The camera belonging to the Palestinian photojournalist Mariam Dagga. Five of those killed in Monday’s attack were journalists who had worked as contractors for The Associated Press, Reuters, Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye. Photo / AFP
Journalists endure the same harrowing reality as other Gazans: hunger and the constant threat of death. Those challenges risk further stifling what the world hears about the war.
The Israeli strikes that killed five journalists in a Gaza Strip hospital Monday were the latest episode in what has been an incredibly deadly conflict for Palestinian journalists, who have often served as the world’s on-the-ground witnesses to Israel’s campaign.
“It’s reached the point where I’m scared to report,” said Gevara al-Safadi, a photographer who works with Al-Kofiya, a Palestinian broadcaster. Such fears and the deadly risks of reporting in Gaza could further stifle the amount of information coming out of the war.
Israel has barred international journalists from freely entering Gaza to cover the war and has killed some Palestinian reporters it claimed were members of Hamas or other militant groups. More than 190 media workers, the great majority of them Palestinian, have been killed since the war began in October 2023, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The episode Monday began after Israel first struck Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, hitting one of the journalists, said Abdullah al-Attar, a freelance journalist who was present. As other reporters and emergency medical workers rushed to the scene, Israeli forces struck again, killing a total of 20 people and wounding several others, health officials said. Al-Attar’s account was corroborated by the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Five of those killed were journalists who had worked as contractors for The Associated Press, Reuters, Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye. The Israeli military named six other people it said were militants killed in the attack. The strikes were intended to hit a camera that Israeli troops believed was tracking them, the military said.
The conflict has been exceptionally deadly for Palestinians in Gaza as a whole: more than 60,000 people, including thousands of children and other non-combatants, have been killed, according to local health officials. The war began after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing about 1200 people, mostly civilians, and seizing around 250 hostages.
Alongside its military campaign in Gaza, the Israeli Government has waged a relentless battle to control the narrative about the fighting. In addition to only allowing international journalists who are accompanied by the military into Gaza, it has disputed the motives and objectivity of many Palestinian reporters working inside the enclave, arguing that they are under Hamas’ thumb.
Hamas ruled Gaza with an iron fist after seizing control of the enclave in 2007. Human rights groups say the armed group frequently arrested its critics, as well as brutally cracking down on demonstrations against its rule.
Tahseen al-Astal, the Gaza-based deputy head of the Palestinian journalists union, agreed that Hamas had clamped down on freedom of the press. But he added that Israel’s actions were aimed at allowing it to promote its version of events without restraint.
“Israel doesn’t want the world to see the magnitude of what’s happening here,” al-Astal said.
Asked for comment on the rationale behind the ban on allowing international media to freely report in Gaza, Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesperson, said it was “security-related”. He did not respond to a request for more details.
Like almost every other person in Gaza, Palestinian reporters have been forced to repeatedly flee for their lives and have struggled to provide food for their families amid widespread shortages and hunger. At times, they have also had to report on the deaths of friends, colleagues and loved ones.
“They are subject to the same kind of horrific deprivation that the rest of the Gazan population is subject to,” said Jodie Ginsberg, the head of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “They are constantly displaced. They are working from housing that is extremely precarious.”
Unlike journalists reporting from other combat zones, Palestinian reporters in Gaza cannot leave the front lines to rest and recover. Israel and Egypt let almost no one out of the enclave except for aid workers, dual nationals and the severely sick or wounded.
“When I’m working and the military orders us to evacuate, I have to scramble to find us a new place to live,” al-Safadi said. “You’re working as a journalist, but you also have to support your displaced family.”
Al-Safadi has been caught in the crossfire. In late July, an Israeli airstrike hit a nearby home in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood of Gaza City, wounding him and his young daughter with shrapnel, he said.
“There’s a lot of fear, and there’s no protection,” he added.
At times, the Israeli military has also deliberately attacked and killed Palestinian reporters it claimed belonged to Hamas’ armed wing, the Qassam Brigades. Several were employees of Al Jazeera, a Qatari-owned broadcaster, which called the allegations baseless.
One of them was Anas al-Sharif, 28, a reporter for Al Jazeera who had become a familiar face to people across the Arab world as one of the last journalists in northern Gaza, much of which has been razed by Israeli forces. Al-Sharif contributed to a Pulitzer Prize-winning set of photos submitted by Reuters in 2024 for coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
Earlier this month, the Israeli military struck a tent housing Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza City, killing al-Sharif. In a statement, the military said al-Sharif had belonged to the Qassam Brigades – a charge rejected by al-Sharif and Al Jazeera months ago.
Israel never accused the other three Al Jazeera journalists and two freelancers killed alongside al-Sharif of having ties to militants. Nor did the Israeli military explain why it had decided to attack al-Sharif on that day, months after it had accused him of Hamas membership.
Israeli officials frequently accuse Al Jazeera of glorifying Hamas and regurgitating the group’s preferred narrative. Since the war in Gaza began, Israel has banned the channel from operating in its sovereign territory and has shuttered its offices in the West Bank.
In the case of al-Sharif, the Israeli military said his name had appeared in at least three internal Hamas directories listing members of the Qassam Brigades. None of the documents could be independently verified, and the most recent one was from 2023.
Al-Sharif occasionally wrote social media posts supportive of Hamas, including the October 7 attacks.
In one Telegram post from October 2023, al-Sharif uploaded an image of someone pressing his shoe on to the face of a man in an Israeli military uniform.
“Whenever morale gets low! Remember that we stomped on their heads in the middle of their military bases,” al-Sharif wrote.
Some Palestinians also had reservations about al-Sharif’s coverage, which they said echoed Hamas’ talking points. When protests against Hamas erupted in northern Gaza earlier this year, Al Jazeera initially ignored them.
“Rallies in northern Gaza are calling for an end to the war and the genocide,” al-Sharif reported at the time, without mentioning the demonstration’s anti-Hamas slogans.
Like some other colleagues at Al Jazeera, al-Sharif appeared to have a good working relationship with the Qassam Brigades, though that alone does not make him a member of the group or a combatant. In his broadcasts, he referred to them as “resistance fighters”.
Voicing support for an armed group, however, would not on its own make al-Sharif a legitimate target, said Ginsberg, the journalists’ rights activist.
“If his crime is that he supported Hamas – that does not make you a combatant, and it doesn’t justify his killing,” Ginsberg said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Aaron Boxerman
Photographs by: Saher Alghorra
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