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18-10-2023
GAZA CITY: Freelance journalist Rakan Abdelrahman works out of a cafe, wearing his vest marked “press”, ready to rush out if he needs to as he reports on Israel’s bombing of the Gaza Strip but Abdelrahman, whose work has appeared in Middle East Eye and The National, is not just covering a story. Palestinian journalists in the Gaza Strip, like Abdelrahman, are trying to defy the odds and death to bring the horrors of war to the world amid difficulties that threaten to hobble their work.
For 10 days, Israeli warplanes have been bombing the coastal enclave relentlessly and have killed 2,808 Palestinians, a quarter of them children. A further 10,859 have been wounded in aerial bombardments and on Monday, the interior ministry said that the bodies of more than 1,000 Palestinians are trapped under the rubble of buildings destroyed by bombs.
Last week, Israel bombed the communications tower in the besieged territory and cut off electricity to the strip’s sole power plant. The actions are part of the “total siege” Israel has implemented in response to the surprise attack on October 7 by Hamas fighters on the Israeli military bases and surrounding Israeli towns and settlements outside of the Gaza Strip. At least 1,400 Israelis were killed in the attack.
The bombings and the siege have left the Gaza Strip without reliable internet or electricity. This has made the work of journalists already risky and challenging in a war zone even harder.
“Due to bad internet connection and electricity outages, we can’t report on something in real-time. There is no appropriate place to work from anyway,” Abdelrahman tells media, adding that journalists wearing clearly marked press vests and helmets have been targeted.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least 11 journalists have already been killed in the Gaza Strip since October 7.
“We can’t cover the site of massacres or even get to the places that have been bombed for fear that another Israeli attack will target the same area,” Abdelrahman says. “Every second you are in danger. Our colleagues have paid the price with their lives, such as Saeed al-Taweel, Mohammed Subh and Hisham Alnwajha.”
The three journalists were killed on October 10 after going out to film a building in Gaza City about to be bombed. They were all standing at a safe distance, hundreds of metres from the stated target of the Hiji building, but the air attack instead hit a different building, much closer to them.
Residents in the Gaza Strip, which has a population of 2.3 million people more than half of whom are under the age of 18 have said the current war is the most ferocious out of the previous offensives in the last 15 years. At least 1 million people have been internally displaced. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
