How Journalists in Gaza and the West Bank Report the News

Photo by nour tayeh on Unsplash

Tareq Hajjaj says he has just two reporting tools right now: his phone and the stories he hears from Gazans. His biggest challenge right now is keeping the former charged so he can collect the latter. 

Hajjaj, 30, is the Gaza correspondent for Mondoweiss. He has been living and working in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, since he, his wife, and his 11-month-old son were displaced from their home in the north on October 13. When we communicate in late November, he and his family are staying at his father-in-law’s house, but without electricity, Hajjaj has to charge three portable power banks at the European Hospital each day to keep his and his family’s devices running. When he feels it’s safe, and when he finishes taking care of his family, he leaves them behind to go out and report, but he knows each trip is a gamble.

 “It feels like going to the death by my own feet,” he writes. “Every time you leave your home to report is like you will never get back. I hug my family, kiss my son, thinking that it’s the last time.”

During the seven-day ceasefire in Gaza, Hajjaj spoke with people in schools, in the streets, and at the European Hospital. He has dozens of stories recorded on his phone. The trick is getting them to his editors. He lost his laptop’s power source, so he can’t type up his reports. Instead, he dictates them in WhatsApp voice messages—like those he sent to me—which his editors at Mondoweiss transcribe, edit, and publish. 

This is how he reported the story of 10-year-old Ayah Sha’ban, who waits to learn that her entire family has been killed, and shared the experiences of starved Palestinians struggling to find enough food to survive. But while reporting these stories Hajjaj, too, looks for enough food and water for his wife, son, and his sick mother. They eat dates for breakfast, and sleep on blankets on the ground next to each other. Hajjaj and other men in the building take shifts waiting in line for fuel. He spent two whole days of the ceasefire in line to get gas for his family so they wouldn’t have to depend on wood for heat and cooking. He didn’t get any.

“We spend most of the time just trying to get basic needs [met]: milk for the children, some coffee, some water to fill our tanks on the roof so we can open the tap and get water to wash our faces,” says Hajjaj. “This is the ceasefire. I don’t know what I can tell you but the situation is fucked up.”

Hajjaj is one of many Palestinian journalists working from Gaza amid Israel’s indiscriminate assault on the occupied territory in response to Hamas’ October 7 attack which killed roughly 1,200 Israelis. There were around 1,000 journalists working in Gaza prior to the war. Israel’s bombing campaign and ground invasion, which have killed more than 17,700 Palestinians, including at least 6,000 children, have also prevented basic necessities from reaching civilians, creating a widespread humanitarian crisis. 

Like his colleagues, Hajjaj is trying to report the news while navigating brutal, unfathomable losses. He knows his work is critical, and he wants the world to hear the stories he’s being told. But given the Israeli military’s accelerated killing of journalists—the Committee to Protect Journalists accused the IDF of killing 20 journalists between 2001 and May 2023, and current estimates suggest that at least 63 have been killed since October 7, the majority of whom were Palestinian—the visibility is unnerving, too. 

“When I feel that my voice is internationally heard, I fear the most,” he says. “When the Israelis see someone from Gaza who has a loud voice, who is exposing their crimes, I believe that they will just kill his voice. Sometimes they kill the journalist with his family. Sometimes they kill the family of the journalist, and leave him to suffer more and more.”

These realities have prompted Hajjaj to stop wearing any protective gear that indicates he’s a journalist in a combat zone. He thinks the press vests, which many of his colleagues have been killed in, make him a target, a sentiment that other Palestinian journalists share. “Without it, I feel less fear of being killed,” he writes. “I believe the Israelis want all reporters dead.” 

In response to the “extraordinarily high” death toll among journalists, the International Federation of Journalists released a statement in late October calling on the Israeli government to respond to accusations of deliberate targeting and clarify its rules of combat engagement.

Media workers in other parts of the occupied territories are grappling with horrific working conditions, too. Freelance journalist and videographer Shatha Hanaysha, 31, lives in a town just south of the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, where it’s estimated that over 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers since October 7. Last year, Hanaysha was working on a masters in media studies, but she left the program to cover the news in Palestine for publications like Ultrasawt and Middle East Eye, as well as on social media. 

