This essay was published first by New Lines Magazine on January 11, 2024.اضافة اعلان
Jad
Shahrour does not often get the chance for time off. So when his work phone
started buzzing on Oct. 13, 2023, he ignored it. As the communications officer
for the Samir Kassir Eyes Center for Media and Cultural Freedom (SKeyes), an
independent monitor of press rights in the Middle East, Shahrour documents
violations of press freedom. While those are common in the region, less so was
the chance to be out, uninterrupted, with his newborn son.
But
this time, the buzzing persisted longer than usual. When he finally stepped
aside to check his phone, he saw that he was being tagged in messages in
several press chats, all asking the same question:
“Do
you know anything about the journalists who were wounded in Alma al-Shaab?” — a
reference to a village in southern Lebanon bordering northern Israel.
He
did not. He only knew there were journalists in Alma al-Shaab because his best
friend, Issam Abdallah, told him the night before that he would be there,
reporting for Reuters, where Abdallah worked as a staff videographer. Shahrour
called him. The line rang initially, a hopeful sign, but there was no response.
He called again. This time, the line cut out right away. He sent Abdallah a
message asking for an update.
“Tell
me what is going on,” he said. “They are saying some journalists were hit or
something.”
Then,
the first names started trickling in Carmen Joukhadar, an Al Jazeera
correspondent, had been injured. Christina Assi, a photo editor from Agence
France-Presse (AFP), was also wounded, seemingly more severely. Abdallah still
wasn’t answering. “I started worrying,” Shahrour said. “But I knew nothing was
going to happen to Issam. The thought did not even cross my mind.” Finally,
there was a photo.
“He
was, I am sorry to use this word, all chopped up,” Shahrour told me, sounding
troubled over the phone.
Still,
there was hope: The body in the photograph was severed and badly scorched. More
remains than a person, it did not look like Abdallah. Quickly, though, the
confirmation came from Reuters.
Abdallah
had been live streaming when the attack came. The first tank missile’s impact,
visible on camera, killed him instantly. Ali Hashem, a correspondent with Al
Jazeera, told me he was with Abdallah just before the attack. By chance, he and
Ramez El Kadi — a correspondent with New TV, an independent news station in
Lebanon — moved to a separate location an hour before the first shell hit. On
their way, Abdallah sent El Kadi a message, warning them about the danger of
where they were headed.
“Imagine
that,” Hashem said. “The guy who was so cautious was killed in the end.”
Shahrour
later told me that, at Abdallah’s burial, he cycled, uncontrollably, between
laughter and sobs. “What is happening?” he thought to himself.
“You
have become a part of the news.” He had not yet slept; he had been up all night
working to get Abdallah’s death certificate notarized. In a Nov. 13 Instagram
post memorializing Abdallah, Assi wrote that only a day before the attack,
Abdallah told Dylan Collins, a colleague at AFP, that he didn’t want to cover
conflicts anymore. Now, he was permanently tied to the war.
In
the 12 weeks since Abdallah’s killing, at least 109 journalists have also been
killed in the conflict. The unprecedented rate of death has made experiences
like Shahrour’s ubiquitous in the region, with journalists asked to dissociate
their grief from their reporting. This has extended to southern Lebanon — where
Abdallah was killed — and the West Bank, where the threat of violence is a more
daily engagement.
“Any
Palestinian reporter who speaks about Israel is, by default, already a martyr,”
Rania Hamdalla, a talk-show host and reporter for Palestine TV, told me.
What
is more, a hesitancy among Western publications to assign blame for these
attacks to Israel (it took Reuters, for example, 55 days to conclude that
Israel killed Abdallah) has forced journalists to more readily advocate for
their slain colleagues. Bereavement, then, has not been the only shift. The
sheer scale of media targeting has jarred journalism in the region, blurring
the lines of advocacy, reporting, and grief.
“Any Palestinian reporter who speaks about Israel is, by default, already a martyr,” Rania Hamdalla
It
has also revealed internal challenges in some of the reporting emerging out of
the Arab world. Diana Moukalled, the co-founder of Daraj Media and a friend of
both Abdallah and Shahrour, has felt that a nuanced approach, one that
acknowledges the atrocities of the Israeli occupation but asks questions of
Palestinian armed groups — that interrogates, for example, whether those groups
have asked too much of the Gazan community — has been missing.
