How Gaza redefined ‘objective’ journalism in the face of genocide
According to a report by Dawn… “By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to report the truth, and now, I am finally at rest — something I haven’t known in the past eighteen months.”
Final message of Gaza journalist Hossam Shabbat, 23, killed in March by an Israeli airstrike
A journalist is never supposed to be the story. In Gaza, however, the killing of at least 223 media personnel by Israel — from October 7, 2023, to Oct 1 this year — turned them into headlines. Social media shared their names and faces, and mourned the last messages they wrote in anticipation of imminent death, while mainstream media documented the numbers and converted them into bite-sized news for the ease of readers.
In the newsroom, their deaths seemed personal; these were members of our fraternity whom we had never met but relied on their lens and words. Wafa Aludaini was one of them; she wrote for this publication in 2022, titled ‘Killing the truth: Shireen Abu Akleh’s murder is a reminder that Israel will go to any length to silence its critics’.
Aludaini herself was silenced along with her husband, their five-year-old daughter and seven-month-old son on September 29, 2024, when an Israeli airstrike hit their home in Gaza’s Deir Al Balah. My colleague spotted her name in a news report, after which we added her name to the growing list of journalists killed in Israel’s latest and most brutal campaign — one that had all the makings of a genocide from the time it began, but wasn’t referred to as one.
What’s in a genocide
Soon after Hamas’ attack on Oct 7, 2023, and Israel’s immediate onslaught, I remember having discussions with different editors as to when the term “genocide” would apply. As one year passed, we ran the headline: 365 days of genocide on Oct 7, 2024. On Sep 16 this year, a UN commission officially declared Israel’s actions as genocide.
Journalists are not juries or judges; we’re not supposed to hand out sentences or write verdicts. Editorially, we’re supposed to show restraint in using labels or terminologies, and leave these matters to authorities that are tasked to make such deliberations.
Our job is to gather information, as accurately as possible, report on it and offer analysis with the help of experts and people on the ground for consumers of news to make sense of what’s happening.
But Gaza challenged our profession: every action by Israel, such as bombing hospitals and shelters or orchestrating a man-made famine, made us question when journalists are meant to pick a side and when merely reporting is no longer enough.
As the death toll rose and Israel’s intentions became more and more transparent, Gaza also challenged the legitimacy of the word genocide itself. Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin, who coined the word in 1944, made the argument that “the Genocide Convention has a specially great appeal to small nations because each of them can disappear completely under the first genocidal attack”. The Genocide Convention was the first human rights treaty adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 9, 1948, and signified the international community’s commitment to ‘never again’ after the atrocities committed during the Second World War.
But all the while the media debated on the timing of using the word, it concurrently broke the news of the International Criminal Court (ICC) issuing arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu, only to follow that up with Hungary withdrawing from the ICC hours after the Israeli leader arrived in Hungary for a state visit. It reported the United States’ declaration on January 7, 2025, that Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) had committed genocide during the country’s civil war, and exactly a month later, on February 7, ran the headline ‘US approves $7.4bn sale of more weapons to Israel used to ravage Gaza’.
For nearly two years, if we don’t count Israel’s action pre-October 7, the law failed the people of Gaza over and over again, and the media documented the world’s helplessness in preventing a genocide from happening — the very first principle of the UN’s ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’.
In all this time, Palestine’s continued plight has begged the question: what value does a word hold in the face of such hypocrisy and ineffectiveness of international law? Or, more crucially, what good is international law when none of the glaring headlines deterred Israel from carrying out a genocide?
Did journalism fail Gaza?
October 17, 2023, was the first clear signalling of Israel’s intent to wage a deadly war without any concern for civilian casualties: it targeted a UNRWA refugee camp and a hospital. Only 10 days into the war waged by Tel Aviv, the media tried to piece together information coming from both sides, and without actual press vests of their own on the ground.
The New York Times was among the publications that retracted their initial coverage on the Al Ahli Arab Hospital explosion that killed scores of Palestinians. “The Times’ initial accounts attributed the claim of Israeli responsibility to Palestinian officials, and noted that the Israeli military said it was investigating the blast,” read the Times’ editors’ note published on Oct 23 following criticism, adding that the early coverage “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified”.
Subsequent investigations into the incident by multiple organisations didn’t offer a conclusion as to whether a failed rocket launch by Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) was responsible for the explosion or if it was an Israeli airstrike. I’m not going to go into the details of the investigations (this Forensic Architecture investigation is worth a read), but want to highlight this incident because at the time, I defended the media organisations’ actions since immediate versions of either side cannot be taken at face value in reporting. But the due diligence proved to be limited to this one incident, prompted by the backlash from Israel’s sympathisers.
The overall Western media coverage remained lopsided for the large part, with headlines, including the NYT’s, often declaring that Palestinian civilians were killed but stopping short of saying by whom; news stories using emotive language for Israeli deaths but not for Palestinians’; editors putting ‘Hamas-run’ before all versions of the Palestinian Health Ministry but failing to provide context to Israeli officials’ repeated claims on incidents of civilian deaths; and media organisations silencing journalists who advocated the rights of Palestinians.
