On Monday,<\/span> journalist Ibrahim Abu Ghazaleh was on his way to meet his friends and colleagues at Al-Baqa Cafe, an area of relative \u201cnormalcy\u201d near the beach in Gaza City where civilians and journalists used to meet and work. Just before he stepped inside, a missile hit the building, killing his friend Ismail Abu Hatab and injuring another, alongside more than 20 other civilians.<\/p>\n Hatab was a Palestinian filmmaker, the founder of a TV production company<\/a>, and \u201ca great person,\u201d Ghazaleh said. \u201cHe served his people and photographed everything in Gaza City, conveying the suffering through pictures.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn Gaza, a camera is a threat.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Israeli forces have killed hundreds of Palestinian journalists as Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continue<\/a> the ongoing genocide<\/a> of Gaza and the West Bank. Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli government has murdered close to 60,000 Palestinians<\/a>, leaving an uncountable number vaporized<\/a>, trapped under the rubble, dying of starvation<\/a>, or shot<\/a> while attempting<\/a> to receive food<\/a>. The bloodshed coincides with a ban on international media and a calculated extermination campaign to assassinate the limited number of people left to document and expose Israel\u2019s atrocities.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn Gaza, a camera is a threat,\u201d Ghazaleh said. \u201cWhen you witness the truth, you become a target.\u201d<\/p>\n In Gaza and the West Bank, Israeli soldiers consistently threaten<\/a> journalists and their families. Before attacking, they warn reporters to cease reporting, pressuring them to abandon what is often the most urgent story of their lives. Last month, the Washington Post obtained<\/a> audio of a threatening call from an Israeli intelligence operative to an Iranian general: \u201cYou have 12 hours to escape with your wife and child. Otherwise, you\u2019re on our list right now.\u201d The calls and messages journalists report receiving aren\u2019t much different. Reporters are often killed when most identifiable<\/a> \u2014 while wearing<\/a> their press vests<\/a>.<\/p>\n Ghazaleh is one of five Palestinian journalists targeted by Israeli military forces who spoke with The Intercept about how Israel\u2019s genocidal attacks on Palestinian people go hand in hand with the suppression of a free press. These reporters face a constant tension between competing urgencies: exposing the truth and protecting their personal safety. Two have since evacuated from Gaza with their families. Two are in north Gaza and continue reporting under the constant bombardment and manmade famine. One is reporting from the illegally occupied West Bank.<\/p>\n Living through Israel\u2019s relentless attacks on civilians, and knowing they risk being targeted for their work, these reporters and a sparse set of their colleagues are those left to tell the world of the atrocities they have faced as Palestinians during the deadliest years<\/a> in journalism\u2019s history. Over 230<\/a> journalists, and counting, have been killed since October 2023.<\/p>\n At 6:05 a.m. in Gaza <\/strong>on October 7, 2023, Youmna El Sayed broke the news of the attack on Israel that Hamas called Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. A former Al Jazeera English correspondent and mother of four, El Sayed said she has covered all of the escalations in Gaza since 2016, including the 11-day war in May 2021, where Israel destroyed many media offices<\/a> in Gaza.<\/p>\n After October 7, she knew things would be different.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was very clear from the beginning that it is going to be unprecedented retaliation,\u201d El Sayed said. In the first frantic days of Israel\u2019s assault, El Sayed documented mass civilian killings as missiles fell. She described being \u201cthrown by the pressure of a missile falling, and it just blows you away, with everything else. That strong sound beeping in your ears when you stop hearing anything. Wearing my very heavy vest and helmet, I kept on running and running because I was trying to escape for my life.\u201d<\/p>\n Then Israel began its ground invasion. El Sayed and her family had tried to escape Gaza City, but she said it was hard to find housing because many people did not want to rent apartments to journalists as they are seen as a threat. When the ground invasion came, the family was trapped in their apartment.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI couldn\u2019t get any signal [on my phone] so I got another SIM card that was not on my name, and two days later, my husband received this call,\u201d El Sayed recalled. \u201cIt was someone who identified himself as an [Israel Defense Forces] officer. He first identified my husband\u2019s full name, and he said, \u2018We know who you are, take your wife and kids and leave your home, otherwise your lives will be in danger in the upcoming hours.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The call was not unique. Mohammed Mhawish, a journalist born and raised in Gaza City who was reporting for Al Jazeera, said that he was one of the few journalists covering his area for the network when he began receiving threatening calls.<\/a><\/p>\n On December 6, he said, \u201cI received [another] call from a military officer saying, \u2018You have to leave the house or we\u2019re going to bomb it.\u2019\u201d He was living in a three-story building with several of his family members and others trying to find refuge under bombardment.