On Friday, Dec. 15, Al Jazeera Arabic journalists Samer Abudaqa and Wael Al-Dahdouh were among the many who were hit by an Israeli drone strike targeting yet another school in Gaza. Yet another school in Gaza…
“In today’s bombing in Khan Younis, Israeli drones fired missiles at a school where civilians sought refuge, resulting in indiscriminate casualties,” Al Jazeera said in a statement. With shrapnel wounds to his arm, Wael Al-Dahdouh managed to escape the blast site and walk on foot to Nasser Hospital.
Samer, on the other hand, didn’t make it out—he couldn’t. “Following Samer’s injury,” the statement continues, “he was left to bleed to death for over 5 hours, as Israeli forces prevented ambulances and rescue workers from reaching him, denying the much-needed emergency treatment.”
I hope Samer knew how sorry we were, and how wrong we were, to have let this happen to him, and I know how little that must have meant as he laid there, fighting to hold onto life among the dead and screaming.
My heart breaks all over again every time I find myself wondering, often through tears, what thoughts were going through Samer’s head in those final hours, his last on this cruel, callous earth. It’s in the nature of all living things to strive, above everything else, to keep living, to cling tightly to the light in us, the light that is us, and to fight desperately to hold onto our lives when our lives are threatened. I hope Samer knew how sorry we were, and how wrong we were, to have let this happen to him, and I know how little that must have meant as he laid there, fighting to hold onto life among the dead and screaming. I hope he knew how grateful the world was to him, and to all our slain media colleagues and fellow workers, for giving their lives to show us the truth. I hope he knew we saw it, and we won’t forget it. I hope, but doubt, he could find some final comfort in that as he writhed in pain, mortally wounded, clinging to life as it bled away, back into the earth, while Israeli military forces used bombs and guns to prevent anyone from coming to help him. He was still somebody’s baby. Everyone is. He was, too. He was somebody’s baby, and they let him die there on the blistered ground, preventing anyone from helping him.
I can’t imagine the weight Samer and all our fellow journalists in Gaza must have felt in their eyelids when they closed them for good in each of their final moments… in that place that is being obliterated before our eyes. And our eyes can only see the destruction because they kept theirs open.
I can’t imagine the weight Samer and all our fellow journalists in Gaza must have felt in their eyelids when they closed them for good in each of their final moments, the weight of not knowing if all this carnage, all this loss of life and humanity, would be remembered in the future they knew they wouldn’t live to see, in that place that is being obliterated before our eyes. And our eyes can only see the destruction because they kept theirs open. By doing so, they were not just doing, and dying for, their professional and civic duty as journalists to document history as it is happening, they were carrying out an even more sacred charge in the name of humanity. Their reporting in the line of fire has provided to the world irrefutable testimony of those who refuse to be erased from history and this land. They have borne unblinking witness to Israel’s genocidal crimes.
With the overwhelming majority of reporting on this “war” coming from inside Israel itself, with so many so-called journalists dutifully filtering the reality of Israel’s war on Palestinian existence through Israel’s own hand-fed talking points or IDF-curated Hamas safaris, our access to life and death in Gaza comes almost exclusively from Palestinian journalists embedded in the carnage—the same vest-and-helmet-wearing martyrs who are being targeted and murdered en masse. Each of these beautiful souls has been the eyes bearing witness to an ethnic cleansing with genocidal intent happening in real time; their eyes have shown the truth of a population, a homeland, a civilization, being disappeared from Gaza; and, one by one, their eyes are being shut.
“As of December 19, 2023,” according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, “at least 68 journalists and media workers were among the more than 19,000 killed since the war began on October 7—with more than 18,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza and the West Bank and 1,200 deaths in Israel.” According to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, the real number is even higher.
Each of these beautiful souls has been the eyes bearing witness to an ethnic cleansing with genocidal intent happening in real time; their eyes have shown the truth of a population, a homeland, a civilization, being disappeared from Gaza; and, one by one, their eyes are being shut.
We know why Israel is doing this, why they are relentlessly murdering journalists, why they have tried so flagrantly and deliberately to cut off Gaza’s electricity and communications and connection to the world beyond their enclosed death chamber. They don’t want us to see the horror, the inhumanity, the atrocity of Israel’s settler-colonial dream realized, with the full backing of the US. As Karren Attiah writes in The Washington Post, “The slaughter of Palestinian journalists is an erasure of those attempting to record the first rough draft of history in Gaza. Like the destruction of art and archives, the killing of journalists is an assault on memory, truth and Palestinian culture. The tacit blank check given to Israel to eliminate civilian targets, including journalists it doesn’t like, puts anyone covering the region in danger.”
Because our journalist colleagues in Gaza have kept their eyes open, because they have refused to let themselves or the world look away, they have, with their final actions in this life, splattered the parchment on which Israel will try to rewrite its own history with streaks of red that can never, ever be washed out.
“They’re killing the truth,” journalist Abby Martin rightly asserts. “That’s what they’re scared of: They’re scared of Americans turning against this colonial, genocidal project. [And that’s why] they don’t want us to see the truth.” They’re scared of the human stain every slaughtered Palestinian will leave on the rubble-strewn streets upon which their bloodsoaked utopia will be built—and in every story they tell hereafter about where it came from. But because our journalist colleagues in Gaza have kept their eyes open, because they have refused to let themselves or the world look away, they have, with their final actions in this life, splattered the parchment on which Israel will try to rewrite its own history with streaks of red that can never, ever be washed out.
For many of these journalists, it seems, death came more quickly than it did for Samer Abudaqa. But still with enough time, I imagine, for a final chill to run down their spine as they realized, in their last moments of consciousness, that they were hearing the screaming whistle from the sky that comes before your death, before your eyes are forcibly closed forever. But in every video you see from these brave, brave journalists, these martyrs, in every post on social media, every interview they’ve done when they can connect with the outside world, you can tell in their eyes that they’ve known the whole time that whistle could be over their heads next—and dozens of them have been right.
I cannot fathom their strength… to hold a microphone through trembling fingers, standing in front of the abyss, and keeping a light and a camera fixed on the face of evil and the truth of Israel’s genocidal war until their last breath.
These are the conditions under which our colleagues in Gaza, our siblings, our fellow human beings, are working and dying in. And the number of deaths is unprecedented for our industry. They are the real-life saints and superheroes who are fighting and dying for truth, for life, for human dignity, for freedom. I am in awe of their bravery, of their courage in the face of death. I cannot fathom their strength… to hold a microphone through trembling fingers, standing in front of the abyss, and keeping a light and a camera fixed on the face of evil and the truth of Israel’s genocidal war until their last breath. But I am grateful to them, more grateful than I could ever communicate; and I am sorry, too, more than they could ever know. All I can do to honor their sacrifice, all we can do, is promise to never stop fighting for life, for peace, for an end to this unbearable madness—and, while there is any light left in us, to keep our eyes open, whatever the cost.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
