I still remember the early days when I practiced journalism in front of a mirror. Not the craft, only the presence. I mimicked the posture: chin lifted, shoulders squared, a pen held like a microphone. I tried to find the rhythm of Shireen Abu Akleh, how she seemed to maintain her composure in a place where nothing ever remains stable. That was my first idea of journalism: a courageous woman on television finding the strength to report without seeming overwhelmed.
Being Palestinian is already a sufficient cause for death. And when I became a journalist, I discovered that it could serve as an additional factor. We are treated as suspects despite there being no crime. Targeting isn’t just firing bullets. Sometimes, it is a post on social media that turns into a headline. Or a shared photo that morphs into an accusation of antisemitism. Journalists in Gaza know this well.
My first experiences as a close observer were at age 18, throughout a series of so-called “escalations” that eventually led to the November 2012 war in Gaza. My recollection of this war starts in Rafah, inside Al-Najjar Hospital. There was the smell of smoke an blood, and there were too many people crammed into a tight, narrow hallway. It was the first time I witnessed children’s dead bodies right in front of me, not on a television screen, not cropped by the camera angle of the person filming them. There was no composed news anchor mediating what I was witnessing. The children’s dead bodies shared the same space as me.
I recall asking the simplest questions.
Why were they killed?
What did they do?
These children posed no danger to the lives of Israeli citizens. Yet, there they were, small, silent, and dead. What disturbed me the most was the anonymity. I did not see their names on television. I did not hear their stories. They just disappeared from this world. I felt the repulsiveness of this within my stomach: that a child can be erased twice — once by the missile, and again by how the world reduces him or her to a number that appears momentarily on a ticker before disappearing.
Therefore, I decided to write.
But I did not write in a journalistic form. What I wrote more closely resembled a diary, a private act of defiance. I did not concern myself with whether anything that I wrote would be published. I wrote to keep my mind from descending into the type of madness that arises from living next to unanswered questions. I wrote as though language could save a human being from completely disappearing into a grave, unknown.
In 2014, the war returned longer and more violent, and the questions grew louder.
Do they really see us?
Do we tell our story in the way that we should?
I began posting brief online postings — anger, expressed in paragraphs, condensed to something sharable.
A typical post might receive either one or possibly two comments. Most of the time, I received no comments. Nonetheless, I continued to write. Silence felt like a second killing to me.
At the time, I did not recognize the writing as journalism. There was no editor, no assignment, and no byline. Only me, a person in Gaza, insisting that what occurs here exists in some shape, some texture, some human image.
The first moment I experienced the death of journalists was during the Great March of Return that began in 2018. That year, my work became more official. I spoke with news organizations, documented the protests, and attempted to convey to the world why these individuals were protesting at the border: that they were tired of being treated as a caged-off population with no history save for the one others told about them.
The border taught me a type of physics of fear that journalists endure while working in Gaza: the openness of land, the width of the sky, dust in your mouth, the overwhelming burning sensation of tear gas causing your eyes to well up with tears, and the loud cracking of live ammunition that cuts across a flat horizon.
Israeli soldiers shot journalists at the border. Yaser Murtaja, whose work helped shape my early development in the craft, was killed during the march by Israeli forces. I realized something simple and stark: a journalist could be killed, and nothing would happen. That is how the world responds to the horrors of Gaza: briefly horrified, quickly distracted, forgotten.
One day, the distance between me and death shrank to a single step.
I stood with two friends, cameras in hand, all of us wearing helmets and vests that said PRESS as if fabric could negotiate with a rifle. A shot hit my friend Khalil Abu Aadhra in the leg — explosive, brutal. In one instant, the body teaches you what the mind prefers to treat as theory: The margin is thin, the route of a bullet is not a moral argument, and the vest can become a bright flashing sign that pinpoints you as a target.
For years, I thought the bullet was the worst thing that could happen to a Palestinian journalist. Then I discovered the other weapon — the slow process of discrediting.
Across wars, I’ve watched Palestinian journalists in Gaza be pulled out of the category “colleague” and placed into the category “suspect.” It often starts with old social media posts, lifted out of context and held up like evidence. Your politics become proof that you are not a journalist at all. The accusation arrives in a word with enormous weight: antisemitic. And because it is such a serious charge, it can be used to end the conversation without having it, to collapse the difference between hatred of Jews and criticism of the policies of Israel. In that collapse, your work becomes “debate,” and your death becomes easier to rationalize.
This is the part that rarely gets viewed as a life-or-death situation — although it is.
If you can successfully persuade an audience that a Gazan journalist is inherently unreliable — an activist, a propagandist, an affiliate — instead of simply a journalist, then the outrage over their murder becomes easier to dismiss. The murder becomes complicated. It becomes an argument as to whether or not the murdered journalist deserves the title of journalist in the first place.