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201c\u200aThe next morning, on December 7th, at around 7:30 in the morning, the house collapsed in milliseconds,\u201d Mhawish said. \u201cIt was targeted by an Israeli warplane. I made it, but I lost family, people I loved, who are very close to my heart. I even lost neighbors to that attack and people who were only passersby at the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe only thing I could do to protect my children is make them promise me they would never look at the ground. Even if you didn\u2019t, you could smell the decomposed bodies.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n After El Sayed\u2019s husband received the call, \u201c the first thing I did was call our bureau chief in Jerusalem and confirm it was a direct threat,\u201d she said. \u201cFor the first time, it was not me in danger because I was in the field or in an unsafe area. I was a danger to my children, to my family. I waited for any of the other families [in our building] to receive any calls, and they didn\u2019t at all. None of them.\u201d<\/p>\n Two days later, the Israeli army surrounded El Sayed\u2019s home.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe first thing they did was shoot at the windows,\u201d El Sayed said. \u201cThey rained the gate of the building with bullets. Then, the tank shelled the gate. Everyone in the building was screaming. It was 15 minutes of unprecedented hell. They called us on their mics and said, \u2018You have five minutes to leave the building.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n El Sayed said her family left everything and drove away while Israeli soldiers shot at them. They traveled on foot across what Israel called a \u201csafe corridor,\u201d stretching seven kilometers from the north to the south, where no cameras were allowed. She described corpses strewn across the ground, where the Israeli army had barred ambulances from picking them up.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI did not want my children to go through that trauma, but it was the only solution left to save their lives,\u201d she said. \u201cThe only thing I could do to protect them, is make them promise me they would never look at the ground. Even if you didn\u2019t, you could smell the decomposed bodies. I could see the formula [bottles] and the bags of children and families killed. We were instructed that whoever falls is not even to be lifted off the ground. It was, to this extent, dehumanizing.\u201d<\/p>\n El Sayed and Mhawish were lucky just to survive. Hassan Hamad, a 19-year-old journalist whose work frequently appeared on Al Jazeera<\/a>, received a text<\/a> from an Israeli officer saying Hamad and his family would be \u201cnext\u201d if he did not stop filming. On October 6, 2024, Israel struck his home in the Jabalia refugee camp and killed<\/a> him.<\/p>\n \u201cWe either speak about it or we\u2019re gonna be erased,\u201d said Mhawish. \u201cI kept filing stories through the voice [recordings] on my iPhone at the moment as I lived through it: the shortage of medical treatment, the collapse of supplies and food, and the rates [of killings] that were taking place across the city in northern Gaza.\u201d<\/p>\n Mohammed al-Sawwaf, like so many Palestinians from Gaza, has lost dozens of relatives to Israel\u2019s brutal assault. An award-winning filmmaker and founder of Alef Multimedia Company, al-Sawwaf is from a family of journalists: His father founded Falasteen, one of the largest circulating daily newspapers in Gaza.\u00a0<\/p>\n Al-Sawwaf recalled being a child witnessing the First Intifada, a multi-year protest and revolutionary movement when Palestinians rose up against the Israeli occupation between 1987 and 1993. \u201cI also witnessed the imprisonment of my father and most of my male relatives in Israeli prisons from my childhood until they were killed by Israeli bombs in November and December 2023,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Al-Sawwaf said that in November 2023, with no prior warning, his family home was targeted in an Israeli attack. He believes the Israeli military was waiting for the whole family to be inside the building before bombing it. The attack killed his parents, two of his four brothers, their children, and several other family members.\u00a0<\/p>\n Al-Sawwaf and his two surviving brothers, Montaser and Marwan, continued their reporting of the genocide. Montaser was a videographer for Anadolu Agency who helped Al-Sawwaf with projects, and Marwan was a sound technician and film producer for Alef Multimedia.Later in the same month, not long after the short-lived ceasefire of November 2023, Israel bombed the house where the brothers were sheltering, killing Montaser<\/a> and Marwan. In total, al-Sawwaf has lost 47 relatives.<\/p>\n \u201cTheir deaths drained my desire for life,\u201d al-Sawwaf said of his brothers. \u201cI still feel immense injustice, as we continue to endure suffering without accountability. Yet, I am still trying to rise and continue our work and mission.\u201d<\/p>\n Al-Sawwaf was injured in the bombing, too, leaving him paralyzed for months after the attacks. Two days after he was brought to Al-Awda Hospital in December 2023, it was besieged for the first time by Israeli forces. Two doctors overseeing his case were killed, and al-Sawwaf said he barely escaped. With little to no medical supplies, water, or food, al-Sawwaf has still not received proper care.<\/p>\n Constant bombing, collapsed medical infrastructure, hunger, and thirst: Journalists in Gaza are forced to live through the same brutal conditions they cover<\/a>. Mhawish experienced something similar in December 2023, after his family\u2019s house was toppled. Most of the hospitals in northern Gaza were already under siege, so he spent the next month trying to recover from his injuries until he could resume reporting.