During its recent attacks on Gaza, Israel targeted several high-rise towers that housed dozens of media outlets. Over the course of a week, photojournalist Mohammed Talatene worked out of three towers that were destroyed by Israeli airstrikes. Then his house was bombed. His story mirrors that of many journalists across Gaza.

Reporter Tareq Hajjaj reflects back on the harrowing last few weeks in Gaza where he twice fled his home to escape Israeli attacks, and reveals the trauma of reporters who cover wars that they are also trying to survive.

On August 18, 2020, CBC’s current affairs program “The Current” carried an interview with Joe Sacco where the host used the word Palestine. The word was deleted in an online version and apologized for the next day, and now an Ombudsman says the program was “at odds with the CBC’s usual practice,” but producers should have left it as it was.

The CBC’s censorship of the word “Palestine” had the unintended result of shining a spotlight on this decades-old erasure of Palestinian national identity in both the Canadian media and government.

Five years on Hamza Abu al-Tarabeesh remembers the 2014 war in Gaza when he was a young journalist. That summer one of his senior editors was killed in an Israeli airstrike, and photojournalist he worked alongside lost a brother. “At the moment of impact the electricity cut, smoke and dust covered the office, and I heard shrapnel hitting the exterior. One of my colleagues started sobbing.”