About The Hottest Place in Hell

The Hottest Place in Hell

The Hottest Place in Hell is an Israeli alternative online news site, published in Hebrew at ha-makom.co.il and known in Hebrew as HaMakom HaKhi Ham BaGehenom and in shortened form as HaMakom, or simply "the place". It was launched on 2 September 2013 and is based in Tel Aviv. From its first day it set out to do a kind of journalism its founders believed Israel's mainstream press was not doing: daily investigations, field reporting and opinion columns on society, welfare, human rights, law and politics, giving a platform to voices that are not popular in the mainstream of Israeli journalism. It carries no advertising and is funded by its readers. Since November 2022 it has been administered jointly with the nonprofit outlet Shakuf and the media-criticism site The Seventh Eye under the shared name the Independent Press Union, while keeping its own editorial staff, its own brand and its editorial independence. In a little over a decade a very small newsroom has produced investigations that moved courts, regulators and larger news organisations, and has won Israeli online-journalism prizes for the model itself.

Founding by Einat Fishbein and Irit Dolev

The site was founded by journalist Einat Fishbein, who served as its publisher, and Irit Dolev, who served as its first editor-in-chief. Dolev remained in that role until her departure in September 2018. Fishbein, a Sokolov Prize-winning journalist, built the outlet on an initial self-investment and on the trust of readers rather than on an owning media group or a wealthy backer. The declared purpose, set out at the launch, was to publish investigations, field reports and columns every day, and to open the page to people and subjects the big Israeli outlets tended to pass over. That founding choice shaped everything that followed: a small, predominantly investigative newsroom, an explicit social agenda, and a refusal to depend on advertising revenue. The site describes itself as Israel's first independent investigative site, and as a founding member of the Independent Press Union it presents that independence — no advertisements, no government funding and no support from tycoons — as the guarantee of its editorial freedom.

A name taken from Dante and Martin Luther King

The striking name comes from a saying attributed to the thirteenth-century Italian writer Dante Alighieri, according to which the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of moral crisis, preserve their neutrality. The American civil-rights leader Martin Luther King used a paraphrase of the saying in a landmark speech against American involvement in the Vietnam war, delivered on 4 April 1967 at Riverside Church in New York, and returned to it in a speech on 30 April that year at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. Fishbein and Dolev quoted King to explain their own choice: he left no room for ambiguity or neutrality, they wrote, believing that in the face of injustice or folly it is always better to challenge than to shelter under the warm, degenerate light of consensus, and that there are times when silence is betrayal. They saw in that saying the character and task of the site they were founding: to shout, to defy, to criticise, not to surrender to marketing dictates, and to stay faithful to its values, its readers and what truly matters. Hebrew Wikipedia notes, with some dryness, that the quotation is apparently a free paraphrase, since in Dante's original Divine Comedy the lowest place in hell is not hot at all but a frozen lake, and it houses traitors rather than bystanders. The name is used in full and in its shortened forms, HaMakom HaKhi Ham and HaMakom.

Editorial focus: society, welfare and rights

The site's beat is Israel's social margins and the institutions that fail them. Its core subjects are society, welfare, human rights, law and politics, and within those fields it has returned for years to a recognisable set of issues: the distress of the Ethiopian and Bedouin publics, the status of workers and public housing, migrant workers and asylum seekers in Israel, the rights of people with disabilities, and workers' organising. These are not topics it visits occasionally; they are the standing agenda against which its investigations are chosen. Its reporting on racism during Operation Protective Edge and its early, close accompaniment of the protest of Israelis of Ethiopian origin are examples of that agenda in action. Since the outbreak of the Iron Swords war, the editorial emphasis has widened from its mainly social agenda to include critical coverage of the Israel Defense Forces and the security establishment, a shift documented in detail below, but the site has not abandoned the social reporting on sexual harassment, corruption and asylum seekers that defined its first decade.

Editors and a small newsroom

After Dolev's departure in September 2018, the site was edited by Tomer Michalson from 2019 to 2022, and then by Galit Hareli from 2022 to 2023. From February 2024 its editor-in-chief has been Dor Zomer, who according to the site joined HaMakom in 2021 as an investigative reporter, also served as its deputy editor, and had previously worked as a reporter at the business daily Calcalist. The newsroom has always been strikingly small for the weight of its output: in December 2022 it numbered five people. Fishbein herself, in a December 2022 interview, described investing about 120,000 shekels a month in the site and the difficulty of holding a newsroom together while being both boss and friend to her employees; with the 2022 merger she ended a decade as the site's publisher. The Media Influence Matrix for Israel, a research survey of the country's media, noted that the site's journalistic coverage relies mainly on a women workforce and that it is committed to exposing systemic corruption and amplifying the marginalised voices of society. A staff photograph from June 2020 shows that small team, including reporter Masha Averbuch, Galit Adut, investigative reporter Sharon Shpurer, Fishbein and Michalson.

