First-person account from a journalist in Gaza: “This job is a path to death”

A few hours' delay in submitting my report on the collapse of healthcare at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis saved my life. I was writing the article for EL PAÍS , using the hospital as an example of the deterioration of the medical sector in Gaza, when exhaustion overcame me the night before. I put my work aside.

The hours I spent that Monday morning finishing and submitting the article meant I wasn't in the hospital when Israeli shells hit twice , killing five fellow journalists and 15 other Palestinians, and wounding many more.

I had planned to go early, as usual, to report on the malnourished children in the hospital for another story. But I decided to finish the article on healthcare first. I had promised my editor I would be ready the day before, but sleep won that battle.

My eldest daughter, Dana, was browsing social media under an olive tree where we're living as displaced persons in Al Mawasi. Suddenly, she jumped up and shouted, "Mom! Dad's missing! The hospital has been bombed!"

The night before, I had told her and her four siblings that I would be leaving at six in the morning, as usual. She didn't know I had changed my plans. My wife, Nour, 38, heard her and answered in a broken voice: "Dad didn't go to the hospital! Dad is here! Calm down, calm down!" She ran to me crying: "Thank God, thank God you're safe. My God, what if you had been with them? Please, we don't want this journalism job anymore. We don't want to lose you. We need you more than any job."

I knelt before my daughter's words, as she, her four siblings—the youngest, Imran, only three years old—and my wife begged me, invoking God, to never return to the hospital or any other dangerous place. They had repeatedly failed to convince me to abandon journalism altogether, even recruiting my parents to their campaign.

I can't leave this job. Who will document the crimes committed against innocent people if any of us falter?

They cried, and I cried with them. But my resolve didn't change. I can't leave this job. For me, it's not just a traditional profession, especially since I also teach media at the university . Journalism is a noble humanitarian mission, and in the Palestinian context, it has a national dimension . Who will broadcast to the world the genocide of an entire people if the journalists give up? Who will document the crimes committed against innocent people if any of us falter?

That's why journalists here cling to their profession with an almost sacred devotion . It transcends mere employment or media contracts. No amount of money or compensation, no matter how large, is equivalent to the injuries or loss of life. What value is money worth in the face of that? Even simpler: No material reward is worth the anxiety, fear, and terror that haunts me and my fellow journalists.

The next day, I went to the hospital early, as usual, to check on the injured journalists and prepare a detailed report on the incident: how some had died and others had been injured. I heard devastating and terrifying words from my colleague Hatem Omar, a Reuters photographer who had been seriously injured.

Choking back tears, he told me, “We practice the profession of death.” He described it as experiencing the horror of Judgment Day, as if a mountain had fallen on him. Those words impacted me like that mountain. As my wounded colleague spoke, my mind wandered: What if I had been in his place or among the dead at the moment of the attack?

My body trembled, my thoughts froze, especially when Omar said we should reconsider the level of danger we were working under. “Yes, we are conveying a message and defending our people in our own way, but we must preserve our lives as much as possible.” These words came from someone who had miraculously escaped death, imagining his children and wife without him in this vicious war.

The tragedy of our profession doesn't end here. I went to the shop of Hussam al-Masri, the photographer killed in the hospital attack. There I found his wife, weeping uncontrollably for over an hour. Between continuous sobs and a complete collapse, she uttered a few devastating words: "Why did Hussam have to die? What have we gained from journalism?"

He begged me to save my life. And he was right: this work in Gaza is a path to death , leaving behind widows, widowers, and orphans.

I left the store, surrounded by rubble on all sides, even more battered and devastated, and walked a long distance before finding a donkey cart to reach another area of ​​Al Mawasi. I crossed an area the Israeli army classifies as "red" (dangerous for combat) and encountered another facet of the journalists' suffering: people's fear of journalists as Israeli targets.

I took some photos and videos along the way when a passenger asked me out loud:

"You better not be a journalist!"

"What's the problem?" I replied.

"Do you want me to be killed?" he replied angrily.

"Lives are in God's hands, aren't they," I said, not wanting to continue arguing.

Other passengers chimed in: "You should be ashamed of yourself. He's risking his life to broadcast our catastrophe to the world. Shut up," they told him.

Suddenly, four artillery shells landed on the intersection less than a hundred meters away. Dust filled the area, I heard the screams of the wounded, and I threw myself to the ground.

Everyone apologized, and we talked about hunger , genocide , displacement , war, and countless other details. I didn't want to stay with them for too long, so I got off after a kilometer to walk back to an agricultural area east of Al Mawasi, within the "safe zones" designated by Israel, to report on eight farmers killed in recent days.

