The New York Times · New York, New York · 23 June 1982
CP-1982-057
Israel Bars Transmissions by ABC
Transcribed from the clipping
TEL AVIV, June 22 — Israel suspended ABC News satellite transmissions from here today after the network used an Israeli ground station to send an interview with Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, that had been filmed in Beirut. The network was accused of having defied Israeli military censorship.
The Israelis granted requests by foreign networks to transmit film from Lebanon through the satellite service here after the ground station in Beirut became unuseable a few days ago. Zeev Chafets, director of the Government Press Office, said the networks had agreed to abide by Israeli censorship rules.
He said ABC had submitted the Arafat interview for censorship but it had been banned. An appeal was lodged with the chief military censor and it was rejected. The network then went ahead and transmitted it, he said. ABC News accused Israel last night of “an intolerable act of political censorship.”
It called on Israeli officials to restore the network’s access to the satellite transmission station in Tel Aviv. The ban, a network official said, poses “a grave inconvenience and a serious interference with our ability to report the news.”
In a statement prepared for broadcast last night on “World News Tonight” — the same program that broadcast the Arafat interview Monday night — ABC News said it had “strongly protested” the cutoff in a series of meetings with Israeli diplomats in Washington.
It said the Arafat interview “in no way compromised Israeli military security — the stated reason for Government censorship.”
How this transcription was made
Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead and no dated folio line, so the date recorded here could not be checked against anything printed on the page. Nothing on the page contradicts it.
Cite this clipping
"Israel Bars Transmissions by ABC," The New York Times, 23 June 1982. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1982-057. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1982-057
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Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
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