Goodbye, Hassan. You knew they were going to kill you.

I woke up with news that I had hoped, maybe naively, would never come. At 7 a.m. yesterday, my wife woke me up to tell me that my colleague and renowned Gaza journalist, Hassan Eslayeh, was killed in an Israeli attack on the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. She tried to break the news to me gently; she knew Hassan and I had worked together during the genocide, and that he was one of the people I relied on for testimonies and updates throughout the war.  

But it was like a bullet fired into my chest. Still half asleep, my body shot up as I digested the news. Once I processed the weight of it, I dropped back down, sinking into my bed heavily. It was time to mourn yet another colleague, taken by this cruel genocide. 

The Israeli army killed Hassan in his bed in the early hours of Monday morning local time. The plain fact of killing someone in their hospital bed is horrific, but there is a deep, cruel irony in the fact that Israel killed Hassan in this way. Just a few weeks ago, he predicted this exact scenario. 

On April 7, Israel bombed a journalists’ tent outside the Nasser Hospital, burning several people alive and killing Palestinian journalist Ahmad Mansour. Hassan was among the survivors, though he was badly injured, with severe burns across his body and the loss of two of his fingers. On that same day, the Israeli army said that Hassan was the target of the attack, claiming he was a Hamas fighter operating “under the guise of a journalist.” It was the same claim that Israel had made, without evidence, of so many journalists it had killed before. 

The impact of the first attempt on Hassan’s life was felt immediately. 

For more than two weeks, as he recovered from his injuries, Hassan’s voice was absent. The round-the-clock news updates and testimonies I and so many other journalists used to receive from him stopped, and the true weight of Hassan’s voice and the role he played in delivering the news of Gaza to the world were felt by every journalist in Gaza. 

Despite his health condition and the clear threats against him by the Israeli army, as he started to stabilize, Hassan returned to work from his hospital bed, fulfilling his duty to bring the stories of Gaza to the world. He wasn’t in the field himself, but worked as part of a team of journalists on the ground to bring us and others testimonies from everyday Gazans impacted by the genocide. I felt a great sense of strength when he returned to work — the attempt to kill him did not deter him from his duty. He was a true professional, steadfast in his principles, and committed to telling the truth of what is happening in Gaza. 

I had started to hope that Hassan would recover and be back in the field, doing the dangerous and critical work that my colleagues in Gaza do every day.

As I lay in my bed, thinking of Hassan, murdered in his hospital bed, I thought back to the conversation I had with him over the phone after that first assassination attempt in April. His fresh injuries made it difficult for him to speak, but what he told me has never left me. 

“It would not be difficult for the occupation to assassinate me again, especially with the increasing incitement I hear and see against me,” Hassan said. “They may target me inside the hospital, in this room of mine. What can I do?” 

They killed him, just as he had predicted, unarmed, inside a hospital, posing no threat to anyone. He was in the hospital’s burn unit, still recovering from the first assassination attempt.

They killed Hassan, leaving behind his family, his children, and his wife. 

They killed him, leaving behind his colleagues who mourn a void that cannot be filled. 

They killed him, just as he predicted, in front of the world, and with no one to stop it. 

They killed him because journalists in Gaza are the only people in the world bearing witness to the greatest crime of our times.

And though we have lost an irreplaceable voice of truth, as the sadness overwhelms me, I think of some of the last words Hassan spoke to me: “If the Israeli army kills me, the photos I took and the stories I told the world will live on. My name, my cause, and my voice will live on — and the occupation will die.”