Palestinian journalists live through the same brutal conditions they cover — and describe a pattern of direct targeting by Israeli forces.
On Monday, journalist Ibrahim Abu Ghazaleh was on his way to meet his friends and colleagues at Al-Baqa Cafe, an area of relative “normalcy” 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.
Hatab was a Palestinian filmmaker, the founder of a TV production company, and “a great person,” Ghazaleh said. “He served his people and photographed everything in Gaza City, conveying the suffering through pictures.”
Israeli forces have killed hundreds of Palestinian journalists as Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continue the ongoing genocide of Gaza and the West Bank. Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli government has murdered close to 60,000 Palestinians, leaving an uncountable number vaporized, trapped under the rubble, dying of starvation, or shot while attempting to receive food. 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’s atrocities.
“In Gaza, a camera is a threat,” Ghazaleh said. “When you witness the truth, you become a target.”
In Gaza and the West Bank, Israeli soldiers consistently threaten 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 audio of a threatening call from an Israeli intelligence operative to an Iranian general: “You have 12 hours to escape with your wife and child. Otherwise, you’re on our list right now.” The calls and messages journalists report receiving aren’t much different. Reporters are often killed when most identifiable, while wearing their press vests.
Ghazaleh is one of five Palestinian journalists targeted by Israeli military forces who spoke with The Intercept about how Israel’s genocidal attacks on the 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.
Living through Israel’s 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 in journalism’s history. Over 230 journalists, and counting, have been killed since October 2023.
Direct Threats
At 6:05 a.m. in Gaza 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 in Gaza.
After October 7, she knew things would be different.
“It was very clear from the beginning that it was going to be unprecedented retaliation,” El Sayed said. In the first frantic days of Israel’s assault, El Sayed documented mass civilian killings as missiles fell. She described being “thrown by the pressure of a missile falling, and it just blows you away, with everything else. That strong sound is 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.”
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.
“I couldn’t get any signal [on my phone] so I got another SIM card that was not in my name, and two days later, my husband received this call,” El Sayed recalled. “It was someone who identified himself as an [Israel Defense Forces] officer. He first identified my husband’s full name, and he said, ‘We know who you are, take your wife and kids and leave your home, otherwise your lives will be in danger in the upcoming hours.’”
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.
On December 6, he said, “I received [another] call from a military officer saying, ‘You have to leave the house or we’re going to bomb it.’” He was living in a three-story building with several of his family members and others trying to find refuge under bombardment.
“ The next morning, on December 7th, at around 7:30 in the morning, the house collapsed in milliseconds,” Mhawish said. “It 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.”
After El Sayed’s husband received the call, “the first thing I did was call our bureau chief in Jerusalem and confirm it was a direct threat,” she said. “For 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’t at all. None of them.”
Two days later, the Israeli army surrounded El Sayed’s home.
“The first thing they did was shoot at the windows,” El Sayed said. “They 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, ‘You have five minutes to leave the building.’”
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 “safe corridor,” 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.
“I did not want my children to go through that trauma, but it was the only solution left to save their lives,” she said. “The only thing I could do to protect them, is make them promise me they would never look at the ground. Even if you didn’t, 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.”
El Sayed and Mhawish were lucky just to survive. Hassan Hamad, a 19-year-old journalist whose work frequently appeared on Al Jazeera, received a text from an Israeli officer saying Hamad and his family would be “next” if he did not stop filming. On October 6, 2024, Israel struck his home in the Jabalia refugee camp and killed him.
“We either speak about it or we’re gonna be erased,” said Mhawish. “I 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.”
Constant Attacks
Mohammed al-Sawwaf, like so many Palestinians from Gaza, has lost dozens of relatives to Israel’s 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.
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. “I 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,” he said.
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.
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 and Marwan. In total, al-Sawwaf has lost 47 relatives.
“Their deaths drained my desire for life,” al-Sawwaf said of his brothers. “I 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.”
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.
Constant bombing, collapsed medical infrastructure, hunger, and thirst: Journalists in Gaza are forced to live through the same brutal conditions they cover. Mhawish experienced something similar in December 2023, after his family’s 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.
The Story
Ghazaleh, now 26, has been reporting since he was 16.
“I have documented many massacres and offensive shellings on Gaza City since the genocide began,” he said. He was sheltering in Gaza’s Indonesian Hospital in November 2023, he said, when “the 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.”
Ghazaleh said he had to leave his laptop and camera equipment behind. He later found them vandalized and broken.
His family moved to the Jabalia refugee camp, where, he said, “many fellow journalists were targeted or directly threatened to stop their coverage of northern Gaza.”
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 for Al Jazeera Mubasher, have been killed. Shabat, along with five other journalists in north Gaza, was put on a “hit list” by Israel in October 2024, and he received threatening phone calls to stop his reporting before Israeli forces targeted his car and killed him on March 24, 2025, claiming without evidence that he was a sniper for Hamas.
