Israel is making sure there is no one to document the horror of its war

Boston Globe

11 hours ago

Since the gruesome Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed about 1,200 Israelis, Israel has waged a pitiless war in Gaza. More than 62,000 people have been killed, including some 18,500 children, according to local health authorities in what is considered by many experts to be an undercount. Most of the tiny enclave is now rubble; almost all of Gaza's 2 million people have been forced to flee their homes, many repeatedly. Since Israel ended the latest ceasefire in March, it has sharply curtailed the amount of humanitarian aid reaching Gaza. Most of its population, according to the United Nations, is experiencing or staring down starvation.
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Amid so much suffering, the targeting of a single journalist may seem like an individual tragedy. But coming as Israel begins an all-out assault to capture Gaza City and as Benjamin Netanyahu has said he intends to occupy all of Gaza in the face of growing global condemnation, the killing of al-Sharif, like the killing in March of his fellow Al Jazeera correspondent Hossam Shabat, marks an ominous new phase in the war.
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To justify its pitiless pulverizing of Gaza, Israel has endlessly invoked the threat of Hamas, supposedly lurking in schools, hospitals, homes and mosques. Now it has begun not only accusing individual journalists of being Hamas fighters but also openly admitting to killing them in targeted attacks, based on purported evidence that is all but impossible to verify.
With Gaza closed to international journalists, this new campaign has created a pretext to eliminate the remaining journalists with the platform to bear witness and terrify anyone brave enough to attempt to take the place of the fallen. It has also exposed the cruel logic at the heart of Israel's prosecution of the war: If Hamas is everywhere, then every Palestinian in Gaza is Hamas. This is truly a war with no limits, and soon there may be no journalists left to document its horror.
I have long been awed by the work of journalists who find their own homeland under attack. I spent years in war zones as a foreign correspondent, working alongside some of the bravest and finest journalists I've ever encountered. We were engaged in the same work, fundamentally: trying to help the world understand seemingly incomprehensible suffering. As an American employed by an American news organization, I stood on the same front lines in Congo, in Darfur, in Kashmir and elsewhere. But I would fly home to safety, while they would remain, struggling along with everyone else to survive.
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We differed in another important way as well. I chose and pursued a career in journalism. For many reporters from war zones, the profession chose them. This was the story of Mohammed Mhawish, a young man from Gaza City. When Hamas attacked Israel, he was dreaming of a career in the arts. He had graduated from the Islamic University in Gaza, where he studied English and creative writing, and hoped to write literature and poetry. Instead, he found himself working as a journalist for Al Jazeera's English-language service.
'It was a feeling of obligation to my people and a responsibility to my hometown that was being destroyed in real time,' he told me. 'I never imagined myself being given the responsibility or assigned the responsibility to be writing through destruction and death and loss and tragedy.' Gaza City is a small place, so he got to know al-Sharif as they both struggled to cover the catastrophe unfolding around them.
'He was this really brave young person,' Mhawish told me. Before the war, his work had focused on culture and ordinary life. 'He reported on families having hope, families getting married, people celebrating life accomplishments, people just enjoying life on a daily basis. He never wanted or aspired to be a correspondent carrying a responsibility for his entire people.'
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The work took a toll on al-Sharif. 'I remember many times where he was in public and sometimes personally with other colleagues of his in Gaza, just saying how hungry he was,' Mhawish said. 'How tired, how exhausted, how terrified and how scared -- he was really scared all the time. He was feeling that he was being watched and he's being hunted and he's being targeted.'
Under international law, journalists are considered civilians. But since the beginning of the war in Gaza, at least 192 journalists have been killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (I'm on the organization's board). 'At some point, I had to abandon my press vest because it no longer provided me with the protection that I was seeking,' Mhawish told me. 'In fact, it functioned as a target on my back.'
Mhawish left Gaza last year. Al-Sharif's death, coming after so many threats from Israeli military officials, was an especially devastating blow. 'At the end of the day, he chose to give the sacrifice of his life,' Mhawish said. 'I am really, really tired of grieving my friends and colleagues.'
When the Saudi government murdered Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident columnist who wrote for The Washington Post, inside its consulate in Turkey, it created a global outcry. Russia's detention and killing of journalists have likewise provoked outpourings of support. If the governments bother to concoct accusations - of espionage and other crimes - to justify these heinous acts against working journalists, they are usually dismissed out of hand as the ravings of autocratic regimes bent on destroying free speech.
The response to al-Sharif's killing, like that of scores of other Palestinian journalists, has been different -- more muted, more likely to give equal weight to Israeli accusations despite the lack of verifiable evidence. Mhawish told me he was dismayed to see so many news organizations around the world parrot Israeli claims that his friend was killed because he was a Hamas militant. 'What's heartbreaking about this is that it tells me that there are journalists in the world who are justifying the killing of other journalists,' he said.
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This is another respect in which I, as a foreign journalist, was always perceived differently from the local journalists who worked alongside me in war zones. They knew far more than I did about events unfolding in their homeland. They understood how to move safely through dangerous territory and possessed essential contacts and expertise that helped enrich my coverage.
