On October 9, 2024, the Al Jazeera journalist Fadi Al-Wahidi was reporting on a Zionist massacre in the Jabalia refugee camp when an “Israeli” sniper shot him in the neck. The scene — Al-Wahidi collapsing on the sidewalk, his colleagues unable to reach him — was horrifyingly reminiscent of Shireen Abu-Akleh’s assassination by the IOF in 2022. Today, Fadi lies paralyzed in north Gaza, while the Occupation denies his requests for medical evacuation. His colleague and friend Anas Al-Sharif has described his condition as “a full-fledged humanitarian crime.” His mother is on hunger strike.

Since the beginning of the present genocide in Gaza, the Zionist entity has killed at least 192 Palestinian and Lebanese journalists, imprisoning and maiming many more. But they cannot kill the story. In Palestine and in Lebanon, the coverage continues. As Ismail Al-Ghoul said before he was martyred by the Zionist entity, “I have to live the same way the people live, to feel them, to be able to speak for them. This is what journalism is for.”

Meanwhile, a staggering majority of journalists in prestigious Western newsrooms — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BBC, CNN — continue to report the IOF’s lies while smearing the Palestinian resistance. By ignoring the calls to protect the brave, untiring, and relentlessly targeted journalists of Gaza, these craven hacks reveal themselves to be unworthy of the designation “colleague.” By embedding with the enemy, they have become the enemy.

No one knows the enemy better than its victims. After more than a year of livestreamed genocide, the witnesses refuse to be intimidated into silence or coerced into playing nice with the perpetrators. “Western media is responsible for my suffering,” writes Abubaker Abed, plain as day, in the latest issue of The New York War Crimes.

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Resisting on the Narrative Front

How the journalists of Palestine and Lebanon are overturning Zionist myths — and hastening the entity’s fall
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The New York War Crimes Editorial Collective
December 6, 2024

After the assassination of Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, twenty-seven year old Al-Jazeera reporter Ismail Al-Ghoul and his cameraman, Rami Al-Refee went to Haniyeh’s family home in Gaza City when an IOF airstrike hit a nearby building. The two journalists left for their safety, in clearly marked press vehicles, and, five minutes later, the IOF assassinated them in a drone strike. On air, standing behind the corpses of his two martyred colleagues and a congregation of mourners, Al-Jazeera’s Anas Al-Sharif proclaimed that in Gaza, “Journalists are the people of a cause before we are the people of a message.”

The journalists whose work appears in this paper have said their greatest fear is not death, it is dying without their testimonies reaching the world. Without the Palestinians documenting the unrelenting horror of the past fourteen months, the Occupation’s narrative would go unchallenged. This possibility drives the journalists to report on the bombings, massacres, and famine, despite knowing their work makes them and their families targets for the Occupation. Their work transcends the Western conception of journalism as solely an act of witness. It is the annihilation of their people and homeland that they are reporting on. The photojournalist Moath Amarneh writes in his dispatch from the West Bank, “There is little distinction between the personal and professional life of a Palestinian journalist working under a brutal and stubborn military occupation.” Roqayah Chamseddine echoes this in her dispatch from the Dahye, writing “to persist, against all odds, is itself an act of resistance.”

The Zionist settler-colonial project is underwritten by the narrative of a dispossessed Jewish people establishing an exceptional democracy in their God-given homeland, under constant threat from their hateful neighbors. The Palestinian journalists who document the Occupation’s daily crimes expose this narrative for what it is: a Jewish supremacist myth. These journalists, who refuse to die silently, are winning the narrative war. Khaled Oudatallah wrote that Basil Al-Araj — the revolutionary thinker who was martyred by the Occupation in Al-Bireh in 2018 — said that the goal was “to be true, that is all. If you are true, you will be revolutionaries and resistance fighters.” This is why “Israel” seeks to kill them.

Since October 7, 2023, “Israel” has murdered 192 journalists and media workers. It has hunted their families and destroyed their homes. It has accused whoever is still alive, reporting on the genocide, of being “terrorists” — signaling its intent to murder them, too. It has banned foreign press from entering Gaza, unless accompanied by the IOF. Western journalists, toadies of the Occupation, have been all too happy to ride into Gaza on “Israeli” Jeeps to take notes on the genocide from the perspective of its perpetrators. These prestigious Western newsrooms, from The New York Times to the BBC, have largely ignored the mass slaughter of their colleagues. The workers at these institutions — whether out of spinelessness, careerism, or moral poverty — have agreed to the terms of the game. Abubaker Abed, from Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza, writes: “I will not forget it is [Western media] who have given consent for the continuation of this genocide.”

Their language is contorted to present Palestinians as the aggressors, erasing 76 years of occupation, siege, land theft, and apartheid. “Israel” justifies their genocide using the Western press’s fabricated tales of Arab savagery; all the while, the same newsrooms dutifully ignore the extensively documented torture and sexual abuse of Palestinians in Zionist prisons. Famine and airstrikes are presented as acts without actors; bombs “fall” from the sky while famine “stalks” Gaza. They refuse to name the perpetrators, intentionally obscuring their own complicity in the bloodshed, choosing instead to act as mouthpieces for U.S. empire.

The Palestinian journalists in Gaza are risking their lives to deliver the truth that Western newsrooms are refusing to confront. Al-Jazeera cameraman Fadi Al-Wahidi was shot in the neck by Occupation forces in Jabalia on October 9, 2024. He remains trapped in Gaza, paralyzed, unable to receive urgent medical care because the Occupation refuses to evacuate him. Fadi’s story, as told by his mother, Hiba Al-Wahidi, and his colleague, Anas Al-Sharif, features on the front page of this paper. They have made an urgent plea: use whatever leverage we have, in our newsrooms and workplaces, to secure a medical evacuation for Fadi.

The journalists in this issue do not distinguish between documenting colonial violence and resisting it. Witnessing is not separate from dying for a cause, but part of the same continuum. The martyred resistance leader Yahya Sinwar, in a 2018 interview (page 6), collapses the distinction between the witness (shahid) and the martyr (shaheed). The “testimony of Palestinians,” he says, “is manifest in the blood of martyrs.”