When
we spoke, Moukalled pointed to a video she had seen two days prior of a young
boy and his family running through the Gaza Strip, pleading to be evacuated
from it. “I can’t forget it,” she recalled. “They were yelling, ‘Let us out,
let us out, we don’t want to be in Gaza.’” This kind of footage, she said,
receives less coverage because it is met with accusations of defeatism and
claims that it deters the “resistance.” These aspersions have resulted in a
local coverage that can be myopic, one that strains the resolve of Gaza’s
citizens in the present but hesitates to confront what the resoluteness will be
for, that asks Gazans to sacrifice but “doesn’t ask where we’re going,”
Moukalled said.
“The
priority should be on ending the killing. We are pushing people to be
steadfast, but they don’t have the resources for that,” she said, referring to
what she perceives as the local media’s propensity to focus on the resilience
of Palestinians rather than to question the underlying narrative of resilience
and who, if anyone, has benefited from it. It is a difficult proposition:
Conceding anything to an Israeli state that has been unrelenting in its
bombardment and collective punishment could be seen as ambivalence toward the
ongoing atrocity. But does that leave room for gradation in the coverage?
“I
don’t think it can be done,” Moukalled said.
“The priority should be on ending the killing. We are pushing people to be steadfast, but they don’t have the resources for that,”
When
it comes to covering the war in Gaza, the journalists doing this job are too
often becoming the story, and by enduring the violence themselves they become
entangled in the very narrative they are trying to cover. Shahrour has
struggled with this, particularly when describing Abdallah’s death. Depending
on the context, he has switched between using the words “killed” and
“martyred,” a division he attributes to a “necessary professional ethic” when
reporting on the death, even though avoiding the latter identifier, he said,
“could almost rub to the side of betrayal.”
Shahrour
told me that, as a matter of fact, “Issam was killed, not martyred.” And
despite publicly identifying Abdallah as a martyr — since he was killed by
Israel while filming its shelling of southern Lebanon — in settings where he is
speaking as a press advocate, he has avoided the question of martyrdom
entirely. This distinction hasn’t been well received. Even when Shahrour has
identified Israel as the assailant, describing Abdallah as anything other than
a martyr has brought about fervent backlash on social media. “They say I have
betrayed them, they say things like ‘Killed? Killed, ya ibn al kalb (son of a
bitch)? It is martyred,’” he said. “But I am like, wait a minute, I’m not an
activist, I am a journalist.”
“This leads to three conclusions. Either Israel killed him, Hamas somehow shot a missile into south Lebanon, or maybe my aunt-in-law did it. I mean it’s unbelievable.”
The
descriptor, Shahrour maintains, regardless of his personal feelings about
Abdallah’s death, is a political one. Therefore, professionally speaking,
Shahrour insists that it should be avoided. Still, the accusations have hurt.
“His stuff is still at my house; he’s like my brother. How could I not want to
do him right when reporting his story?” he said. But that volatile question of
right has made for a challenging pitfall to navigate. “It’s a terrible trap,”
he said. “You lean on one side and you further the betrayal, you stay silent
and you’re accused of being afraid to speak out.”
Less
than 48 hours after Abdallah’s death, Shahrour agreed to speak on air. He felt
that, as a seasoned press advocate, there was more to be said about Abdallah’s
killing. The attack was more than another example of Israel’s blanket
aggression; it revealed a new, deadly attention being paid to the region’s
reporters. Separating grief and critical analysis was challenging. During his
first appearance on New TV, the host’s first question broke any stoicism still
enduring in Shahrour’s expression.
“How
are we doing?” she asked him. Already, he was fighting tears. “It has been the
hardest 48 hours of my life,” he said, his voice breaking.
After
that, Shahrour continued to give on-air interviews nearly every day for two
weeks. He said not only that the attack on Abdallah was the result of what the
Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate has described as Israel’s calculated
targeting of journalists, an egregious war crime in and of itself, but also
that it appears as if the mere presence of an Al Jazeera satellite news
gathering (SNG) vehicle sufficed to inspire the missile strike.
