Anas Zayed Fteiha, a Palestinian photojournalist in the Gaza Strip, filed a legal claim seeking an injunction against global publishing giant Axel Springer, which he accuses of violating his constitutional rights by falsely portraying him as a Hamas propagandist in Germany’s largest tabloid, BILD.

The filing against a European news organization is a first-of-its-kind legal strategy for journalist working in Palestine. “I want to prove the truth cannot be erased by false allegations,” Fteiha told The Intercept.

Fteiha’s legal claim, submitted in the Frankfurt am Main Regional Court, stems from a BILD article published on August 5 under the headline: “This Gaza photographer stages Hamas propaganda.”

The BILD piece singled out Fteiha, alleging he fabricated images of starving Palestinians to push a Hamas narrative. To underscore this charge, BILD published a picture showing Fteiha kneeling to photograph people in Gaza holding empty pots in front of a metal barrier. BILD framed the scene as an attempt to exaggerate the levels of hunger in Gaza. Later in August, a United Nations-backed body declared a famine in Gaza.

The article claims Fteiha staged the photo and describes him as a “journalist” three times, always in quotation marks.

“In fact it was a genuine moment of human suffering,” Fteiha told The Intercept.

“It seems that [Axel Springer] is promoting a narrative portraying journalists in Gaza as accomplices of Hamas.”

Fteiha was at the food distribution site as a freelancer for the Turkish news agency Anadolu, and published a range of photographs online from that day. To Fteiha, BILD’s reporting is part of a campaign to discredit Palestinian journalists, he told The Intercept.

“Falsely accusing me of staging propaganda exposes me to threats and undermines the supposed protections afforded to journalists,” he said. “It means I could be targeted simply because false reports about me were published.”

Fteiha is seeking an injunction proceeding — an emergency procedure aimed at reaching a quicker resolution than a typical lawsuit. If granted by the court, the injunction would require Axel Springer to correct the statements in the article that he alleges are false and would oblige the publisher to cover the costs of the legal proceedings brought........

© The Intercept