“The journalist here does not have protection,” Ghazaleh said, “but despite the danger, we cannot back down because documenting the truth has become a moral duty before it is a profession.”
In the West Bank, where Israeli settlers, emboldened by the ongoing genocide, have increased their violence against Palestinians, 24-year-old freelance journalist Mojahid Nawahda was reporting in Nablus when Israeli forces arrested him.
He was detained before the October 7 attacks, on July 19, 2022. “They vandalized and broke my camera equipment, and I was interrogated for 75 days at the al-Jalma Investigation Center,” Nawahda said. He was then held in Megiddo Prison for a year under “indescribable and unbearable conditions,” without any form of due process. The prison is often compared to “hell,” with several testimonials including reports of torture and sexual abuse.
Upon his release, Nawahda resumed reporting on the occupied West Bank, where previous ceasefires in Gaza have not applied. The Palestinian Prisoners Society reported that over 17,000 people, including medical workers and journalists, have been arrested in the West Bank. Settlers have been responsible for many of the daily attacks on Palestinian journalists.
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 Palestinians’ homes in the Tulkarm refugee camp, part of a large-scale project Israel approved to build more illegal settlements across the West Bank.
“I 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,” Nawahda said. “I 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.”
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.
“I felt this very strange feeling that whatever I was saying in front of the camera was not moving the world,” El Sayed said. “ When you’re a journalist, you’re not the story. You can’t stand in front of the camera and say, as a mother, ‘My children are suffering from diseases. My children are losing weight because there is no food. They’re dehydrated because there’s no water.’ My 8-year-old was terrified. Every single night, she told me, ‘Let’s sleep very close to each other so that when the missile falls, it kills us all, and I don’t become the only survivor.”
Leaving Home
In January 2024, after months of constant upheaval, El Sayed and her family evacuated from Rafah to Egypt.
With his 2-year-old and pregnant wife, Mhawish left the same year in mid-April.
“It was a very difficult decision,” Mhawish said, “you could be the story before you even file your story.” He said he had begun receiving more threats from Israeli forces, who told him, “This time it’s not going to be fun.”
“They really also indicated that I’m not gonna survive it this time,” Mhawish said.
Nawahda remains in the West Bank, documenting settler violence, and al-Sawwaf and Ghazaleh are still in Gaza.
Al-Sawwaf said that he’s begun to recover from his injuries, but without better health care, the process is difficult.
“I still need an accurate diagnosis and MRI scans for my spine and head, tests that are unavailable in Gaza,” he said. “Everything in Gaza is destroyed — buildings, homes, factories, infrastructure. Prices are exorbitant, with some items costing 10 times their original price. People have lost their sources of income, and many remain unemployed. How do we build again if another Israeli war brings it down? Wars have not stopped since I was born.”
Matters are worsened, Ghazaleh said, by the aid blockade imposed by Netanyahu, now stretching into its fifth month. Ghazaleh was nearly killed during an Israeli bombing attack on al-Ahli Hospital, where he’d been hospitalized due to a lack of food.
While Israel has claimed to allow “dozens of aid trucks” into Gaza, the Palestinian people and the United Nations have called this a gross misrepresentation. Ghazaleh noted that some of the food that does arrive is contaminated or expired.
“The markets have run out of food, and the aid that did reach [the north of Gaza] was not enough,” Ghazaleh said July 1. “Once food arrives, some is contaminated or old, but we have no choice but to take risks and eat it because hunger is merciless. Some children have been poisoned, and some families have completely lost confidence in any truck that enters. Everything costs money, to buy tents, to buy food, which we do not have either.”
The U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation started “aid distribution centers” in May, which has resulted in over 400 civilians being killed deliberately by Israeli soldiers while trying to reach them. Others have also reported incidents of kidnappings and grenades being thrown at them.
“My friends and I went to the aid sites, and it was a harsh experience,” Ghazaleh said. “The queues stretch for kilometers, and the security is missing. I saw mothers crying from the intensity of hunger, and sometimes you wait for hours, and come back with nothing.”
Doctors Without Borders, which sends medical workers regularly to Gaza, has condemned the sites as “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid, while a total of 170 aid groups have called for the GHF to close. The U.S., meanwhile, has spent over $20 billion in military financing, weapons sales, and transfers from U.S. weapons stockpiles to aid Israel.
The psychological effects of witnessing this massacre, up close and afar, are torturous, Mhawish said.
“As Palestinian journalists, we can’t separate ourselves from Gaza or the struggles that we lived, and it just adds more to the weight of the emotional toll,” he said. “ Gaza is a piece of life, and that life is being taken out of it, one soul at a time. We lost children that we were never supposed to lose. We lost parents. We lost families. We lost loved ones, only for the sake of just proving to the world over and over that we are only ordinary human beings who should be able to live.”
Neha Madhira is an award-winning journalist with a focus on geopolitical analysis, health, and human rights in the Middle East and North African region and South Asia.
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