I’ve witnessed this progression so many times that it is difficult to avoid anticipating it: A journalist is murdered, and shortly thereafter, people begin to scour the murdered journalist’s history online as if they are not mourning a human being but rather building a case for why the murder should not matter.
Once a journalist’s humanity is in doubt, so too is their protection.
As of Jan. 22, 2026, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) reported that at least 234 Palestinian journalists and media workers had been killed in Gaza since October 2023. This number is much more than a statistic — it represents empty chairs in our newsrooms, uncompleted footage, and families who now talk about their lost loved ones in the past tense.
According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), at least 68 journalists were likely killed or targeted while doing their jobs. RSF also connects these killings to a second reality — an ongoing blockade on the ability of international journalists to report from Gaza.
Access is not merely a technical issue. Access is one of the main reasons journalists in Gaza are losing their lives. Even though international journalists cannot freely enter Gaza to report independently, the world still needs images, names, and evidence. That need does not diminish — it concentrates. It falls on the same local journalists time and time again. We are both indispensable and exposed. We are forced to go closer to the bomb sites, closer to the hospitals, closer to the funerals because there is no “other” team coming to share the burden. Restricting access does not eliminate the risks; it simply transfers them to the people who are unable to leave — the local press corps that is already being decimated.
For local journalists, Gaza’s war is one where you cannot retreat from a “frontline” — literally or metaphorically — your home is a potential target, the road you travel on is a potential target, and the hospital you seek refuge in is a potential target. I’ve filed stories while searching for water. I wrote while trying to determine if my family was alive. I held my phone up like a prayer to get single bar of signal.
In August 2024, Human Rights Watch released a joint statement with press freedom organizations urging the European Union to take action against Israel for its “unprecedented” killing of journalists and other abuses of media freedom.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has recorded that Israel’s military has directly targeted and killed at least 64 journalists. Human Rights Watch emphasizes that intentional or reckless killing of journalists may constitute a war crime. They underscore how difficult it is to demonstrate targeting in Gaza, where preserving evidence is exceptionally challenging due to limited access and where evidence destruction occurs under fire.
Meanwhile, those killings continue even after ceasefire periods. A report from Jan. 28, 2026, regarding the deaths of three journalists, reported that the Israeli military claimed it had struck suspected drone operators. Journalists’ associations and colleagues, including those reporting on the attack, argued that the military had no right to make these accusations without sharing evidence to back up the claims. The three journalists were embedded with the Egyptian aid convoy when their vehicle was hit by an Israeli missile; this vehicle was clearly marked as belonging to a humanitarian organization.
While the number of casualties may appear abstract to outside readers, for us, they are names we call repeatedly on our phones, suddenly getting no answer. There are empty chairs in the crowded room where we work. The familiar voice who was arguing over captions is now silenced, the person it belonged to now reduced to a photo circulated as an act of mourning. These are our colleagues and friends — the people who carry extra batteries for us, trade flak jackets, share cigarettes and jokes in the few minutes between bomb strikes and go back out onto the streets again to do the job that has been assigned to us.
Losing them is not only a blow to the public record. It is a private kind of grief we are forced to carry even as we continue to work, reporting for a world which continues to consume the evidence but has tolerated the conditions which make producing the evidence so deadly. There is a certain form of cruelty in requiring us to constantly produce evidence and verify information while we are living in a place where simple acts of documentation can make us a target, where protection is regarded as a luxury rather than a basic right.
The last incident of Israel killing three journalists hit me far harder than I ever could have anticipated. My good friend Abed Shaat was among the three journalists slain. I had known Abed for almost eight years. I had taken small comfort in the fact that there was a “ceasefire.” I did not feel optimistic; I simply felt a small reduction in my anxiety and the hope that, for a short time, the long list of names of people killed by Israel might slow down. I could not bear to lose any more friends, at least not again, not so quickly.
Then Abed was dead.
While Abed was an exceptional journalist who worked with large international news organizations, including AFP, he was also a man in the midst of his life. Just two weeks before he was killed, Abed got married. He and his partner were two young people starting their new lives in a land that actively works against the concept of the future. When Abed was killed, it was not simply the killing of a “media worker” — it was the murder of a love story, the execution of a witness.
I worked with Abed on multiple projects. He never pursued personal gain or financial compensation. He saw his job as a duty, a responsibility to tell the world about the horrors that occur within the enclave that the world chooses to ignore. Abed said that he believed that if readers stopped reading about Gaza, that was not a reason to stop reporting on Gaza.
When people ask me why journalists are being killed in Gaza, I do not search for a simple explanation. I find myself searching for all of the complex and often contradictory explanations that build upon each other to create a system.
Still, the question does not disappear: How many journalists have to be killed before the world recognizes that “investigations” are meaningless unless they result in some form of accountability? Saying “we will review this” is not justice. Promising to “look into it” is not a deterrent.
When the bodies continue to pile up, when no one is held accountable for those killings, the process itself becomes another form of violence, a means to allow time to erase our outrage.