noam Sohlberg, Justice Khaled Kabub, and Justice Ruth Ronnen – said that, “in these difficult times,” it saw no reason to advance the deadline for the state’s update.

The new request argues that the rationale for further delay has now fallen away. Petitioners say that, with the Iran ceasefire having taken effect, there is no real reason to wait another month and a half merely for an update from the state. They argue that after a year and a half of litigation – and after repeated extensions – continued delay is itself causing irreversible harm to freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and the public’s right to know.

That is the procedural ask; the deeper issue the filing tries to force back into view is the distinction between independent reporting and state-managed access.

The state’s position throughout the case has not been that journalists are wholly absent from Gaza. Rather, it has maintained that entry without military escort remains too dangerous, even if conditions on the ground have changed, and has pointed to organized, escorted entries as evidence that some access exists. In its January filing, the state said the war had entered what it described as a different factual phase, but argued that ongoing threats still barred journalists – Israeli or foreign – from entering Gaza independently and without accompaniment.

But the petitioners’ case is built on the opposite premise: that escorted entry is not a substitute for independent journalism. Their argument is that when the army decides which reporters go in, along what route, under what conditions, and with what military framing, that may amount to controlled access – but not to the kind of independent, first-hand reporting the petition seeks to secure.

That fault line surfaced clearly at a hearing in late January, where counsel for the petitioners told the court that escorted tours chosen and structured by the state were “anything but journalism,” arguing that such visits place reporters on a predetermined route and under a military briefing rather than permitting genuine independent coverage.

The hearing also showed that the court understood the case as going beyond a narrow logistical dispute. According to the Monday motion, the bench emphasized in January the importance of journalistic coverage and indicated that broad phrases such as “security reasons,” “security risk,” and “threats and security incidents” could not, on their own, justify such sweeping harm to the rights asserted by the petitioners and to the global public interest in information and transparency.