What it takes to be a Palestinian journalist

On August 25, Palestinian journalist Adli Abu Taha called his brother Moaz, also a journalist, minutes after news broke of an Israeli strike on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza. Moaz was there. 

“I’m fine, but Hossam Al-Masri was just killed,” Moaz told his brother, who urged him to leave the site. Moaz reassured him that he would leave shortly, but wanted to finish filming the aftermath of the strike, which was on an outdoor stairwell. Minutes later, a second Israeli strike hit the stairwell, killing Moaz. 

A total of five Palestinian journalists were killed on that day.

Moaz Taha was 27, a freelance videojournalist. He was talented, and passionate about his work. He had been filming the aftermath of the Israeli strike that killed Hossam al-Masri, a 49-year-old photojournalist who was operating a live feed for the Reuters news agency. When an Israeli tank fired the first shell, Reuters said that the live feed “suddenly shut down.”

In December, Hossam was covering Israel’s siege of Nasser Hospital and was among the last to leave. As Hossam continued to cover the genocide in Gaza, he carried a personal  agony. His wife had been suffering from cancer, and the lack of medical treatment in Gaza due to the Israeli blockade and destruction of the health sector worsened her condition. His colleague, Palestinian journalist Amr Tabash, recalled on Instagram how a few days before he was killed, Hossam asked him to help evacuate his wife to get the treatment she needed. Hossam’s wife remains in Gaza with their children.

In the same strike, Palestinian freelance journalist Mariam Abu Daqqah was killed. A 33-year-old mother, Mariam worked for various outlets, including the Associated Press and The Independent. Her brother, Sudqi Abu Daqah, told the Arabic edition of The Independent, for whom she worked, that Mariam used to visit the displaced encampments in Gaza. Whenever she could, she would buy pencils and notebooks for the orphaned children in the encampments.

At night, Mariam would often look at her phone and cry as she kissed the picture of her son, Ghaith, who was 13. She had managed to evacuate him out of Gaza to go live with his father in the United Arab Emirates. Sensing the rising Israeli targeting of journalists, Mariam wrote her will to her son in advance: “Don’t cry for me, but pray for me. Keep up with your studies and grow up to be successful.”

At the moment of the Israeli strike, another young journalist, 24-year-old Muhammad Salama, was killed. He had made his way into his profession with considerable personal struggle, having lost his mother as a child and living with his father’s relatives until he graduated from a vocational college with a photography diploma. He followed veteran photojournalists and learned from them as he honed his skills. He was one of the few journalists left in Khan Younis after the first Israeli invasion of the city in December 2023. He joined Al Jazeera in February 2024.

Last November, on the day of his birthday, Muhammad got engaged to his colleague and journalist, Hala Asfour. They both hoped to marry once there was a ceasefire.

These are some of the 12 Palestinian journalists Israel has killed in Gaza during the month of August alone. They are among the more than 250 Palestinian journalists that Israel has killed in Gaza since the beginning of its war on the Strip in October 2023. But Israel’s targeting of Palestinian journalists didn’t begin in 2023. It didn’t begin with the killing of veteran Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022 in Jenin. And it didn’t even begin with the killing of Gaza photojournalist Yasser Murtaja during the Great March of Return in April 2018.

Israel’s policy of targeting Palestinian voices has gone on for decades. Israel’s first ever targeted assassination of a Palestinian was of a journalist and a writer. His name was Ghassan Kanafani.

On the morning of July 8, 1972, Kanafani entered his car in the Hazemiyah neighborhood of Beirut and turned the key, triggering the bomb that Israeli agents had planted in the vehicle and blowing his body to pieces. Kanafani was accompanied by his niece, 17-year-old Lamis, who was also killed in the assassination.

Kanafani, now a towering figure in Palestinian literature and political history, was also one of the earliest Palestinian proponents of what is today regarded as “committed journalism” — journalism in the service of the cause of liberation. But this tradition only began with Kanafani. 

