Israel Curbs 2 U.S. Journalists for Assassination Reports

Two correspondents in Israel for major American media organizations had their accreditations suspended Tuesday for failing to submit to the military censor their reports that Israeli leaders ordered the April 16 assassination of a senior Palestine Liberation Organization official.

Glenn Frankel of the Washington Post and Martin Fletcher of NBC News will be allowed to continue working as journalists here but without the services provided by the Israeli Government Press Office and other key agencies, press office director Yoram Ettinger said.

Both men, quoting unnamed Israeli sources, had reported that the assassination in Tunis of Khalil Wazir, chief deputy to PLO leader Yasser Arafat, was a joint operation of the Israeli army, navy, air force and Mossad intelligence agency.

The Israeli government has repeatedly refused to comment on the issue of responsibility for the killing. Ettinger insisted that the decision to move against the two journalists “has nothing to do with the validity or invalidity of the information reported.”

‘A Severe Violation’

He said in an interview that their action constituted “a severe violation” of Israeli requirements that journalists submit reports dealing with security matters to military censors. The temporary withdrawal of their press credentials, he added, was the least severe of several alternatives proposed to punish the pair. It was chosen so as “not to infer that there is a new policy and we are now ganging (up) on overseas media, which is not the case,” he explained.

The official refused to speculate on how long the suspensions might last, saying only that they will continue pending “completion of the examination of the matter.”

The action was believed to mark only the third time that Israel has suspended the credentials of a foreign correspondent.

The last time was in 1980, when it lifted the press card of Dan Raviv, a CBS News reporter, who filed a report that Israel and South Africa had jointly tested a nuclear bomb. Two years later, Raviv was re-accredited to cover the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

In 1969, the government suspended the credentials of another CBS News reporter, Tony Hatch, who broadcast news of an Israeli raid into Egyptian territory while the operation was under way.

Ettinger said his office acted on a complaint filed against the two correspondents by the chief censor. He said the censor had not complained about any other reporters, even though he has heard that other correspondents also failed to submit their reports on the Wazir assassination to the military.

Officials at both the Washington Post and NBC said their organizations will protest the Israeli action.

Fletcher, 40, said he assumes that “what I had was a government leak” and that his report broke no censorship taboos. “The whole area of Israeli censorship as it involves foreign correspondents is a gray area,” he added.

A correspondent here for five years, Fletcher said he thought the government action would have little practical impact on him.

Frankel, 38, said the issue involved is “a very natural conflict” between a government that wants to keep certain matters secret and a free press, which is committed to reporting the news as best it can. “It’s not surprising both that I would try to print the story and that the government would react in some manner,” he said.

A former southern Africa bureau chief for the Post, Frankel has been posted in Israel for the last two years.