A colleague of well-known Palestinian journalist Wael al-Dahdouh said of him that he “looked beyond the catastrophe that befell him as if he was telling us that it is the tragedy of the Palestinian people that needs to be covered.”
Wael works in the field, witnessing the destruction as he reports it. It is already too close to home when it is your own country or city, but on Oct. 25, he received a phone call while he was on the air, that his entire family had been killed in an airstrike. Most of them died and those that survived were badly injured.
He continued working for the press soon after the tragedy.
Journalists are supposed to be protected, and in fact they are protected under international humanitarian law. Article 79 of Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions says so: “journalists in war zones must be treated as civilians and protected as such.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports that “nearly 75% of journalists killed in 2023 died in Israel’s war on Gaza.” As of April 21, 97 journalists have been killed, or about five a week during the first few months. Local Palestinian groups say the number is over 100. It is dangerous to be in Palestine, but as a journalist it is even more risky.
Jack Mirkinson writes in The Nation, “The speed at which so many journalists have been killed is something we have never experienced in modern history.”
Unlike other conflicts, war coverage of Gaza has come from local Palestinian journalists rather than the typical Western media. This is because of complete border access denial for foreign media outlets due to heavy airstrikes by the IDF and other Israeli policy. Foreign journalists who have been able to cross the border were on the backs of Israeli tanks.
American journalist Azmat Khan, who has reported from several war zones, stated that “there have been efforts to invest in Gazan journalists for years, so you have this incredible crop of reporters that have come up.”
Many of the journalists in Gaza have been using social media to disperse the information that they have gathered, increasing accessibility as well as providing an important primary source account.
Motaz Azaiza, a photojournalist who recently had to leave Gaza after 108 days, had captured images and posted them to Instagram to the more than 18 million people who follow his account. He told CNN, “I want to capture the beauty of Gaza, not the war on Gaza. But I don’t have the option.”
Journalism shows the world the reality in Gaza. It is the only way that we know the desperate situation people are existing in, and how the media has been apprehended and combated by those who are inflicting the suffering of civilians.
However, Israel does not show images of Gaza in their media, further isolating Palestinian journalists. If anything, it is people pleasing journalism and completely voluntary. “[Israeli media] sees its duty as enhancing the Israeli position,” Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who writes for the publication Ha’aretz, said.
Most of the media portrayal of Israel’s war on Gaza includes footage and images of soldiers to codify the pride of the Israelis and dismiss the suffering of the Palestinians.
Mainstream media has a lot of power, and when that is aligned with the government’s interest to support the military, it is not an accurate portrayal of the situation. To say the death toll does not paint a picture. When the Palestinian journalists taking the photos and writing the stories are targeted and killed, who do we look towards to understand what is happening to the people?
Where is the global outrage?
Now, the deaths of journalists around the world are frequently described as if they were soldiers: “in the line of duty.” Mirkinson writes that “Journalists who die are often referred to as martyrs – people who gave their lives for a noble cause.”
What has happened to Palestinian journalists in Gaza is incomparable and so much worse than anything the journalism community has seen or “dealt” with. We can clearly see the global relevance and outrage of previous killings of journalists such as Jamaal Khashoggi and those held in prisons unjustly, many of whom receiving Nobel Peace and Pulitzer Prizes.
But our collective response is just not the same. We are effectively ignoring the journalists who have been intentionally killed. For example, Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah was killed on October 14 when an Israeli airstrike “hit the exact spot seven journalists were standing,” according to Reporters Without Borders, wounding several of his colleagues. A second strike injured a team of Al Jazeera reporters.
The Israeli army declared that it was “sorry,” and that they would investigate it.
Where is the global outrage?
In an Aljazeera report, “(Jodie Ginsberg) said Western ‘hesitancy’ to show solidarity with those targeted and killed in Gaza was ‘sadly unsurprising’ given that Israel is ‘the country, the issue that has divided international media, international politicians more than anything.’” Ginsberg is the president of the CPJ.
Israel has used a propaganda strategy to garner support from The United States and a multitude of other Western countries: to oppose Israel in their current siege is to be antisemitic. To question “the assertions” of Oct. 7 has been likened to Holocaust denial, all of this heightened by Israeli media.
We can see that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and others in the Israeli government are using Oct. 7 to justify Israel’s siege of Gaza and of the West Bank. In an official statement on Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, Netanyahu said, “all of the places which Hamas is deployed, hiding and operating in, that wicked city, we will turn them into rubble.”
When talking about the attack on Oct. 7, we cannot overlook the catastrophe. However, to refer to a city as wicked in an official statement as the prime minister is belligerent. A city is made up of people. A city, a country, is made up of journalists.
The CPJ has listed all 97 of the journalists and media workers who were killed, injured or went missing. Each person has their name, date of death and a small bibliography. There are links to social media accounts of the deceased people documenting what their world looked like.
It is chilling to scroll for so long on that page. The first person documented on the list died from being shot by the Israeli army while collecting flour from a humanitarian aid delivery.