Among the journalists silenced was Mehdi Hasan, whose show was cancelled by American cable news channel MSNBC. While Hasan chose not to speak candidly on the matter, the cancellation was linked by media and lawmakers alike to his opinions about the atrocities in Palestine.
Perhaps the biggest betrayal of the fraternity was the lack of outrage by these media organisations at the deaths of Palestinian journalists. The due diligence exhibited during the Al Ahli Arab Hospital bombing wasn’t exercised in these instances, such as when the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the five Gaza journalists — targeted in a Quds Today van parked outside a hospital, where the wife of one of the journalists was about to give birth — were “Islamic Jihad operatives posing as journalists”. No further investigations took place into these claims despite systematic campaigns by Israel in place to defame and threaten these journalists, as detailed by Reporters Without Borders.
“There have been few media campaigns or statements of solidarity with Palestinian journalists — compared with similar efforts around […] other western correspondents targeted by US adversaries,” wrote Mohamad Bazzi for The Guardian, noting that “press freedom and protection from persecution, it seems, are limited to western journalists”.
On August 10, 28-year-old Al Jazeera journalist Anas al Sharif was killed alongside four of his colleagues in an Israeli airstrike that targeted a press tent outside a hospital in Gaza. Less than a month before his death, the Committee to Protect Journalists had said it was “gravely worried” about the safety of Sharif, highlighting that he was being “targeted by an Israeli military smear campaign, which he believes is a precursor to his assassination”. Yet, the threats to his life and Israel’s pattern got little to no attention in the Western media, despite hundreds of Palestinian journalists already killed by Israel up to that point. Eleven days after his death, the NYT published an opinion piece with an honest, matter-of-fact headline: ‘He was the face and voice of Gaza. Israel assassinated him.’
Sharif, in the message he prepared for his death, had pleaded “not to let chains silence you”. Perhaps his end was what was needed for the media to start speaking up for him.
How Gaza gave new meaning to/redefined journalism
Despite the often skewed media coverage, Gaza has shifted the tide of public perception. During the course of the onslaught on Gaza, the media also reported on barriers breaking; the barrier to acknowledging that the destruction was not a result of Oct 7 but had been going on for decades, barriers on Gaza being a regional topic and turning into a global protest movement, and barriers of diplomacy which prevented countries from calling out Tel Aviv’s nefarious plans and accepting the Palestinian state.
We also witnessed barriers guarding media hegemony break; with organisations such as the BBC, once considered credible and honest, coming under intense scrutiny for its evasive framing and questionable editorial judgments. And when the same organisation pulled a documentary on Gaza, it created space for others to step in.
The documentary, titled Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, was subsequently streamed by Zeteo, a news platform launched by Mehdi Hasan after he exited MSNBC, after it was dropped by the BBC. Hasan, along with his team of diverse contributors, from Fatima Bhutto and Bassem Youssef to Cynthia Nixon and Greta Thunberg, positioned Zeteo as a leading platform to talk about Palestine without tiptoeing around Israel’s actions.
Meanwhile, Israeli TV continued its propaganda on the IDF’s so-called operations but Haaretz, the country’s left-leaning and oldest newspaper, still managed to publish some pieces critical of the government, repeatedly calling attention to Benjamin Netanyahu’s tactics of keeping the hostages where they were to be able to pursue his rampage. In the Middle East, where the media is highly controlled by the Gulf states’ official policies, The National pushed the envelope in trying to expose the full scale of Israel’s genocidal acts.
The main source of information, however, remained the brave men and women of Gaza who recorded videos and accounts of the unfolding horror and shared them with the world in real time through social media. People across the world turned to their accounts, followed their stories and came to trust them in the absence of original — and often fair — reporting across mainstream media. Inside newsrooms, they served as inspiration through their commitment in the face of some of the worst atrocities modern history has witnessed. They made journalists like myself question what our profession stands for and how we can use it to amplify their voices to end a genocide which has made us feel helpless at many junctures.
“I have seen my colleagues break down and cry at how we’re covering the war,” a peer in BBC London told me in December 2024. I shared how I’ve seen my colleagues tear up at the sheer horror of the information and photos coming out of Gaza. The genocide has been difficult and challenging to cover, to say the least. Footage of parents first retrieving bodies of their children from underneath rubble only to bury them, people moving to ‘safe zones’ and then being bombed, unarmed citizens being burnt alive in tents or killed while out to collect food, doctors breaking down at their helplessness to save lives or even have the equipment to do so — sifting through these footages and information has been heavy on the heart and mind.
But none of this comes even remotely close to the pain and suffering of the people living through a genocide and reporting on it.
And so, I won’t end this piece on the toll it has taken on journalists to cover two years of this genocide. Because a journalist is never meant to become the story — unless you are a journalist in Gaza staring at death and writing your final message. complete report is on below link. Source: https://www.dawn.com/news/1947192/how-gaza-redefined-objective-journalism-in-the-face-of-genocide