WASHINGTON — Congress may consider a resolution condemning Middle Eastern nations that imprison journalists following testimony yesterday that detailed widespread harassment of reporters in many Arab states.

Rep. Gary Ackerman, a Democrat of New York and a senior member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, said yesterday he would introduce a measure denouncing the use of intimidation and other strong-arm tactics against journalists in the Middle East.

The moves comes at the urging of press freedom advocates who appeared before a House panel convened by Mr. Ackerman yesterday to examine “censorship and incitement in the Arab world.”

While the resolution would likely be symbolic in nature, the advocates view it as a step toward the kind of international pressure that they say represents the best hope for expanding press freedom in the region.

At yesterday’s hearing, representatives from the Committee to Protect Journalists, Freedom House, and the Anti-Defamation League described a climate for reporters in the Arab world that remains severely restrictive and often dangerous, despite some modest progress in recent years brought on by the rise of satellite television and Internet blogs that are more difficult for governments to control.

“The challenge for promoting press freedom in the Arab world today is as difficult as ever,” the Middle East program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, Joel Campagna, testified to the committee.

In oral and written testimony, Mr. Campagna and a senior program manager at Freedom House, Richard Eisendorf, told of a leading blogger in Saudi Arabia, Fouad al-Farhan, who has been detained without charges for the past six weeks, apparently for using his Web site to criticize the government and voice support for political prisoners.

Mr. Eisendorf told the committee of the editor of an Egyptian newspaper critical of the government, Abdel Halim Kandil, who in 2004 was abducted late at night and taken in an unmarked van to an isolated desert outside Cairo, where he was stripped naked, beaten, and abandoned.

Mr. Eisendorf testified that in Iran, a blogger who campaigned for greater Internet freedom, Arash Sigarchi, was sentenced to three years in prison in 2006 for “insulting the Supreme Guide” and publishing “propaganda against the regime.”

The degree of press freedom in the Arab world varies by country, Messrs. Campagna and Eisendorf testified. They said that while many states showed signs of progress earlier in the decade due to the expansion of Web journalism, countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, and Syria have cracked down on Internet dissent in recent years.

Government officials have increasingly targeted bloggers and have expanded power in other ways, such as by monopolizing the ownership of Internet service providers and enacting laws to control Web publishing, the advocates said. In Syria, for example, the law mandates that the writer’s name and e-mail address appear next to any online article or post.

Countries have also increasingly blocked Web sites that could contain criticism of the government. Mr. Eisendorf said that a oft-recited joke in many Arab states is, “The most popular Web site in the country is ‘This page cannot be displayed.'”

Messrs. Campagna and Eisendorf said satellite television stations, such as Qatar-based Al Jazeera, have been more successful at avoiding harassment and prosecution in the Middle East. They urged Congress to ramp up pressure on Arab states to expand press freedom, including issuing specific calls for the release of journalists currently in prison. They also said that the often camera-friendly politicians in Washington could help by accepting offers to appear as guests on Arab television, which they said could encourage an open dialogue and exchange of ideas.

The hearing yesterday also examined what Mr. Ackerman termed “the ugly adjunct” of censorship and restrictions on a free press: the space left open when it comes to anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, and for incitement to violence.

“Not only is space left open,” Mr. Ackerman said at the outset, “but in some cases, these loopholes in censorship for hate are exploited by government proxies, or even, by Arab governments themselves.”

A deputy director of the Anti-Defamation League, Kenneth Jacobson, said that increased anti-Semitism and propagating of negative Jewish stereotypes, particularly through editorial cartoons, represented an “obstacle to peace” in the region.

He urged lawmakers to take a stronger stance in pressing leaders of Arab states to publicly denounce anti-Semitism in the press, and he said the issue should be a fixture in negotiations between Israel and Palestinian Arabs.