Investigations that changed the public agenda

HaMakom claims, and the record supports, a series of significant journalistic exposures. It covered the death of Yosef Salamsa and, following it, gave early and close coverage to the struggle of Israelis of Ethiopian origin. It documented phenomena of racism during Operation Protective Edge. Its reporting on sexual offences included the case of Alon Kastiel, which set Israel's Me Too movement in motion, the sexual-harassment case of Roy "Chicky" Arad, and the sexual offences of Haim Da'uel Luski. It published a series of reports and investigations on Efi Naveh and the Israel Bar Association, and covered cases of police violence, including the shooting of Yakub Abu al-Qian at Umm al-Hiran. It also exposed sex groups operating on Telegram. In 2020 it published investigation transcripts and correspondence between Judge Eti Crayef and Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, in parallel with the television programme HaMakor on Channel 13. In the same year it published testimonies of six men about sexual harm by the singer Momi Levy, after which his programme was removed from the Radius 100FM radio station. In 2021 it published testimonies of twenty women against the poet Yitzhak Laor, after which Amos Schocken announced that Laor would stop publishing in Haaretz. Also in 2021 it reported that the appointment of Uri Zaki as chairman of the Herzl Center had allegedly been agreed between the circle of Minister Tamar Zandberg and Yair Lapid, and it published testimonies of sexual harassment at the advertising agency Joshua TBWA, after which Rami Joshua suspended himself as chairman.

The site's recognition began immediately. In 2013 it received a commendation from the Pratt Prize for media and environment, for being an independent newspaper that treats sustainability as a concept touching environment, society and economy in equal measure. In March 2014 it won the Digit Prize for online journalism. The prize's reasoning said that the site symbolised the move of experienced, excellent journalists to the digital platform in a worthy and necessary attempt to control the journalistic product bearing their names, and that it granted an opening to a different, challenging and interesting discourse while exploiting the advantages of digital, with an emphasis on distribution on social networks. The Haaretz newspaper marked the site's second anniversary in 2015 with a feature headlined "The temperature is rising", and a 2021 Haaretz review of a book marking the site's first seven years concluded that it proved reality can be changed. The prizes matter to the site's story because they were given not for a single story but for the proposition itself: that experienced journalists could leave legacy newsrooms and run an independent digital product of their own.

Reader funding, T-shirts and crowdfunding

The business model was part of the editorial promise. The site was founded on self-investment and is financed mainly by reader donations. In Fishbein's own formulation, the business idea and the great challenge were to win the trust of a public that the founders had come to do independent journalism, free of pressures and clean of interests. After the 2022 merger the site is financed, together with Shakuf and The Seventh Eye, by reader donations, and the donation of a single donor is capped so that no donor can influence the content — a mechanism the site presents as structural protection against the pressure that owners and advertisers can exert elsewhere. The site has supplemented donations in characteristically direct ways. In 2015 it began selling T-shirts bearing its logo, and a number of celebrities, journalists and artists who bought them posted photographs of themselves wearing the shirt. In August 2017 a further crowdfunding project was completed successfully, beyond its original targets. Members of the newsroom also give lectures around Israel, whose proceeds go to finance the site's work. The site's own description stresses that thousands of supporters give fixed, capped monthly support, without advertisements, government funding or tycoon money, and that this model allows full editorial freedom and independence from political or economic pressure.

The fight for government press cards

One episode turned the site's smallness into a precedent for all Israeli digital journalism. At the beginning of 2018 the Government Press Office rejected the site's request to grant press cards to the journalists writing for it, because it did not meet the threshold of at least 10,000 entries a day. In January 2018 the site opened a mass entry campaign to pass that threshold, and within three weeks the campaign brought the site more than 1.2 million entries. Following it, after the work of an advisory committee that examined amending the rules, the Government Press Office decided in April 2019 to open a parallel track for granting cards to journalists working on digital platforms, regardless of the scale of their exposure. The significance went beyond one newsroom: a rule written for legacy media reach had been changed because an independent site, with five-figure daily traffic ambitions but not yet the numbers, organised its readers to demonstrate demand. HaMakom's journalists gained access to the credentialing system, and so, by the new track, did journalists of other small digital outlets.

