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Amira Yassin’s job as a journalist operating inside Gaza was hugely challenging even before Israel launched its bombardment of the territory nearly two weeks ago.
Now it is fraught with danger, with the Al Hurra correspondent forced to move from place to place and work from different and more difficult locations — under the constant threat from Israeli missiles — in an effort to deliver the news about the unfolding conflict.
“I’ve covered all the wars and Israeli escalations in Gaza, but I’ve not faced anything more difficult than the current situation,” said Yassin. “I left my home when the war started on October 7, and I’ve not been able to go back since.”
She and other journalists in Gaza, some seasoned war correspondents, are working under the toughest conditions they have faced in the packed coastal enclave that has endured four previous wars between Israel and Hamas since 2008.
The Israeli military launched its latest Gaza offensive in response to the October 7 assault by Hamas, which controls the strip, on Israel that killed more than 1,400 people, according to Israeli officials. The multipronged attack by the Islamist group was the worst single attack in Israel since the Jewish state was founded in 1948. Israeli strikes on Gaza have killed 3,785 people since the conflict began, according to Palestinian officials.
At least 21 of those were journalists, according to a tally by the Committee to Protect Journalists, a non-profit group that defends the free press. Seventeen were Palestinian and three were from Israel. One journalist from Lebanon has also been killed.
This had been the “deadliest time for journalists in Gaza for over 20 years”, said Sherif Mansour, the CPJ’s Middle East and north Africa programme co-ordinator.
Mansour pointed out that many of the Gazans killed were freelance reporters and photojournalists eking out a living in the impoverished territory. “The number of international journalists has dwindled over the years. Many journalists now say it is too dangerous to work,” he said.
Yassin, whose Arabic language channel is backed by the US government, was forced to evacuate the Al Hurra offices in Gaza City’s now-levelled Rimal district with her team early in the conflict.
At first they worked from a local hospital, but the facility thronged with displaced people, and the internet was too unreliable. When Israel ordered more than 1mn residents of northern Gaza to evacuate to the south of the territory, they took to the road.
“I rejoined my family and, wearing my helmet and flak jacket, we walked to Khan Younis,” Yassin said, referring to the town in southern Gaza.
Yassin admitted that she felt “conflicted between my responsibility as a journalist and my responsibility towards my family”.
“I sometimes hesitate to answer calls from my young daughter because I can’t bear to hear her cry. Friends of my eldest were martyred in the bombardment and I couldn’t be with her to console her,” she said.
Gazan journalists, like everyone stuck in the hemmed-in territory, not only live in fear for loved ones but must devote time to finding food, water and shelter and to matters of hygiene. “I’ve had to go to the nearby home of strangers who are friends of friends in order to shower,” Yassin said.
Some have even been forced to stop reporting because communications with the outside world have become too challenging. “We managed to work with great difficulty during the first six days of the war,” said Fathy Sabbah, editor of the Palestinian news website Masdar. “Then, because of power cuts and poor internet, we had to stop.”
The difficulties of reporting from Gaza, and the fact that international journalists are now unable to travel there, have helped create what some believe is an imbalance in how the suffering of Palestinians is portrayed in the media in comparison with that of Israelis.
“There are scores of international journalists in Israel who can cover every detail of every atrocity that’s taken place there, but there’s nothing of similar depth available when it comes to the incredible civilian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza,” according to H A Hellyer, senior associate fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute.
He said this relative lack of coverage showing Gazans struggling with the devastation wrought by the Israeli bombardment — families coping with the loss of several members at once, digging loved ones from under the rubble, or rushing bloodied victims to overwhelmed hospitals — had the effect of dehumanising the conflict’s Palestinian victims.
“[It] unfortunately means we’re probably more immune to outrage about Palestinian civilian suffering than we are to Israeli civilian suffering,” he said.
Inside the territory, some journalists have taken to recounting their own personal experiences to convey the dire conditions. Rushdi Abualouf, a BBC correspondent in Gaza, this week told how he had been forced to move his family for the second time in five days after their landlord received a warning from the Israelis that a building next door was to be bombed.
“So now we’re homeless again,” he wrote in an article on the broadcaster’s website. “Honestly, I don’t know what to do — it’s hard to be a reporter and try to look after my family like this. I struggle to find food and water for them. We now don’t have a home.”
Abualouf told the Financial Times that although he tried to mask worries about his family during the coverage “this is very difficult”.
“For 20 years I’ve been covering the stories of other people and their suffering . . . but this time I’m living the story and I’m part of it,” he said.
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