The British BBC network announced that its press team in Israel was attacked and detained at gunpoint, after police arrested them in the city of Tel Aviv.

The network said - in a statement published on its official website -, “Muhannad Totenji, Haitham Abu Diab, and the BBC Arabic team were on their way to a hotel, when their car was intercepted.”

It added, "The car - which had a TV sign in red - was pulled over, they were searched, and they were pushed against the wall."

Totenji and Abu Diab said that they identified themselves as BBC journalists and showed the police their press ID cards.

While trying to film the incident, Totenji said that his phone was thrown to the ground and he was hit on the neck.

A spokesman for the British network said, “The BBC News Arabic team was among the teams deployed in Tel Aviv. It was in a car with a clear sign indicating that it was a media organization, and it was stopped and assaulted last night by the Israeli police. Journalists must be able to cover the conflict in Israel and Gaza freely.”

Yesterday, Friday, journalist Issam Abdullah from Reuters was killed, and two journalists from the Al Jazeera team, Carmen Joukhadar and Elie Brakhia, and three other journalists from foreign and local media, were injured in the border town of Alma al-Shaab in southern Lebanon, as a result of Israeli forces targeting their car.

In Gaza, 8 journalists were killed since last Saturday, as a result of the ongoing Israeli attacks, according to what the government media office in Gaza reported last Tuesday.