Malta Joins Global Plea: Why Local Newsrooms Stand With Banned Gaza Journalists

Valletta’s own Times of Malta newsroom fell unusually silent yesterday evening as editors, photographers and layout designers paused to watch a joint video appeal released by the world’s leading news agencies—AP, Reuters, AFP, BBC and CNN—begging Israel to open Gaza’s doors to foreign correspondents. In a country where 92 % of adults follow the news daily (Eurobarometer, 2023), the plea felt personal; after all, Maltese journalists know what it is like to report from a tiny, crowded island where every boat tragedy or political scandal ricochets through extended families before the ink is dry.

“Gaza today is the size of Gozo with the population of Malta itself, yet no foreign reporter can enter,” remarked Matthew Vella, executive editor of MaltaToday, during a phone-in on Radju Malta’s breakfast show. Listeners texting the programme drew immediate parallels with the 1940s when British censors stopped local papers from publishing casualty lists during the Siege of Malta. Eighty years on, the sense of information blackout still stings.

Across the archipelago, the issue is amplified by Malta’s unique cultural blend of Catholic solidarity and decades of Arab contact. Parish rectories that usually focus on fundraising for missions in Africa have now redirected collections to Gaza relief, while imams in Paola and Żejtun quote the same Reuters dispatches their parish-priest counterparts share on Facebook. The agencies’ joint appeal—filmed in Jerusalem, London and New York—was subtitled into Maltese within hours by volunteer translators who normally subtitle Game of Thrones episodes, a testament to how deeply the story has cut into everyday conversation.

For Maltese journalists, the ban is more than an abstraction. Freelancer Rebecca Zammit, 29, had planned to embed with an Italian medical NGO crossing at Rafah this month; instead she is stuck in Valletta re-writing press releases. “It’s like being refused a boarding pass to the Santa Maria convoy in 1942,” she says, evoking Malta’s wartime hunger for outside news. Her grandfather, a war-time radio operator, listened clandestinely to the BBC; today she streams Al-Jazeera clips between ads for Cisk and political spots. The technological leap is huge, but the hunger for on-the-ground facts remains identical.

University of Malta media lecturer Dr. Mario Thomas points out that Malta’s 2018 Media Literacy Act enshrines the public’s right to “diverse, verified international reportage.” When global agencies cannot access the epicentre of a humanitarian crisis, he argues, Maltese citizens are effectively deprived of that statutory right. “We are an open economy dependent on reputation—tourism, iGaming, maritime flags,” he told HOT Malta. “If investors abroad see us relying on second-hand WhatsApp footage, our credibility wobbles.”

Community impact is already visible. Bookshops report record sales of Gaza-themed titles; Agenda’s Sliema branch sold out of Joe Sacco’s graphic novel “Palestine” in 48 hours. Meanwhile, the Malta Chamber of Journalists organised a candle-lit vigil outside the Law Courts on Tuesday, its tiny square filled with reporters carrying battered notebooks instead of candles—symbols of the tools they are forbidden to use in Gaza. Nationalist MEP David Casa has tabled a parliamentary question asking the European Commission whether visa restrictions on Israeli officials should be considered until press access is granted; government whip Glenn Bedingfield countered that Malta must first secure the release of 17 Filipino-Maltese dual nationals who volunteered on kibbutzim and are now unaccounted for.

Ordinary viewers are left parsing competing narratives, aware that Maltese families themselves were once split by foreign wars: some fled to Australia, others joined the British Navy, letters arriving months late. Today the lag is measured in minutes, but verification remains elusive. “We scroll Twitter at 2 am and still don’t know what’s real,” says Maria Camilleri, a Birkirkara mother whose teenage son quizzes her about TikTok clips. “At least in the war my nanna told us, we trusted the Times of Malta because the reporter was someone’s cousin.”

As the agencies’ video racked up 30,000 local views overnight—huge for a nation of 520,000—one truth resonated: when the cameras are locked out, rumour rushes in. For an island that has lived siege, bombardment and migration, the plea from foreign journalists is not a distant ethical debate; it is a mirror held up to Malta’s own memory of darkness relieved only by the flicker of a neighbour’s candle and the hope that someone, somewhere, is taking notes. Until Israel allows those notebooks into Gaza, Maltese living rooms will keep refreshing their feeds, knowing that behind every pixel lies a story their grandparents would have recognised—and that tomorrow’s history books will judge who bothered to tell it.