It's Becoming Impossible To Report From Gaza - The Washington Post

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Over the years, NPR has relied on Anas Baba to be its eyes and ears in Gaza. Last week was no exception.

The Palestinian producer interviewed civilians seeking shelter from Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City’s main hospital, where the hallways were filled with the wounded and dying. He later cited an eyewitness account of young children walking dozens of kilometers to evacuate the city. The reporting required “a lot of effort and a lot of luck,” said Aya Batrawy, an NPR correspondent who coordinated with Baba from Jerusalem on a story aired Friday about the horrific conditions in the besieged enclave.

But meanwhile, Baba struggled with challenges that some journalists in Gaza describe as the worst in recent memory.

“I was forced to quit my job … to go and evacuate my family,” he told NPR over a scratchy phone line last week, but found that other neighborhoods were just as dangerous. “…Where should I hide them? Is there a safe place in Gaza?”

The flow of information in war zones is often halting and unpredictable, but given the scale of the Israeli attack – which UN experts say amounts to “collective punishment” in violation of international law – journalists face unprecedented challenges in obtaining and disseminating information.

While major U.S. networks scrambled to send star TV hosts to the relative safety of Israel, journalists in the 140-square-mile Gaza Strip are grappling with massive bombings, power and internet outages, food and water shortages and the psychological strain they report on looming humanitarian crisis as they experience it themselves.

BBC Arab reporter Adnan Elbursh and his team reported from al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City and discovered their own neighbors, relatives and friends among the injured and killed.

“This is my local hospital. Inside are my friends, my neighbors. This is my community,” Elbursh said on air. “Today was one of the most difficult days of my career. I’ve seen things I can never unsee.”

In the days since a Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 that killed more than 1,400 people, Israel’s retaliatory attack has killed more than 2,700 people in Gaza. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 11 Palestinian journalists and three Israeli journalists were killed. On Friday, Israeli shelling near the Lebanese border killed Issam Abdallah, a Beirut-based Portal journalist, and wounded six other journalists, an international incident Press freedom observers condemned.

“Journalists are civilians doing important work in times of crisis,” Sherif Mansour, CPJ program coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement, “and must not be targeted by warring parties.”

In an interview, Mansour said that Israel’s recent attacks on media outlets have exacerbated the current reporting crisis in Gaza. In May 2021, Israel bombed a building in Gaza that housed the offices of the Associated Press and Al Jazeera. In May 2022, Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot in the head while reporting in the West Bank. The Israeli military initially claimed that Abu Akleh was killed in crossfire with Palestinian fighters, but numerous independent investigations, including by The Washington Post, concluded that Israeli forces were likely responsible.

Mansour said these cases have changed risk calculations for international journalists – leaving local photojournalists and freelance journalists tasked with covering the conflict in Gaza and the West Bank.

“They are the most needed, and they are also the ones who live there locally,” Mansour said. “The nature of their work requires them to be on the front lines, often without good equipment, without security resources or a dedicated newsroom behind them.”

Some of these journalists have been sharing their coverage of the ongoing Israeli attack on social media in both English and Arabic, with the aim of reaching the Western world and each other. The journalist Plestia Alaqad is one of them.

With more than half a million followers on Instagram, Alaqad had been sharing several updates a day last week about evacuations, power outages and children separated from their families in the chaos. On Friday, she posted a photo of her light blue helmet labeled “Press” and wrote that she could not evacuate Gaza City because she had neither transportation nor the energy to walk. She said she had no cell service and relied on a hospital’s internet.

“I have always loved journalism and Palestine, and I am glad that I was able to share a part of the truth or a part of what is happening to the world,” she wrote, adding: “It is still until the night “Come on, I’ll see if I have any options and I’ll keep you updated if I could.”

Then her employee account remained dark for three days.

Posting again Monday morning, she explained in a video that she had been unable to access the internet — just part of the increasingly dire conditions, she said.

“The situation is becoming more and more difficult … in terms of the electricity situation, the water situation, the food situation, the medical situation,” she said. In the caption, she wrote: “I’m trying my best to stay grounded and cover up what’s happening.”

Palestinian journalists face another obstacle: Challenges to their credibility.

“There is a systematic attempt to discredit the very idea that there is such a thing as an independent Palestinian journalist,” said Thanassis Cambanis, a former Middle East journalist and director of the foreign policy think tank Century International, which he called “a damaging one.” and dangerous part of information warfare.”

The result is that Palestinian journalists face critics who are quick to dismiss their reports of death and destruction as biased, biased or even fabricated.

Even within the Gaza Strip, many people struggle to access news about what is happening around them.

Nihal al-Alami, a translator for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, fled Gaza City with her family on Friday via a bombed-out evacuation route and ended up in a stranger’s house in the southern part of Gaza.

She was desperate for relief, for news of peace. Her 9-year-old son, who had a bone marrow transplant last year, needs follow-up care “so you can feel how scared I am for him.”

Al-Alami said she has a small battery-operated radio to follow the news, as well as a network of friends and relatives living abroad who keep her up to date with important news when she can charge her phone and access the Internet . But she doesn’t know how long this will last. “We took [fuel] from our car to run the generator to pump water into the tank,” she told The Post in a WhatsApp message on Sunday.

NPR’s Batrawy also uses WhatsApp to contact people in Gaza, but that means of communication is becoming less reliable.

“The connectivity is usually pretty good and you can reach people in Gaza,” she told The Post. “Now all of a sudden you have no idea whether your messages are getting through or whether they’re trying to notify you.” She said NPR was able to reach Baba, the producer in Gaza, through a phone line, but the contact was lost occurs temporarily.

Since the start of the war, Batrawy said, she has exchanged voice notes with people in Gaza, including a medical student in Gaza City named Tasnim Ahad, whose voice can be heard in some of Batrawy’s radio reports.

Ahad’s house was bombed. Her family is displaced. She had tried to evacuate, but there is no way out of Gaza. She’s running out of water. This is the fifth war she has experienced in Gaza.

“She’s been through a lot,” Batrawy said. “She told me that sending voice notes was almost therapeutic, like someone cared. Someone is listening.”