In a WhatsApp text message, Hanaysha describes a day of work in late November. She drove close to Jenin after hearing about an Israeli raid there, then parked her car and walked the rest of the way into the camp. It’s a short but nerve-wracking journey. “It’s hard to enter the camp without getting killed by a bullet from [an] Israeli sniper,” Hanaysha writes. 

She says there’s no end to sad stories in Jenin, but recently she was especially shaken by witnessing the grief of a 70-year old mother, whose disabled son was shot and killed in the street by an Israeli sniper in November.

Hanaysha is uniquely aware of the danger of reporting in the West Bank. She used to believe that while visibly on the job as a media worker, Israeli soldiers wouldn’t kill her—they might harass, arrest, assault, or wound her, but at the end of the day, she’d be alive. That changed on May 11, 2022. That day, she was standing beside veteran Al Jazeera anchor Shireen Abu Akleh in the Jenin refugee camp when Israeli soldiers shot and murdered Akleh during a raid. They continued to fire upon Hanaysha while she took cover behind a tree. “The soldier who killed Shireen and [who was] shooting [at] me and my colleagues, they [got] away with it,” Hanaysha writes. Still, she continues to wear her press vest and helmet wherever she goes, in case she’s caught in a raid by Israeli forces.

Raids and other instances of violence in the West Bank will sometimes draw coverage from international outlets, but when the dust settles, local journalists like Hanaysha report on the impacts of the conflict in the community. “For us, as the journalist, our day doesn’t end with the ending of the raid,” she writes. “After the raid, we cover the martyrs’ funeral and the farewell for the young men who got killed in this raid.” During one such raid on November 29, Israeli soldiers killed two Palestinian children, aged eight and 14.

Israeli soldiers are not the only threats in the West Bank. Dalia Hatuqa, a 43-year-old journalist based between Ramallah and Amman, Jordan, is equally fearful of attacks from settlers while she commutes between Ramallah and Jenin. That could mean having stones thrown at your vehicle, or it could mean being shot at. “In the [United] States, I used to be more afraid of the fact that I’m Arab and Muslim, and that I would get attacked for either of these, especially because I’m Palestinian,” she says in a voice note. “In the West Bank, I’m worried about these things as well, but also there’s [a] randomness of the attacks by settlers. The fear in the West Bank is more palpable.”

Mauricio Morales, a 41-year-old Colombian freelance journalist and photographer, has also been reporting in Jenin and Ramallah, including for Al Jazeera. He’s covered difficult conflicts before—he was in Gaza during the 2014 war—but the level of violence he’s witnessing now is “just horrible.” 

“Spiritually, it will have a toll… There is always an emotional and physical toll,” he writes. “But I am a journalist that decided to go there and cover. I am not a Palestinian forced to live under occupation and armed violence.” 

Morales says that Palestinians living in the West Bank are still welcoming and willing to speak to him, but they’re tired, and for some, there’s a feeling of futility toward news coverage after years of occupation—they feel that even if journalists come to report on the brutality they deal with, things won’t change.

Still, journalists in Gaza and the West Bank believe in the power of storytelling, and young Gazans have captured the world’s attention with first-hand social media reporting and commentary. Hajjaj feels deep reverence for every account he collects—each is as important as the last. “Every story is magnificent for its teller, because everyone has a story to tell and everyone passed through something tough and hard,” he says. 

He thinks that these stories are making a difference around the world. “I believe that all the massive protests that can be shown in the world is because of our reports,” he writes. “We provide a different view to the world … Only because we are free and independent, the world now is seeing the truth.”But Hajjaj wishes he could go back to simply covering events rather than being part of the story. When the ceasefire ended on November 30, Israeli forces resumed bombing on Gaza, but this time, they targeted the southern parts of the strip with bombing and a ground invasion. Hajjaj and his family have had to flee once again, this time from Khan Younis to Rafah, near the border with Egypt.

“To be honest, I didn’t want all of this,” says Hajjaj. “I just wanted a good job [where] I can tell stories about people under occupation. Stories about life, stories about struggling to have life, stories about anything meaningful.”