[News] When the Journalists are Gone, the Stories Will Disappear

[Anti-Imperialist News]

counterpunch.org
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/10/27/when-the-journalists-are-gone-the-stories-will-disappear/>
When the Journalists are Gone, the Stories Will Disappear
Vijay Prashad – Zoe Alexandra - October 27, 2023
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[image: Screenshot-2023-10-27-at-8.05.24 AM-600x429.png]

Al Jazeera’s Gaza Bureau Chief Wael al-Dahdouh at the hospital, after
learning his family had been killed in an airstrike.

Every few hours we check the social media timeline of Muhammed Smiry, the
Gaza-based Palestinian journalist. He has been walking the ruined streets
of Gaza, documenting everyday life amidst Israeli bombs and the impact they
have had on Palestinian life. Close to seven thousand Palestinians have
been killed in the Israeli barrage, and any one of them could have been
Muhammed. “I am still alive,” he wrote
<https://twitter.com/MuhammadSmiry/status/1711596332018770379> on October
10. A few days later, Muhammed wrote
<https://twitter.com/MuhammadSmiry/status/1712791323638403208>, “I am still
alive. I can’t tell you how bad the situation is in Gaza.” On Telegram,
Muhammed wrote, “Nowhere is safe in Gaza.” His Telegram timeline is
horrifying – so many killed here, so many killed there. It is unrelenting.

Journalists in Gaza with whom we are texting tell us that they are charging
their phone with repurposed car batteries and with small solar devices.
They are covered with dust, some of it – they say – the incinerated bodies
of Palestinians blown to bits in their homes.

Since Israel began this unrelenting bombing of Gaza, journalists – many of
them Palestinian – have been posting pictures in real time of the
airstrikes and their victims, entire families wiped out in a flash. They
tell us about the difficulties of survival for those who do not die, people
trying desperately to access food, water, and some energy. “I want to die
with my family,” says a journalist in a text.

*I was just reporting….*

Not long after that text is sent, Wael al-Dahdouh, al-Jazeera’s bureau
chief in Gaza, learns that an Israeli airstrike hit the house where he had
been living in the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza. His wife, daughter, and
son have been killed immediately. They had left their home in central Gaza
and headed southwards, following the instructions of the Israeli military.
Dahdouh saw his family’s bodies at al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir
al-Balah. “What happened is clear,” he told al-Jazeera while he rushed to
the hospital. “This is a series of targeted attacks on children, women, and
civilians. I was just reporting from Yarmouk about such an attack, and the
Israeli raids have targeted many areas, including Nuseirat.”

Dahdouh and his team have been central to the coverage of this bombardment.
Brave journalists, including those who work for al-Jazeera, have gone from
streets to hospitals, covering the screams of parents and the quivering of
children. Dust, debris, and blood is the canvas of their stories. There are
videos of heroic rescue teams, rushing on foot because the ambulances have
no fuel, trying to dig out survivors from the rubble. Text messages from
beneath the shattered concrete cry for help. Some of them are dug out, but
many die, their bodies buried deep underneath the buildings that have been
hit by powerful bombs. Half of the population of Gaza is beneath the age of
18, and half of the dead are young people – children, really, who have no
idea about why they are being hit so hard by a government led by a man who
says
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/10/25/benjamin-netanyahu-israel-preparing-ground-invasion-gaza/>
he wants to fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah. “We are the people of light,”
said Benjamin Netanyahu, “and they are the people of darkness.” Underneath
the concrete, Netanyahu’s cruel vision comes true.

*Dangerous assignment.*

Reporters never have an easy time in a war zone, particularly if one of the
combatants sees them as part of the enemy in the information war. Walk into
al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and the first thing you see are
the clothes worn by Tareq Ayoub (age 35). Tareq worked at the network’s
Baghdad bureau office – whose coordinates had been given to the United
States military as a precaution. On April 8, 2003, Tareq – a Jordanian
national – was reporting on the violence in Iraq when the United States
bombed the office and killed him, leaving his wife Dima and his
one-year-old child Fatima. Tareq was the twelfth journalist killed in Iraq,
and he would be followed by many more (one report
<https://cpj.org/data/killed/mideast/iraq/?status=Killed&motiveConfirmed%5B%5D=Confirmed&motiveUnconfirmed%5B%5D=Unconfirmed&type%5B%5D=Journalist&type%5B%5D=Media%20Worker&cc_fips%5B%5D=IZ&start_year=1992&end_year=2023&group_by=location>
counts 283 journalists killed in Iraq since the US began its illegal war in
2003).