In that same year, Israel’s secret intelligence assassinated Palestinian writer and translator Wael Zueiter in Rome. The following year, it assassinated Palestinian editor Kamal Nasser in Beirut alongside two other Fatah leaders. In 1984, Israeli agents killed Palestinian journalist and the head of the Arab journalists’ union, Hanna Muqbel in Nicosia, Cyprus. The bullet that killed Muqbel first pierced through his journalism card before reaching his heart. The date of the assassination was May 3, World Press Freedom Day.

And it continued. By the time Israeli forces killed Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh in the Jenin refugee camp, the records of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate showed that 50 Palestinian journalists had been killed by Israel since the year 2000. But death is not the only thing Palestinian journalists risk — it’s just the ultimate price they have paid. Beyond it, Palestinian journalists have been the target of a relentless campaign of repression, intimidation, arrests, and censorship.

In 2023, the Committee for the Protection of Journalists reported scores of Israeli violations against Palestinian journalists, with  37 recorded in April, 27 in May, 56 in July, and 61 in September. The violations included physically assaulting journalists in the field, the confiscation of their equipment, preventing them from reporting, arresting them, and issuing travel bans against them. All this happened before Israel stepped up its systematic targeting of journalists in light of October 7.

Why the coverage continues

The concept of journalism as a profession saturated with risk — regardless of the type of journalism — has become deeply cemented in Palestinian consciousness. Shatha Hanaysheh, a freelance reporter and Mondoweiss contributor from Jenin refugee camp, says that “being a Palestinian journalist is being a war reporter, whether you choose it or not.” 

“The reality of occupation is part of our daily life, when we are on duty and when we are off duty,” she explains.

The reason, of course, is because “the occupation’s violence threatens us all the time, everywhere and always,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if you report on politics, on the economy, on social issues. The fingerprints of the occupation are always there. So you have to work through them, and they make their way into your reporting.” 

For Shatha, the reality of the risk takes new personal forms that can only be discovered through practice.

“I decided I wanted to be a journalist as a child during the Second Intifada, and I always understood that it was a risky job,” she explains. “Years later, I was taught to protect myself by avoiding the most dangerous locations, by making myself visible and recognizable, and to adopt a whole set of rules that I continue to follow strictly. Back then, I was the only female journalist to be present in the field during Israeli incursions, which challenged some social views in my community at the time. That’s why I wanted to do it in the best way possible and stay safe, but then I began to understand the real meaning of risk.”

It was the spring of 2022, and armed resistance in the Jenin refugee camp was experiencing a revival, as the disaffected youth of the camp became fed up with the status quo and with no prospects for a decent future. The resistance came to be known as the Jenin Brigade, and Shatha was one of the early journalists to report on its formation.

That was when Israel began to raid the Jenin refugee camp more regularly in an effort to put down the resistance. 

“First, I was concerned that I might be detained in the field, or that my equipment might be confiscated,” Shatha describes. “I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to stand the effects of teargas or that I might be beaten or arrested. Then, when Israeli incursions became more frequent, they also became more violent, and at some point it became routine to get shot at by Israeli forces as journalists, all while wearing our PRESS vests and making ourselves visible.”

All of a sudden, her previous concerns seemed secondary to the more immediate risk of being killed or seriously injured.

That risk materialized in front of Shatha’s eyes on May 11, 2022. 

On that day, Shatha says, something changed in her forever. She was reporting on an ongoing Israeli military raid into the camp alongside a group of journalists. They were walking down a narrow alley at the edge of the camp, and walking beside Shatha was Shireen Abu Akleh, reporting for Al Jazeera. That was when Israeli forces opened fire on them. 

Suddenly, Shireen Abu Akleh lay dead on the ground. Shatha took cover behind a tree less than a meter away from her slain colleague as bullets continued to slam into the pavement and the tree she hid behind, petrified.

“That experience never left me,” Shatha says. “Every time I hear news of another colleague being killed in Gaza, I relive that day all over again, in all of its details. It’s as if it just happened.” 