Ideally, this leads to mutually beneficial and symbiotic relationships between local journalists and their international counterparts, who often hire locals to improve their coverage. But in some places, what might be seen as expertise comes to be viewed as something darker. As a foreigner, I tend to be seen as a neutral outside observer. A local reporter, embedded in her community and enduring the same hardships as her fellow citizens, comes under more scrutiny. She cannot help being blinkered, the thinking goes, by her own suffering and root for one side in the conflict she is covering. She is, surely, a partisan.
In the remarkable new documentary '2000 Meters to Andriivka,' a pair of Ukrainian journalists accompany a group of Ukrainian soldiers through a narrow band of forest as they seek to recapture a village from Russian forces. It is a claustrophobic, harrowing film, unfolding in bunkers and foxholes. At one point the film's director, the Pulitzer- and Oscar-winning filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov, notes the parallel between himself, the journalist, and the young officer he is interviewing.
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The soldier, Chernov says, picked up a rifle, while he picked up a camera. Through different means, each man sought to stand up for the dignity and sovereignty of Ukraine's people. Were Chernov, who works for The Associated Press, to be targeted or smeared by the Russian state, journalists the world over would not hesitate to rally to his side and dismiss any allegations against him as propaganda. I would be among the first to join any crusade on his behalf.
It is in this context that we must consider Israel's contention that al-Sharif was a Hamas militant. The evidence offered to the public is weak, consisting of screenshots of spreadsheets, purported service numbers and old payments that have not been independently verified.
'The Israeli military seems to be making accusations without any substantive evidence as a license to kill journalists,' said Irene Khan, the United Nations' special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, when a different Israeli airstrike killed another Al Jazeera journalist and his cameraman last year. Al-Sharif reported on their deaths.
In interviews before his own death, al-Sharif pleaded for help and safety. 'All of this is happening because my coverage of the crimes of the Israeli occupation in the Gaza Strip harms them and damages their image in the world,' he told the Committee to Protect Journalists. 'They accuse me of being a terrorist because the occupation wants to assassinate me morally.'
Even if one takes Israel's allegations at face value -- which I absolutely do not, given Israel's track record -- and entertain the idea that in 2013, at the age of 17, al-Sharif joined Hamas in some form, what are we to make of that choice? Hamas at that time had been the governing authority of his homeland since 2006. It ran the entire state apparatus of a tiny enclave. 'It is a movement with a vast social infrastructure,' Tareq Baconi, the author of a book about Hamas, has written, 'connected to many Palestinians who are unaffiliated with either the movement's political or military platforms.'
Take it further and contemplate, based on Israel's supposed evidence, that al-Sharif had played some military role before becoming a journalist. The history of war correspondence is replete with examples of fighters turned reporters -- indeed perhaps the most famous among them, George Orwell, recorded soldiers' lives while fighting in the Spanish Civil War and became a war correspondent.
These days, having served in the military is widely seen as an asset among American war reporters. Far from seeing those who served as hopelessly biased, editors rightly value the expertise and perspective these reporters bring from their experiences and trust them to prioritize their new role as journalistic observers. In Israel most young people are required to serve in the military, so military experience is common among journalists.
Many will protest that Hamas is different from the military of a state. This is true. Long before its gruesome attack on Israel on Oct. 7, it engaged in horrifying terror tactics like suicide bombings that targeted civilians. Many countries, including the United States, consider it a terrorist organization. But it was the accepted authority in Gaza.
Indeed, the uncomfortable truth is that Hamas owes much of its strength to Netanyahu's cynical policies, which, as the Times reported in 2023, included tacit support designed to prop up Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority. As late as September of that year, the month before Hamas attacked Israel, his government welcomed the flow of millions of dollars to Hamas via Qatar.
'Even as the Israeli military obtained battle plans for a Hamas invasion and analysts observed significant terrorism exercises just over the border in Gaza, the payments continued,' my newsroom colleagues wrote. 'For years, Israeli intelligence officers even escorted a Qatari official into Gaza, where he doled out money from suitcases filled with millions of dollars.'
Freud theorized that hysterics were an extreme version of ordinary people experiencing outsize distress in exceptional circumstances. In this way, journalists are an extreme version of the curious person who lingers and tries to figure out what's going on when everyone else, sensing danger, has packed up their curiosity and gone home.
What are journalists but unusual people who decide on society's behalf to witness the unbearable? They set aside their personal safety, and perhaps find strange thrills in the horrors of the work they do and the things that they witness. There can be a kind of moral deformity in this, to be sure, but it's an important and socially recognized role. Someone's got to send word back into history.
In this regard, journalists are actually not that different from soldiers. Soldiers, after all, are ordinary people given minimal training, mostly how to use their equipment and the tactical ways that one does the job. And then they set off to do a monstrous task on behalf of the rest of us, something most of us cannot possibly imagine doing.
This strange and seldom acknowledged kinship is what permits a pall of suspicion to fall over the work of journalists in war zones, especially local ones, who cannot help being caught up in the events unfolding around them. Using their chosen instruments and medium, they are engaged in a struggle to protect their home and their people. It is easy to see how the other side will seek to cast them as combatants, even if they carry no weapons. But that does not mean we should believe them.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.