We remember names of journalists killed in the wars because their deaths
were spectacular or we knew them personally, but otherwise they are
forgotten, part of the anonymity of the war dead.

The database
<https://cpj.org/data/killed/2023/?status=Killed&motiveConfirmed%5B%5D=Confirmed&motiveUnconfirmed%5B%5D=Unconfirmed&type%5B%5D=Journalist&type%5B%5D=Media%20Worker&cc_fips%5B%5D=IS&start_year=2017&end_year=2023&group_by=location>
at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) counts twenty-two journalists
killed in the Occupied Territory of Palestine – most of them due to
“dangerous assignment.” This is a strange designation. Salam Mema (age 32)
was the head of the Women Journalists Committee at the Palestinian Media
Assembly. She was at her home in the Jabalia camp in the northern Gaza
Strip on October 13, 2023, when an Israeli airstrike levelled it. Her
“dangerous assignment” was to be Palestinian and to live in Palestine.

The CPJ database does not yet have the name of Duaa Sharaf, a presenter for
Al-Aqsa Radio and a Facebook friend of one of us. Duaa, like Salam Mema,
was at home early in the morning of October 26 with her young daughter in
the al-Zawaida area in central Gaza. Israeli fighter jets fired not one
missile but many into her home. Duaa was, it seems, on a “dangerous
assignment,” waking up with her daughter to make some food and rush off to
be on the radio.

*Murder.*

Al-Jazeera has lost many reporters in the conflicts from Iraq to Libya (Ali
Hassan al-Jaber, a cameraman, was killed in Suluq, Libya, on March 13,
2011; one of us knew him in Doha, where he worked for Qatar TV). The most
dramatic of the killings of al-Jazeera journalists appears in the CPJ
database under “Murder” not “Dramatic Assignment,” and that is the murder
of Shireen Abu Akleh on May 11, 2022, in Jenin, Palestine by the Israeli
military. The Israelis argued that Abu Akleh was shot by Palestinian
gunmen, in the same way as they argued that the airstrike on the Al-Ahli
Arab Hospital in Gaza, City on October 17, 2023, was actually a rocket
strike by Islamic Jihad.

Despite the numbers of these deaths and the danger of the war zone, more
and more reporters go out there – bravely – to tell the stories that need
to be told. Thanks to the reporters in Gaza who are uploading pictures and
videos on their ordinary phones, and who are writing posts on telegram and
Facebook, we are able to pierce the ugly multi-billion-dollar *hasbara* or
propaganda machine of the Israeli government. The atrocities depicted and
evidenced in their work have in a significant way been responsible for the
mass outpouring of support for the Palestinian struggle and the
overwhelming condemnation of Israel’s actions.

*Say their names*.

Each tweet we read, each picture we see, reminds us of the journalists who
are putting their lives on the line, some of them being targeted by the
Israeli war machine. Say their names, these journalists murdered in a
vicious war. Say their names. Say their names:

+  Mohammed Imad Labad

+ Roshdi Sarraj

+ Mohammed Ali

+ Khalil Abu Aathra

+ Sameeh Al-Nady

+ Mohammad Balousha

+ Issam Bhar

+ Abdulhadi Habib

+ Yousef Maher Dawas

+ Salam Mema

+ Husam Mubarak

+ Issam Abdallah

+ Ahmed Shehab

+ Mohamed Fayez Abu Matar

+ Saeed al-Taweel

+ Mohammed Sobh

+ Hisham Alnwajha

+ Assaad Shamlakh

+ Mohammad Al-Salhi

+ Mohammad Jarghoun

+ Ibrahim Mohammad Lafi

+ Duaa Sharaf
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