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n By signing up, I agree to receive emails from The Intercept and to the Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Use<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n Ghazaleh, now 26, has been reporting since he was 16.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI have documented many massacres and offensive shellings on Gaza City since the genocide began,\u201d he said. He was sheltering in Gaza\u2019s Indonesian Hospital in November 2023, he said, when \u201cthe Israeli army advanced on the hospital and we were holding our breath whilst reporting on what was happening. There were so many sick and wounded who were sheltering in the hospital, and we were forced to leave or become martyrs ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n Ghazaleh said he had to leave his laptop and camera equipment behind. He later found them vandalized and broken.<\/p>\n His family moved to the Jabalia refugee camp, where, he said, \u201cmany fellow journalists were targeted or directly threatened to stop their coverage of northern Gaza.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDocumenting the truth has become a moral duty before it is a profession.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Israeli forces bombed the camp too, and Ghazaleh and his family have since been displaced over 12 times. Several of his friends, including Hossam Shabat, a journalist who worked<\/a> for Al Jazeera Mubasher, have been killed. Shabat, along with five other journalists in north Gaza, was put on a \u201chit list\u201d<\/a> by Israel in October 2024, and he received threatening phone calls<\/a> to stop his reporting before Israeli forces targeted his car and killed him on March 24, 2025, claiming<\/a> without evidence that he was a sniper for Hamas.<\/p>\n \u201cThe journalist here does not have protection,\u201d Ghazaleh said, \u201cbut despite the danger, we cannot back down because documenting the truth has become a moral duty before it is a profession.\u201d <\/p>\n In the West Bank, where Israeli settlers, emboldened by the ongoing genocide, have increased<\/a> their violence<\/a> against Palestinians<\/a>, 24-year-old freelance journalist Mojahid Nawahda was reporting in Nablus when Israeli forces arrested him.<\/p>\n He was detained before the October 7 attacks, on July 19, 2022. \u201cThey vandalized and broke my camera equipment, and I was interrogated for 75 days at the al-Jalma Investigation Center,\u201d Nawahda said. He was then held in Megiddo Prison for a year under \u201cindescribable and unbearable conditions,\u201d without any form of due process. The prison is often compared to \u201chell,\u201d with several testimonials<\/a> including reports of torture and sexual abuse.<\/p>\n Upon his release, Nawahda resumed reporting on the occupied West Bank, where previous ceasefires in Gaza have not applied. The Palestinian Prisoners Society reported<\/a> that over 17,000 people, including medical workers and journalists, have been arrested in the West Bank. Settlers have been responsible<\/a> for many of the daily attacks on Palestinian journalists.<\/p>\n In Nablus and Jenin, Nawahda said, Israeli soldiers fired tear gas bombs at him and other reporters on May 27. Meanwhile, under the protection of Israeli soldiers, settlers attacked their colleague Issam al-Rimawi in Ramallah. Again, on June 30, Israeli soldiers fired at journalists in Jenin while they were reporting on the demolition of<\/a> Palestinians\u2019 homes in the Tulkarm refugee camp, part of a large-scale project<\/a> Israel approved to build more illegal settlements across the West Bank.<\/p>\n \u201cI am now always working on reports about the camps of the northern West Bank, specifically that the occupation has evacuated and displaced the people of these camps and is now blowing up and demolishing their homes,\u201d Nawahda said. \u201cI like my city because it is always steadfast in the face of this occupation despite everything. People here reject the existence of the occupation and always do anything to get it out of the city. However, things are getting worse in the West Bank. The occupation is still working to demolish homes, close roads, and attack journalists and civilians.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI felt this very strange feeling that whatever I was saying in front of the camera was not moving the world.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n It can be hard, however, to keep the faith under such conditions. In a span of three months, El Sayed, the former Al Jazeera English correspondent, said her family was displaced six times, all while she continued reporting on atrocities committed against other families, the targeting of health care facilities, and the lack of menstrual products and overall aid.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt this very strange feeling that whatever I was saying in front of the camera was not moving the world,\u201d El Sayed said. \u201c\u200aWhen you\u2019re a journalist, you\u2019re not the story. You can\u2019t stand in front of the camera and say, as a mother, \u2018My children are suffering from diseases. My children are losing weight because there is no food. They\u2019re dehydrated because there\u2019s no water.\u2019 My 8-year-old was terrified. Every single night, she told me, \u2018Let\u2019s sleep very close to each other so that when the missile falls, it kills us all, and I don\u2019t become the only survivor.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n
\n Photo: TKTK<\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\nDirect Threats<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Constant Attacks<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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