“An attack that doesn't kill you makes you stronger, stronger, and stronger.” Palestinian journalist Mohamed Balousha wrote this message after being shot on December 15 in the left leg while he was recording Israeli troop positions in Gaza City. The day before, Balousha retransmitted through audio notes to EL PAÍS the attacks that were taking place in the Sheik Redwan neighborhood. He is one of the few reporters who, risking his life on a daily basis, remains in the north of the Strip, although his recovery is unknown. His is one of the most widespread exclusives of the war, broadcast by Emirati television Al Mashhad.
In a video from November 27, which EL PAÍS has been able to see without censorship or pixelated images, he puts a face to the ignominy of the conflict. This is the discovery of at least four babies abandoned in the ICU of the Al Naser hospital in a state of putrefaction, eaten by worms and flies and still attached to cables and respirators. Two and a half weeks earlier, the facilities were besieged, attacked and evacuated by order of the Israeli army. If the world can see tragedies like that and those that take place daily in that Palestinian enclave, it is thanks to him and those who manage to narrate the war from within for Palestinian and international media.
EL PAÍS has contacted some of those unique witnesses of a war to whose main scene, the Gaza of more than 20,000 dead, Israel prevents access. Mohamed Balousha is still alive there for the moment, but the number of deaths of reporters or media employees since October 7 amounts to 68 (61 Palestinians, four Israelis and three Lebanese), plus three missing, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ, according to its acronym in English). More lives have been lost in ten weeks than in any country in an entire year, CPJ reported last Thursday.
Mahmud, 30, tries to rebel against the image that many have that the reporter in Gaza comes standard with a shell that keeps him immune to everything that happens around him. “We are being treated as if we are less than human beings. I have every right to feel pain. I have every right to mourn my murdered family members. “I have every right to feel afraid,” emphasizes this reporter from a large international media outlet who is not authorized to make statements, but who agrees to speak on the condition that neither the company he works for nor his real name be published. .
Like all those consulted, Mahmud deals daily with the difficulties of obtaining food and water, he says from the three-story home he shares with about 70 people in Rafah, at the southern end of the Strip, after escaping from Gaza City. Unlike other journalists, he has his own solar panel system provided by his media that makes his work easier, although the batteries are lasting less and less.
Priority: survive
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Under the slab of uncontrolled violence, the reporters who these days cover the conflict in that open-air cage with 2.3 million inhabitants have a priority above the fulfillment of their professional duty. That priority is the odyssey of survival, according to the stories collected over the last few days for this report.
Almost all of them have escaped from the north to the middle and southern areas of the Palestinian enclave, where they are sheltering in overcrowded conditions with relatives or acquaintances. Searching in the midst of the brutal humanitarian crisis that is shaking the Strip for food, water or shelter is essential to, as informants, obtain transportation, keep the batteries of their electronic devices charged, manage to connect to the internet to communicate or transmit material to the media. that they are going to publish it.
Confirming a common phenomenon of modern wars, social networks have triggered the popularity and dissemination of the work of some of the Palestinian informants, such as the photographer Motaz Azaiza, who narrates the conflict from the southern half of the Strip and who has more than 17 million followers on Instagram. Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups broadcast their own propaganda videos, but do not allow informants access to their operations or the places where they are holding hostages.
“I have covered the movement of people from the north to the south and also between cities in the south. I myself was always one of them. Sometimes I had to walk or ride a donkey cart to get to cover the stories,” explains Sami Alajrami, 55, a Gaza correspondent for the Italian agency Ansa for 12 years and who has already changed jobs seven times. home since he left his home in the north to settle first in Deir el Balah, in the central area, and now, in Rafah. At the beginning of the war, Alajrami says in a written message, he paid ten times the normal price for fuel to move around and do his job. “I have covered the murder of 14 members of my family who were also displaced,” he details to give an idea of how impossible it is to separate the journalist from the victim, something that almost all reporters suffer.
With most of the informants being part of the 1.8 million displaced inhabitants, the most complicated situation is experienced in the north, where only a handful remain on the ground. It is the area where the army has hit and hits the most and where there is hardly any population left. There, the journalists, some forged and seasoned in the current conflict due to the impossibility of colleagues or replacements arriving from outside, try to move in groups in the midst of constant fighting and bombings such as the one that wounded Islam Bader in the neck on Tuesday. , reporter freelance (he collaborates with various media and charges per published piece) who works for the Qatari network Al Araby. She was in the Yabalia refugee camp when a bombing killed dozens of people.
In the two-story house in the Al Maghazi refugee camp, in the central area of the Strip, where the reporter freelance Aseel Musa, 26 years old, has taken refuge with fifty other people, there is a generator, but no fuel to power it. This prevents there from being electricity in the house, so she uses a neighbor's solar panels to charge the computer and phone, her main work tools. With the car stationary, she has to walk. “We depend on firewood to heat water and cook. What we have is only canned food, pasta or rice,” Musa details in responses sent via voice notes.
“We journalists in Gaza are not protected and we work in an extremely difficult situation,” laments Akram al Satarri, a 47-year-old reporter, who had not witnessed such a level of violence despite the fact that he has covered all the wars in Gaza since, in In 2005, Israel vacated the Strip. Like Alajrami and Musa, this journalist freelance He also fled from Gaza City to the south with his family. “I think there is no safe haven in all of Gaza,” she says from Khan Younis via phone call and voice messages.
Six hours crawling with two bullets
“Two bullets hit me in the leg and I fell to the ground. After six hours, I crawled to the second floor, where I had a first aid kit, with which I stopped the bleeding. (…) A friend came to see me with four others and they transported me on a wooden board for two or three kilometers to the nearest medical point,” Mohamed Balousha said in a message.
Journalists in the Palestinian enclave “have paid, and continue to pay, an unprecedented price and face exponential threats. Many have lost their colleagues, families and media facilities, and have fled in search of safety when there is no safe haven or way out,” said Sherif Mansour, CPJ coordinator in the region.
The deaths of informants are accompanied by threats, arrests, censorship and the loss of their own family members. “The main problem of being a journalist in Gaza is that I don't feel safe. “Israel attacks journalists and their families,” deplores Aseel Musa, who has lost six relatives in the current conflict and who also complains about the threats and insults he receives through his social media profiles. Mahmud, with a large number of family members, acquaintances and colleagues killed in these weeks, receives threats from “Israeli settlers who want to kill me, rape my wife or murder my son with the intention of stopping my work or intimidating me.”
One of the latest fatalities among reporters was Samer Abudaqa, Al Jazeera cameraman, hit by the projectile launched from an Israeli drone. His rescue could not be carried out for hours due to the intense attacks and he ended up dying, according to the version of the network and his companion, Wael al Dahdouh, wounded in that same bombing. Al Dahdouh already lost his wife, a son, a daughter and a grandson in another Israeli attack in October, but within hours he was back in front of the camera.
“It is very important to understand that we are also victims of this conflict and that they can kill us and in fact they are killing us,” Mahmud emphasizes. But, despite the determination and strength of colleagues like Al Dahdouh, he insists: “We are not machines. I mean, we have feelings and we need to cry sometimes, but we are almost always treated like machines. And, in any case, we have to end up doing the job.”
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