It’s becoming impossible to report from Gaza
-Journalists are trying to report the news while fleeing for their lives
By Laura Wagner
Source: The Washington Post
Over the years, NPR has relied on Anas Baba to be its eyes and ears within Gaza. This past week was no exception.
The Palestinian producer interviewed civilians seeking shelter from Israeli airstrikes at Gaza City’s main hospital, where hallways were crowded with the wounded and dying. Later, he called in an eyewitness account of young children traveling on foot for dozens of miles in an attempt to evacuate the city. The reporting took “a lot of effort and a lot of luck,” said Aya Batrawy, an NPR correspondent coordinating with Baba from Jerusalem on a story that aired Friday about horrific conditions inside the besieged enclave.
But meanwhile, Baba was contending with challenges that some journalists within Gaza are describing as the worst in memory.
“I was forced to leave my job … to go to my family in order to evacuate them,” he told NPR over a scratchy phone line last week, only to find that other neighborhoods were just as dangerous. “… Where am I going to hide them? Is there any safe place in Gaza?”
The flow of information in war zones is often halting and unpredictable, but given the scale of Israel’s assault — which U.N. experts have warned amounts to “collective punishment” in violation of international law — journalists are facing unprecedented challenges in obtaining and sharing information.
While major U.S. networks scrambled to ship star TV anchors to the relative safety of Israel, journalists within the 140-square-mile Gaza Strip are contending with a massive bombing campaign, electrical and internet outages, food and water shortages, and the psychological burden of reporting on the unfolding humanitarian crisis while living it themselves.
Reporting at Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital, BBC Arabic reporter Adnan Elbursh and his team discovered their own neighbors, relatives and friends among those injured and killed.
“This is my local hospital. Inside are my friends, my neighbors. This is my community,” Elbursh said on-air. “Today has been one of the most difficult days in my career. I have seen things I can never unsee.”
In the days since an Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel killed more than 1,400 people, Israel’s retaliatory assault has killed more than 2,700 people in Gaza. Eleven Palestinian journalists and three Israeli journalists have been killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. On Friday, Israeli shelling near the Lebanon border killed Issam Abdallah, a Beirut-based journalist for Reuters, and wounded six other journalists, an incident international press freedom monitors condemned.
“Journalists are civilians doing important work during times of crisis,” said Sherif Mansour, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, in a statement, “and must not be targeted by warring parties.”
In an interview, Mansour said Israel’s recent history of targeting media exacerbated the current reporting crisis in Gaza. In May 2021, Israel bombed a building in Gaza that housed the offices for 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 had been killed in crossfire with Palestinian fighters, but numerous independent investigations, including by The Washington Post, concluded that Israeli forces were probably responsible.
Mansour said these cases have changed the risk calculations for international journalists — leaving local photo and freelance journalists to do the job of covering conflict in Gaza and the West Bank.
“They are the most needed, and they are also the ones who live there on the ground,” Mansour said. “The nature of their work requires them to be on the front lines, often without good equipment, without any safety resources or a dedicated newsroom behind them.”