This made being a journalist intensely personal for Shatha, but she insists that it doesn’t diminish Palestinian journalists’ capacities to be professional. “As Palestinian journalists, we know better than anybody else the difference between the reality of occupation and the preconceived notions that frame it to the world.” 

Shatha explains that Western journalists bring those preconceived notions with them to Palestine, using them as a lens to look at the reality on the ground. “But all of those frameworks are politically-motivated, even though they’re made to look professional,” Shatha points out, insisting that Palestinians “don’t need, for example, to make up a story about 40 beheaded babies” just to force the reality to fit into a certain narrative. 

“For us, the job is to open a window into the reality of our people. It’s an ethical duty above everything else,” Shatha stresses.

All this makes journalism for Palestinian journalists “more than just gathering, editing, and publishing the news,” says Wahaj Bani Moufleh, a photojournalist from the village of Beita, south of Nablus. “It is about documenting parts of history which the occupation wants to erase from memory.” 

“During the mass protests against Israel;s settlement expansion in Beita, my cousin, Zakariya Bani Moufleh, was killed by an Israeli bullet in front of my eyes,” Wahaj tells Mondoweiss. “I wasn’t a journalist, but I liked photography, and I had a camera. So I took his photo, and then I realized that I had documented his killing.” 

Wahaj recalls that as the moment when he became a journalist. Afterwards, he decided to study photojournalism. “I documented hundreds of moments of daily life under occupation across the West Bank,” he says. “I was shot at several times and was injured twice, once with a rubber-coated bullet and once with a teargas canister. I was detained, searched, and beaten several times, too.”

For Wahaj, risk as a Palestinian journalist is present everywhere. “In the street, at home, while eating at a restaurant.” 

“We aren’t in a different situation from the rest of our people, who despite the risk and anxiety, continue to hope and to live,” Wahaj explains. “That is what we need to document and show the world.”

But far too many colleagues have given their lives to show this to the world, Wahaj adds. Perhaps because of this, Wahaj doesn’t feel he can back out now, despite the danger. “If I stop or quit, it would be a betrayal of their sacrifices. That’s why I continue.”

Journalistic integrity from within

Despite this awareness of the inherent danger associated with being a journalist in Palestine, they have now found themselves launched into the bloodiest period in their history, as well as the history of their people. Yet the present moment also highlights a paradox. 

Although Palestine is one of the most heavily covered places on earth, much of its decades-long reality is just starting to become known to millions. The unprecedented advance of means of communication, the internet, social media, and independent media outlets are all part of this story, but at the heart of it are Palestinian journalists — not because of who they are, but because they cover Palestine from within.

And what does that mean? Namely, that they cover the news down to its hard, material reality. In that reality, people don’t passively “die.” They’re killed by Israeli bullets. A family is forcibly expelled — not “evicted” —  from their home so that a foreigner can take their place. It isn’t because Palestinian journalists are special. It’s because they are part of the living, material reality that shapes their language, not an abstract exercise of narrative-framing written thousands of miles away under the weight of money and politics.

In other words, they are the inheritors of Kanafani’s legacy, carrying the burden of a journalism committed to a cause and an obligation to the truth of the communities from which they came. This committed journalism does not derive its journalistic integrity and ethical and moral compass from the guidelines of AP or the New York Times. It is grounded in their loyalty to the suffering and sacrifices of their people, and to their fallen colleagues. 

This type of journalism doesn’t wear a suit and tie, and it doesn’t accept Pulitzers. It is covered in dust from the rubble of bombed-out hospitals in Gaza. It is saturated with the smell of teargas in the streets of the West Bank. It only continues because men and women put their lives on the line to bring Palestine’s reality, and that of its people, to you. Don’t take it for granted.

Qassam Muaddi
Qassam Muaddi is the Palestine Staff Writer for Mondoweiss. Follow him on Twitter/X at @QassaMMuaddi.