Based
on Shahrour’s assessment, Israel appeared to be strategically targeting and
attempting to silence its most popular media critic, as if to fight the war of
narratives using lethal force. Indeed, three weeks after Abdallah was killed in
the tank strike on Alma al-Shaab, a similar bombardment occurred in Yaroun,
where an Israeli airstrike narrowly missed several news crews stationed in the
southern Lebanese town. Among them, again, was an Al Jazeera van. The response
to these attacks, Shahrour said, has also revealed a polarization in the war’s
reporting between Western media, which has largely underreported it, and Arab
media, which has not missed reporting on any killing. The extremity of this
dichotomy is new.
The
dividing lines, Shahrour told me, have never been this obvious. Before Reuters
reported that an Israeli strike killed Abdallah, its initial statement appeared
to pussyfoot around the issue, saying only that Abdallah was “killed in missile
fire from [the] direction of Israel.” For Shahrour, the use of the passive
voice and ambiguous language was the kind of journalistic failure that has
become too common in coverage of the region by Western media.
Similarly,
in a Nov. 3 article on the death of the Palestinian journalist Mohammed Abu
Hatab and his family, The New York Times referenced the media watchdog group
Reporters Without Borders’ investigation into the killing of Abdallah but wrote
only that the report found that he “had been ‘targeted’ by a strike that the
group said came from the Israeli border.”
While
accurate, it notably omits the report’s claims that the journalists were
“identified in the area by the [Israeli] forces present before the bombing,”
that there was an Israeli Apache helicopter flying over the scene moments
before the attack, and that there were notable similarities between the Oct. 13
strike and an Oct. 9 attack on journalists in the southern Lebanese village of
Dhayra — where, again, an Israeli helicopter appeared to scan the area moments
before a missile hit. Of this opaque border-blaming, Shahrour joked
facetiously: “This leads to three conclusions. Either Israel killed him, Hamas
somehow shot a missile into south Lebanon, or maybe my aunt-in-law did it. I
mean it’s unbelievable.”
The
passivity has sullied the respect that Shahrour once personally held for
certain Western institutions.
“There
are Western reporters for whom we were excited when they received a platform,
who now we can’t trust, who seem to know nothing about media ethics and who
have been held up as the standard for the latter,” he said.
In
the West Bank, these effects are even more pronounced. Rania Hamdalla, for
example, has paused her show entirely since the war began. Pivoting to work
with the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, she leads their committee focused
on press rights from Jerusalem.
“Imagine that,” Hashem said. “The guy who was so cautious was killed in the end.”
Her
pivot toward advocacy reflects a growing need in the media landscape in Gaza,
which is, strangely, both violently threatened and somehow still growing. Since
the start of the war, Israel has either completely or partially destroyed 66
Palestinian media and journalistic institutions, stranding reporters in the
field with little editorial support or direction. But despite the devastation,
the field has gained in numbers.
Though
the conflict means that exact statistics are impossible to compile, Hamdalla
said that most of the Syndicate’s 1,200 members have continued to work in Gaza
even throughout its escalation. Israel’s continued barring of foreign
journalists from accessing the strip has also only increased pressure on
Palestinian reporters, many of whom now live and work out of Gaza’s shelters.
And, given the death toll, the larger sector is probably essential: At least 95
Gazan media workers have been killed since Oct. 7 — a horrendous level of
fatalities silencing almost 1 in 10 journalists registered with the syndicate
over three months. Such a figure does not account for the personal loss endured
by the surviving journalists, some of whom have lost their entire families in
Israeli strikes. When we spoke in early December, of the roughly 1,200 media
workers, Hamdalla told me, “910 of them have had their homes wiped out.
Do
you understand what I mean by wiped out? They have no home left.” That number
is now closer to 1,100.
In
light of the casualties, Hamdalla and the syndicate have devoted significant
energy to international outreach: They have submitted photographs, videos, and
written documentation to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ)
seeking to prove that the Israeli army has been targeting reporters. They filed
similar claims to “nearly every other syndicate internationally.” They have
also submitted an amicus brief in U.S. federal court that highlights the
unprecedented attacks on Palestinian journalists. The brief is in support of
the lawsuit, Defense for Children International-Palestine v. Biden, that is
trying to stop U.S. diplomatic and military support to Israel because Israel is
committing genocide in Gaza. On Nov. 21, the IFJ’s director visited Ramallah to
collect testimonies from Palestinian journalists who had been wounded in the
West Bank. The process is tedious, rife with bureaucratic hurdles, and, among
the international syndicates, challenging language barriers. But the
formalities of what Hamdalla describes as “diplomatic advocacy” obscure the
urgency of material aid needed on the ground.