The Bar Association lawsuit against Sharon Shpurer

The site's reporting on the Israel Bar Association brought its most dangerous legal test. In January 2017 the Bar Association and Efi Naveh, who headed it, filed a personal defamation suit of about one million shekels against reporter Sharon Shpurer over a series of articles she published on HaMakom. Among other things, Shpurer had written, against the background of Naveh's ties to the Bar's ethics committee, that the committee applied double standards, and in another article that the Menora insurance company, a client of Naveh, had won the contract to insure the Bar's members and sold them improper insurance policies that included a defence clause in cases of sexual-harassment claims, a clause that was against the law. In the defence filed through HaMakom, Shpurer argued that this was a baseless silencing suit — a SLAPP. After the plaintiffs refused the court's proposal of mediation, on 11 September 2019 the Magistrate's Court dismissed the suit and ordered the Bar Association to pay Shpurer 70,000 shekels in legal costs. Shpurer and the site appealed the size of the sum, demanding compensation at the level of the original claim in order to deter future plaintiffs from filing silencing suits, and arguing that the plaintiffs had behaved disrespectfully, but the court rejected the request. The outcome was nonetheless a clear newsroom victory: a powerful professional body had sued an investigative reporter personally for a very large sum, and lost.

Merger into the Independent Press Union

In November 2022 it was decided to merge the site with the Shakuf association and The Seventh Eye. The merger had a prehistory in Israeli independent media: in September 2020 The Seventh Eye and Shakuf had already announced their own unification, to operate on what they called the publishers' model, with full reliance on public support from the first shekel to the last. Under the terms of the November 2022 merger, the three outlets were united administratively but each keeps its editorial independence, its branding and its own staff, and they are managed together by Shakuf. The joint body operates under the name the Independent Press Union, and HaMakom is one of its three founding bodies. For HaMakom the merger ended its first, heroic financial structure: with it, Fishbein finished her decade as the site's publisher. For readers the practical change was in the funding page rather than the homepage — support for the three outlets is gathered jointly, with capped donations — while the bylines, sections and investigative line of HaMakom continued under its own editors, first Hareli and then, from February 2024, Zomer.

Covering the Iron Swords war differently

Until the war that began in October 2023, the site dealt mainly with social topics, among them sexual harassment, corruption and asylum seekers. With the outbreak of the Iron Swords war the newsroom decided to expand its coverage to national security and to offer military coverage alternative to that of the military correspondents of the mainstream channels and newspapers. Its war coverage has included reporting on the mental difficulties of Israeli soldiers alongside reports on soldiers' actions in communities in the Gaza Strip. Some of its investigations in this period were published simultaneously in English in +972 Magazine, under a cooperation between the two outlets, and a Reuters Institute study of Israeli outlets exposing surveillance, brutality and war crimes in July 2025 discussed HaMakom among the small independent outlets doing this work while mainstream television ignored Gazans' suffering. The site runs a continuing coverage project on post-trauma in the security forces called "The Silent War", including investigations, testimonies and data on the mentally wounded of the security establishment. In July 2025 its reporter Omri Kalisher published an investigation according to which Malmab, a classified directorate in the Ministry of Defense, conducts covert investigations against disabled veterans, including the combat-traumatised, despite a 2017 High Court ruling. In January 2025 the site reported that a commander in the Nahal Brigade shot dead in Rafah a Palestinian who had been forced to serve as a human shield and who had received permission to stay with the soldiers in one of the buildings; the IDF Spokesperson confirmed the event to the site and said lessons had been learned, and the report was quoted in Haaretz and The Times of Israel. In February 2025 it published, simultaneously with +972, an investigation by reporter Ili Pari according to which in May 2024 a senior officer in the Nahal Brigade tied an explosive cord around the neck of a Palestinian man of about eighty in Gaza City's Zeitoun neighbourhood and forced him to serve as a human shield for about eight hours, after which he and his wife were shot dead by another force; the report was quoted in Haaretz, Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye and the Spanish newspaper Público, and a month after publication the IDF Spokesperson said the event had been examined and a Military Police investigation opened. These stories show the second-decade HaMakom applying its founding method — field testimony, documents and persistence — to the most sensitive subject in Israeli public life.

Place in Israeli media

The Hottest Place in Hell occupies a specific and now institutional place in Israeli media. It is catalogued among Israel's news sites alongside the country's largest outlets, but its scale and method are those of a boutique investigative newsroom: a handful of staff, no advertising, capped reader donations, and a record of stories that larger organisations then followed. Its documented firsts and effects include helping to set Israel's Me Too movement in motion, forcing a change in Government Press Office credentialing for digital journalists, defeating a million-shekel defamation suit by the Bar Association, and sustaining, through the Independent Press Union merger, a shared administrative home for three independent outlets that refuse owners and advertisers. Its name, borrowed from a saying about the moral price of neutrality, functions as a standing editorial instruction, quoted by its founders: not to shelter under the consensus, and to treat silence, in a time of moral crisis, as betrayal. Whether measured by prizes, court outcomes or the agenda-setting of its investigations, the Tel Aviv site has demonstrated for more than a decade that this model can survive in the Israeli market — precariously, at about 120,000 shekels a month of founder investment in its independent years, but durably enough to become part of the structure of Israel's independent press.