Rights and Accountability 10 January 2024
The day before, an Israeli airstrike on a car they were riding in killed Al Jazeera journalist Hamza Dahdouh and his colleague Mustafa Thuraya in Khan Younis.
A key topic of the discussion was the relative lack of international solidarity for Palestinian journalists who are the only reporters covering Gaza from inside, even as they face Israel’s ongoing American-backed extermination campaign.
The relative silence highlights how Palestinian journalists have long been second-class citizens – so-called stringers who expose themselves to death but who are lucky to get third place on the byline, or a note at the bottom of an article, while US or European journalists who parachute in get all the glory.Palestinian journalists are the world’s eyes and ears, the witnesses recording the Israeli genocide so that no one one can ever claim “we didn’t know.”
Yet the knowledge of Palestinians is often devalued and they are assumed to be inherently biased and untrustworthy. But as I told Al Jazeera, nobody knows Gaza better than Palestinian journalists, and no one is more objective about the reality there than they are.On the panel with me were Tim Dawson, deputy secretary general of the International Federation of Journalists, and Jodie Ginsberg, president of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
You can watch the full discussion in the video at the top of this article as well as some clips below.
“Assassination”
Al Jazeera condemned the attack that killed Hamza Dahdouh and Mustafa Thuraya as a deliberate “assassination,” as the pair “were on their way to carry out their duty in the Gaza Strip.”
The network added that the latest killings confirm Israel’s determination to “continue these brutal attacks against journalists and their families, aiming to discourage them from performing their mission, violating the principles of freedom of the press and undermining the right to life.” Hamza was the eldest son of Wael Dahdouh, Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief who already buried his wife Amna, teenage son Mahmoud, 7-year-old daughter Sham and toddler grandson Adam, all killed in an Israeli attack in October.Wael Dahdouh was himself injured in an Israeli drone strike last month that killed his colleague Samer Abu Daqqa.
Hamza Dahdouh posted this tribute to his mother, brother, sister and baby nephew just days before he would join them on the list of victims in Israel’s genocide.
Unprecedented toll
Israel has killed more than 100 Palestinian journalists in Gaza since 7 October, an unprecedented toll.
“The Israel-Gaza war is the most dangerous situation for journalists we have ever seen,” said Sherif Mansour of the Committee to Protect Journalists in December. “The Israeli army has killed more journalists in 10 weeks than any other army or entity has in any single year. And with every journalist killed, the war becomes harder to document and to understand.”
In a brief filed in December supporting an ongoing US lawsuit against President Joe Biden and Secretary State Blinken for their direct role in the genocide, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate states that “Evidence strongly indicates that the vast majority of the journalists and media workers killed since the start of the genocide were specifically targeted for assassination by the Israeli military.”
“At least 84 of the 95 deceased journalists were killed in ‘surgical’ or sniper Israeli attacks that targeted either their homes (or, in one case, their personal vehicle) or the area where they were reporting, filming or otherwise covering news stories,” the brief adds.
As I told Inside Story, this extermination campaign is only possible with the support of the United States, whose Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday shed crocodile tears over the killing of Hamza Dahdouh and other journalists, during a press conference in Qatar.
Their work is all the more important since Israel prohibits international journalists from entering Gaza, except under escort from its military – a restriction Israel’s high court endorsed on Monday.
https://x.com/RamAbdu/status/1744634736582996062
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