It is the Day of Solidarity with Gaza’s Journalists!
We must therefore do something unusual for us as journalists, those of us who have never really drawn a line between the victim and ourselves. To say that we are standing in solidarity with ourselves is not true. We are not journalists standing with journalists; we are raising our voices for colleagues whom the Israeli army decided to kill—and, sadly, succeeded. The story is perfectly clear: journalists in Gaza are a direct target of Israeli army fire. They are not “collateral damage”; they are, alongside civilians, at the heart of the extermination mission.
In recent months of Gaza’s tragedy, when we moved from writing about a war crime to writing about a war of extermination, we began asking our colleagues there to write about themselves. Mohammad wrote about his little daughter who was wounded in the shelling; Fathi wrote about techniques for resisting hunger with salt; and Mustafa wrote about his son who was killed in the middle of the Strip.
They are our journalists: no distance remains between them and the story. They have become the story. The journalists’ tent was bombed repeatedly, and dozens of colleagues were killed in direct targeting. The machinery of extermination decided that Palestinian journalists are among its objectives, because they alone are the ones documenting the facts of the crime. In Gaza, there are no journalists except these local reporters. International media are barred from entering, and the mission assigned by the Israeli government to its army requires that the world not witness the crime. And if the mission requires blackout, it also requires killing Gaza’s journalists, so that we will not see what is happening.
But what can we do in the face of this announced killing of journalists in the Gaza Strip? Is it enough to drape our screens in black? Their stories have become part of the rhythm of our newsrooms. We arrive at the office in the morning and start tracking their updates: Where did Mohammad Abu Shahma move with his family after the Israeli army ordered the evacuation of Rafah? How is Mustafa Ibrahim managing with half a house left in Gaza City?
Should we feel guilty about what our colleagues there are enduring? Yes, that is the least we should feel. Saying that we are powerless to do anything to help them does not answer the question posed by the catastrophe we witness around the clock. We must do something. It is no longer useful merely to relay what is happening; the news reaches wherever it needs to go before we even write it. The images of queues of the hungry, and the soldier who takes aim and kills, do not need us to add anything. We must pivot in our work: we should write the story of the soldier who fires on the hungry. The world must know who this soldier is, why he agreed to carry out the mission, and what story he will tell his children when he returns home. We must photograph their faces, in the hope that someone will go back to find them where they live, ask them what they did, and hold them to account. What is happening in the Strip is no longer only a matter of public concern; it is also the choice of individuals who decided to take part in perpetrating extermination.
The victims have their stories—stories that have been torn apart—and the perpetrators, too, have their stories.
We are nothing more than newsrooms exhausted by the event. But what about you, as you chase evacuation orders from Rafah to Al-Mawasi, and from Khan Younis to Gaza City? Today is not only your day; it is all of ours—the day of Gaza’s journalists, who have themselves become the story.
