The struggle of Gaza journalists to stay alive another day

BarcelonaGazan journalist Abu Salim cannot hold back his tears when he speaks to ARA about the murder of his colleagues on Sunday night in an Israeli drone attack on the tent where they lived and worked, outside Al Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza. His friend Mohamed al Khaldi died in the attack, along with Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al Sharif and the rest of his team, who were covering the war from Gaza City for the Qatari network. "We are devastated, sad, depressed. And we are very scared."

For Abu Salim, who had been the protection officer for the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate in Gaza, Israel's objective is clear: to eliminate the witnesses. The murder of the Al Jazeera team in Gaza City comes two days later.and the Israeli government announced a ground offensive on the city, as the final blow against the Gaza Strip, after 22 months of indiscriminate bombing. "When Israel cleared two-thirds of Palestine in 1948 and forced 700,000 Palestinians to leave their land, there were no cameras or journalists. Now they want to invade Gaza City and the press is bothering them, because even in the worst conditions we are explaining the truth: against the bomb. Doing so must eliminate journalists.

Just hours before being assassinated, Al Sharif had taken down a message on X warning of "intense and concentrated bombing in eastern and southern Gaza." He had become known throughout the world for his tenacious coverage of the situation in the north of the Strip, the hardest hit by Israel in these almost two years of indiscriminate war, from the Arabic channel Al Jazeera. UN Secretary General António Guterres has called for an international investigation into the attack.

During these 22 months of Israel's genocidal offensive in the Gaza Strip, at least 238 journalists and media workers have been killed, according to the Hamas government, a figure corroborated by organizations such as the Committee to Protect Journalists and the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Expression. This figure is unprecedented in our times: it exceeds the journalists killed in World War I, World War II, and the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined. Many of these murders have been deliberate, as in the case of Anas al-Sharif, whom Israeli authorities have accused for months of being a Hamas operative without providing evidence. Mostefa Souag, director general of Al Jazeera, has warned that "ordering the assassination of Anas al-Sharif, one of the bravest journalists in Gaza, and his colleagues is a desperate attempt to silence the voice of truth before the implementation of the plan to invade Gaza City."

The flip side of this policy of silencing is the complete blockade of independent international press entry into the Gaza Strip. As international law expert Jonathan Kuttab points out, this is a "deliberate policy of silencing, of removing any credible witnesses from the crime scene, and Al Jazeera was the only internationally credible network left in Gaza, which is why it has been hit."

Threatened and abandoned

Mahmoud Abu Salama, a journalist from northern Gaza and a colleague of Al Sharif, who has also been explicitly threatened by Israel, breaks down when he remembers his dead friend and attacks the complicity of a world that impassively watches the genocide. "There's no way to explain the abandonment of everyone who has seen and knows what's happening to us. Israel's Nazi army didn't stop until they killed him and his other colleagues, but we will continue the coverage from where they left off." Journalist Hind Khoudary, who has covered the Israeli offensive since October 7, 2023, for Al Jazeera's English-language channel, has expressed similar sentiment. "I will not speak to foreign media about the murder of Palestinian journalists. I will not participate in your global channels to be part of a segment that will be forgotten tomorrow: for you, we are a headline and that's it, a tragedy to be consumed, not colleagues to be defended. They are persecuting us and killing us, who, because we are Palestinians, do not really see us as colleagues."

Abu Salama, Khoudary, and the other journalists who continue to work tirelessly in the Gaza Strip do so in unimaginable conditions, literally risking their lives every day. Journalists work around hospitals because it's the only place where they have internet access and can charge computers, cameras, and phones. They also face a lack of fuel, which forces them to walk long distances to cover and verify news, even though they suffer.with the same hunger as 95% of the population of the Strip. Or the difficulties of finding a half-destroyed apartment or a tent in which to take refuge with their families: no one wants to live next to journalists because it's too dangerous.

"In Gaza, a camera is no longer a tool for documenting: it's a heavy weight on fragile shoulders struggling not to give in to hunger. Female journalists cover massacres while they search with their eyes for a piece of bread, while their male colleagues tighten their belts. We fight not to get information but to stay alive until the war is over," explains Palestinian journalist Mona Khodor. A few days ago, journalist Beda'a Ma'mar broke down during a live broadcast in which she was covering a massacre: "Yes, I'm talking to you, and I'm very hungry. I don't know what will happen when I get home and have nothing for my children's dinner." The reality is that what happens behind the cameras in Gaza is much worse than what the images show, which are fewer and fewer every day and from more limited areas. Gaza's journalists are witnesses to the genocide against themselves.

One of the things that makes the Gaza genocide different from other genocides that have been perpetrated before in the world is that it is televised live. But with each passing day, fewer witnesses remain on the ground. Khodor warns: "We are facing a historic moment in which those telling the story can no longer bear it. Gaza's journalists are like the victims filming, calling out to a deaf world, their voices broken by hunger and bombs. But who is listening to them?" We are becoming deafer and blinder in Gaza.