Comment on this storyCommentAdd to your saved storiesSave
Al Jazeera English correspondent Youmna Elsayed recounted the horrific scenes in Gaza City during a live broadcast last week. Israeli warplanes roared overhead. Air raids hit the districts below.
It was not a distant battlefield. The war raged all around their home.
Their children were in a nearby room along with neighbors’ families. “Our building is literally shaking now,” she said during the Oct. 30 broadcast, as the station showed a view from a roof of columns of black smoke. Explosions echoed over Elsayed’s phone line. She was sitting alone in a quieter room in her house. Airstrikes, she explained, made her youngest child scream.
“It doesn’t feel safe at all,” she said.
For weeks, hundreds of on-the-ground journalists in Gaza have given the world an intimate look at the devastation to Palestinian lives and homes – as it happens try to find ways to survive themselves and protect their families. They calm and comfort children, search for food and water, and run between the hospitals and destroyed buildings they report, hoping no friends or relatives will be there when they arrive.
A look at some of the journalists killed in Gaza
During the conflict, Palestinian journalists have been killed at a shocking rate of at least one per day. According to various estimates, between 34 and 50 people were killed, many in Israeli attacks, according to press groups. The toll amounts to almost four percent of Gaza’s media workers.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, October was the deadliest month for journalists in more than three decades. The deaths from last month’s war included four Israeli journalists, who were among more than 1,400 people killed during the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel that sparked the conflict, and a Lebanese journalist, Issam Abdullah , who worked for Portal and was killed in southern Lebanon by rockets fired from “the direction” of Israel, the news agency said.
According to the Ministry of Health there, more than 10,000 people have been killed in the Israeli bombings and invasion of Gaza, including more than 4,000 children.
International journalists have not been able to enter the Gaza Strip because Israel and Egypt, which control the borders, have prevented them from doing so. Some foreign journalists integrated into the Israeli army during the invasion of Gaza.
The boundless global appetite for news — the worsening humanitarian disaster, the rising civilian death toll and the unfolding battle between Israel and Hamas — has increased the pressure on local reporters trying to navigate a war.
Some Palestinian journalists were not home reporting stories when strikes have killed their families. Their grieving trips to the hospital to see the bodies of their loved ones were broadcast live on television.
Salman Bashir, a Palestine TV correspondent, was on air when he heard that a colleague, Mohammed Abu Hatab, was killed in an Israeli strike that Palestinian authorities said destroyed Abu Hatab’s home. During the broadcast he tore off his blue press vest The presenter he was speaking to began sobbing.
“I felt that the armor I was wearing, which clearly bore the press badge, was not protecting me,” Bashir said in an interview. Abu Hatab’s wife, two of his sons and four of his daughters were also killed in the attack, Bashir said.
The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that it had “no knowledge of any military activity by our forces” near Abu Hatab’s home in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, on the day he and his family were killed in their home .
“The IDF does not specifically target journalists and takes measures to mitigate unintended harm to journalists and all civilians,” the statement said, adding that the military “targeted all Hamas military activities throughout the Gaza Strip.” “What results in “high intensity attacks” can lead to damage to surrounding buildings and areas.”
The Israeli military’s statement said that Hamas “also has a practice of targeting military operations near journalists and civilians.” Hamas officials have denied using civilians as “human shields.”
According to Portal, the Israeli military made a similar statement to Portal and Agence France-Presse last month when the news outlets sought assurances that their journalists would not be targeted by Israeli attacks.
“Under these circumstances, we cannot guarantee the safety of your employees and urge you to take all necessary measures for their safety,” the Israeli military said, according to Portal.
What is the difference between a ceasefire and a humanitarian pause?
If Israel targeted media, “it’s a crime,” said Shuruq As’ad, a journalist and member of the general secretariat of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, which is based in the West Bank. The syndicate counted 42 journalists or media workers killed in Gaza, two more missing people and attacks on 60 media offices, she said in a voice message The Washington Post on Tuesday.
Half an hour later, she sent another one saying the number had risen to 44 media workers. “Sorry,” she said. “We have constant updates.”
Some Gaza journalists fight with outdated equipment, such as body armor without armor plates. In recent weeks, the internet and other lines of communication to Gaza have been interrupted several times. Local stations, including radio stations, were forced to stop broadcasting and journalists began spreading news through their social media feeds.
Mahmoud Abu Hassira, a photojournalist at Palestine Online, a Hamas-affiliated publisher, was not home at his parents’ house on Saturday when an Israeli attack destroyed the building, he said. 26 members of his family were killed, including his wife, two sons and his father-in-law Mohammed Abu Hassira, who worked for the Palestinian news agency Wafa.
Mahmoud Abu Hassira said he did not believe he or his father-in-law were a target. “Israeli planes make no distinction between children, the elderly, journalists and a nurse,” he said.
In response to questions about the attack, the Israeli military said that “Hamas has been proven to operate near, under and within densely populated areas.” The statement added that the attacks on “military targets are subject to the relevant provisions of international law.”
It was dark when Abu Hassira reached his house. Using the lights on their phones, he and others were only able to recover some of the bodies trapped beneath the rubble. They were forced to stop digging and carry on the next day, he said.
“We used to deliver the news,” he said. “But now we’re the news. We are the reporting.”
Several deaths affected some close-knit circles of the journalist community in the Gaza Strip. Roshdi Sarraj, a journalist and filmmaker and co-founder of Ain Media, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on his parents’ home on October 22, according to his wife. A few weeks earlier, his friend Ibrahim Lafi was fatally shot near the Erez border crossing with Israel.
Five years ago, Yaser Murtaja, another co-founder of the production company Ain Media, was fatally shot by Israeli troops on the Israel-Gaza border.
For other journalists, survival was its own ordeal.
Elsayed, the Al Jazeera correspondent, spoke about the trauma of reporting from the hospitals: “You see dead bodies in front of you all the time. There are injuries all the time.”
“It haunts me at night. It haunts me when I want to eat. It haunts me when I want to sit and rest,” she said. “You can’t find peace.”
Israa Al-Buhaisi, a correspondent for Al-Alam, an Iranian broadcaster, said her children lived with their parents in a house that was built for 10 people but now houses 50. While reporting in Gaza’s hospitals, she had begun “scanning the faces of children arriving in the ambulances to check if any of them were mine.”
“We are afraid of a ringtone or a text message. We’re afraid of everything,” she said. “We die alive and we envy the dead.”
Harb reported from London and El Chamaa from Beirut. Hazem Balousha in Cairo, Miriam Berger in Tel Aviv, Niha Masih in Seoul and Ellen Francis in London contributed to this report.
Israel-Gaza war
Israeli forces pushed deeper into the area and neared Gaza City – a move that U.S. officials said would likely result in more casualties. As the war continues for a month of fighting, Israel’s bottom line for Gaza is no clearer. Understand what is behind the Israel-Gaza war.
Hostages: Israeli officials say Hamas militants kidnapped about 240 hostages in a highly organized attack. Four hostages – two Americans and two Israelis – have been released as families remain hopeful. A released Israeli hostage told of the “spider web” of the Gaza tunnels where she was held.
Humanitarian aid: The Palestinian Red Crescent said it had brought over 300 trucks carrying food, medicine and water into the Gaza Strip through the Egyptian Rafah border crossing. However, the PRCS said there is still no approval for the importation of fuel that powers the enclave’s hospitals, water pumps, taxis and more.
Israeli-Palestinian conflict: The Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip has a complicated history and its rulers have long been at odds with the Palestinian Authority, the U.S.-backed government in Gaza West Bank. Here is a timeline of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.