I walked along a dirt road that separated the agricultural lands where many Palestinians had taken refuge and led to the almost completely destroyed residential town of Hamad, northwest of Khan Yunis. A tanker truck was in front of me, and behind me was a small bus carrying Ministry of Health employees and other civilian vehicles. Suddenly, four artillery shells landed on the intersection less than 100 meters away. Dust filled the area, I heard the screams of the wounded, and I threw myself to the ground.

Moments of terror in which I repeated the shahada (the Islamic declaration of faith), fearing that the bombing would continue and that it would be my last breath. All I could think about was survival: if it had happened a few seconds earlier, I would have been right under the shells. I crawled face down, then stood up and retreated, my body trembling, repeating the shahada until I was hundreds of meters away, unable to stand for fear.

I sat by the side of a main road, trembling and terrified, until I met my cousin, a doctor, who stopped his car to take me back to our deployment site in northern Al Mawasi. He could tell I'd been through something difficult.

"Were you near the last bombing?" he asked me.

I nodded.

"Calm down, you're fine. I've told you many times, this job will finish you off."

As my cousin and his passengers talked, I imagined myself blown to bits. Who would take care of my family after me? It's a catastrophe to pay with your life or body parts for a story.

My children and I are hungry like everyone else. We're journalists, but we also have to find food, firewood, fresh and salt water.

I returned to my wife and children, terror etched on my face. I didn't want to tell them, but my cousin had already told my father and wife. My mother cried, my wife cried, and, through their tears, they cursed the journalism that was putting my life in danger, reminding me that I wasn't alone, that I had to take care of them.

I didn't respond. Their attack was justified. But that night, my wife, my children, and my relatives reminded me of the many times I had escaped certain death during this war and previous ones: my car, destroyed; my equipment, lost; the place where I slept, bombed; the place where I broadcast live, attacked. And much more.

My wife reminds me that my hair began to turn gray during the 2014 war, when terror gripped me as I abandoned my car and ran after shells and rockets twice fell around me on the Salah al-Din road, between Deir al-Balah and Gaza. She compares photos from the beginning and end of that war, showing how the white had invaded my hair.

I can't forget that, as a journalist here, I work in exceptional conditions. There's no electricity to charge laptops or phones, nor stable internet, which goes completely out, as do communications, for days. The most basic tools for work are nonexistent. You have to search endlessly for a phone, a camera, cables, batteries, a microphone. Everything is either out of stock or unattainably priced.

On top of this, my children and I go hungry like everyone else. We are journalists, but we also have to find food, firewood, fresh and salt water, medicine—things that aren't easy to obtain, even with money. In short, we suffered like displaced people from Gaza for most of the war, a torment like no other, and we suffer doubly so when we try to work as journalists in such terrifying conditions.

Being a journalist in Gaza isn't like being in a normal place. Covering the war here is like being at the mouth of the volcano, in the spotlight.

Being a journalist in Gaza isn't like being in a normal place. Covering the war here is like being at the mouth of the volcano, in the crosshairs. This isn't a conventional war , and we aren't war correspondents in the sense that we used to teach our students to cover military zones. In this war, Israel has abandoned all legal, human rights, and moral norms. The death of a journalist means little to a state that kills tens of thousands of civilians without retreating an inch.

As I write about my work as a Palestinian journalist during this genocidal war, I find myself continually drafting my will, sometimes on paper, sometimes out loud. I gather my family to remind them of the steps they must take if, God forbid, I am killed. Who to call for help, which relatives or friends to turn to, how to collect debts or pay others, how to continue their lives. These painful details often bring tears to my eyes when I say them out loud.

But I tell you, life here is hard, and we need to be prepared. If we can't bear to talk about death, what will we do when it comes? We must assume a great responsibility. This is my situation, and it's everyone's situation here.

My wife makes sure my two youngest children, Imran and Lama, ages three and seven, say goodbye to me every day. They haven't enjoyed much time hugging or playing with me due to their age. She insists on taking photos and videos of these moments.

I write these words feeling that they may be the last, closer to a testament than a first-person essay.

It has become a daily farewell. This is how I feel when I kiss my little ones and leave, thinking that I might return on a stretcher, unable to walk on my own. It is an undeniable reality that we cannot ignore or avoid. The approximately 1,000 journalists who continue to report from Gaza, according to data from the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, live in the most dangerous conditions in the world for reporters, with 246 journalists killed and 500 injured by Israeli attacks since October 2023.

I write these words with tears in my eyes, feeling like they may be my last words, closer to a will than a first-person essay. My hands are shaking, my heart is beating steadily. My 15-year-old daughter, Layan, and her sister, Razan, two years younger, approach me and point: "Are you writing your will, Dad? Have mercy, we're more important than your job." I look at them without responding, then I hug and kiss them.

My pain grows. My tears don't stop. What if I'm the next target?