“How
can you ask a reporter to step back into the field if they cannot find bread to
feed their child?” she said. The syndicate’s most important provision for
reporters? Tents for shelter. “It’s true that the syndicate’s job shouldn’t be
providing this kind of material or food support for reporters in the field,”
she added. “But it is necessary for the moment, given you might not find a
single can of tuna in all of Gaza.”
Hamdalla
seems, also, to be growing disillusioned with the ability of local reporting to
inspire change among Western and other international political actors. We were
exchanging audio messages on the morning of Dec. 15, shortly after Samer Abu
Daqqa, the Al Jazeera cameraman, had been shot. By then, he had been bleeding
out for five hours and 15 minutes. Hamdalla was in a sort of simmering panic;
Al Jazeera had been trying to contact the Red Cross, asking them to mediate a
safe passage with Israel for medical assistance to reach Abu Daqqa. The Red
Cross, she said, was refusing to get involved. “I guess we need journalists
from Europe and America to challenge them and ask them why they’re behaving in
this way,” she said, fighting back tears.
“Our reporters in Gaza have been trying to talk about this, but nobody has listened.”
The
number of media deaths had doubled since the first time we spoke in early
December. The urgency in her demands was notably more desperate, as she
insisted that international organizations — like the Red Cross — had given up
on Gaza, and that, by doing so, they had become complicit in the bombardment.
Over a series of WhatsApp audio messages, she pleaded, “Our reporters in Gaza
have been trying to talk about this, but nobody has listened.” A single Red
Crescent ambulance was trying to make its way to Abu Daqqa but, according to
Wael al-Dahdouh, Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, it came under Israeli fire and
retreated. Dahdouh himself has also endured immense loss, including the killing
of his wife, their grandchild, their 7-year-old daughter, and their 15-year-old
son. On Jan. 7, Wael’s eldest child, Hamza — a fellow journalist at Al Jazeera
— was also killed in an Israeli missile strike.
In
the midst of the action, I asked Hamdalla if she was free to call. After a long
pause, she replied, instead, with a photo of Abu Daqqa and another audio
message.
“Samer
died. Samer’s dead,” she was crying. “For six hours he was bleeding on air,
every camera in the world recording him, and there’s not a paramedic who dared
come help him.”
Abu
Daqqa’s death received widespread coverage. Among the outlets who reported on
the killing was Reuters, whose article on the death closed with a quote from
John Kirby, the White House national security spokesman.
In the 12 weeks since Abdallah’s killing, at least 109 journalists have also been killed in the conflict. The unprecedented rate of death has made experiences like Shahrour’s ubiquitous in the region, with journalists asked to dissociate their grief from their reporting. This has extended to southern Lebanon — where Abdallah was killed — and the West Bank, where the threat of violence is a more daily engagement.
“We
still have no indications that the Israelis are deliberately going after
journalists covering this war,” he said. In a video meeting broadcast on Al
Jazeera, Abu Daqqa’s oldest son told Dahdouh, “And just as our father’s loss
pains us, the loss of [Wael’s] family pains us.”
Hamdalla
followed the photo of Abu Daqqa with another audio message; she was
inconsolable. “What did he do to die like this? What did we do, us? Tell me
why?”
Abu
Daqqa was, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the 65th
journalist killed in the conflict. How many deaths would it take, I wondered,
listening over and over to Hamdalla’s message, before the killing of a
colleague was no longer so painful?
About
a month before Abu Daqqa’s murder, Jad Shahrour’s wife was going through his
phone, looking for photos of their newborn son, Zayd. She couldn’t find any.
Instead, there were rows and rows of killed Palestinians. They were saved on
his phone, he said, in case he needed to share anything to SKEyes’ social
media. “It was like walking into a cemetery,” he told me.
Later,
in that same conversation, I asked him if he had found time to rest in the two
months since Abdallah’s burial.
“Look,
I don’t know if I can move on,” he said. “Everyone else, even his friends, can
get distracted in their work, but this is what I do. I’m in the chaos.”
Rayan El Amine is a writer and journalist from Beirut, Lebanon,
who lives in New York City
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