We looked out at the view in front of us and could see al-Walaja on the mountain across from us, completely surrounded by Israel’s separation fence. Eventually it will be turned into a wall, and the Palestinians who grew up going to Ein Haniya, playing in the spring, singing songs, picking local herbs, and making tea on fires will only be allowed to enter it with a fee, and only during the hours set out by the Israeli Nature and Parks authority.
There is an ebb and flow between hearing the stories, being on the ground reporting on the developments of war, and being a part of this reality at the same time. No certainty of what can be found, no real safety, and a looming feeling of endlessness.
Journalists in Gaza often face an internal conflict where you feel split between the pleasure of being able to tell people’s true stories and the concern that you might be judged for it because of who you are.
It is a maddening reality to report on Israel’s heinous crimes every day, forcing real people, who had real lives, real families, and real hopes and dreams, into boxes and statistics, in an attempt to make it digestible for audiences and readers, to try and help them understand the true scale of the oppression forced on the Palestinian people.
Is it worth leaving Gaza to seek work in foreign countries to build your future if you can’t do this at home?
From the slaughterhouse, journalists become phone line operators – taking sound bytes from a wire and switching it to a phone plug. It’s an attempt to bring the distant near as the near seems to fade slowly. Yet as journalists from the slaughterhouse, we can also see that what seems like despair and doom, may only be a glitch in the wire. That, on the other end of the line, life still persists, even if the line is lagging.
What happened in Huwwara for those four days was a microcosm of the Israeli occupation: the collusion and incitement between the state and the settlers, both entities enabling one another in their continued occupation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
Today, as I report on developments from Palestine I recognize the striking similarities between the years of the second Intifada and now.
To me Hafez’s story is the embodiment of Israeli apartheid, and the themes I’ve covered for so many years reporting on the ground in occupied Palestine. It’s a story of violence, injustice, inequity, and a yearning for freedom in a place where oppression reigns supreme.
September is the month kids go back to school in Gaza. Thousands of students are…