On 24 March, Hossam Shabat, a 23 year-old Al Jazeera journalist, was killed in a targeted airstrike on his car in Beit Lahiya, Gaza, on his way to a live broadcast. He was the 208th Palestinian journalist killed by Israel since 7 October 2023, but there was no global outcry. No world leader had anything to say about his death.
The next day, the Israeli military issued a statement confirming it had assassinated Shabat. It claimed he had “participated in terrorist activities against IDF forces and citizens of the State of Israel… further proof of the employment of Hamas terrorists by the Al Jazeera media network”. The proof was a blurry Excel spreadsheet listing the members of a Hamas battalion in Beit Hanoun, in which Shabat was marked as a sniper.
On 10 August, nearly five months later, Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif was killed in a targeted drone strike on a media tent outside Shifa hospital alongside four of his colleagues. Again, the Israel military confirmed the assassination, accusing Al-Sharif of being a Hamas fighter. It presented its evidence: the same fuzzy spreadsheet on which the correspondent is listed as a commander in a rocket-launching squad. The Foreign Press Association said there is “no credible evidence” that this is true. The BBC said they “cannot independently verify” the claims. Israel offered no justification for killing the four other journalists.
The Israeli government has not allowed foreign media into Gaza to report on this war. The world has relied instead on the Palestinian journalists trapped there to tell us what’s happening, as we watch Israel systematically eliminate them. Al-Sharif’s assassination takes the total number killed to 269.
Al-Sharif was well-loved. He had become an icon of passive resistance and resilience. A clip of him breaking down in tears after a woman collapsed from hunger in front of him became an international news story. His assassination marked a shift in global opinion, the stirrings of outrage. Keir Starmer finally made a statement, issued through a spokesperson, expressing “grave concern” at Israel’s systematic extermination of Gazan media, pointing out that journalists in conflict zones are protected by international law. But by the time the Prime Minister got round to making this point, it was moot. There are now very few journalists left in Gaza to protect: most of those who couldn’t leave are dead.
As a foreign correspondent in Gaza in the 2010s, I never once feared for my life. I relied on several excellent local journalists and fixers to arrange my stories and my security and to translate for me. At the time, there was a larger concentration of international media in Jerusalem than almost anywhere on Earth, and we reassured ourselves that the wars sporadically erupting in Gaza were safer for us to report than almost any other.
When I covered the 2012 war, Israeli military spokespeople called me most days, checking my movements, making sure I was safe. I noticed the groups of curious children who huddled around the media at any bomb site and considered how much safer I was than them, despite our proximity. Not because of my flak jacket and helmet but because of the very serious consequences for the Israeli government if their military killed a British journalist rather than a local journalist, or another Palestinian child.
This impossible realisation was one of the many I had about Palestine that could not be explained in news stories. In 2015, when I’d left the region, I started to write a novel about an ambitious reporter who causes mayhem and destruction trying to make a name for herself in a war in Gaza. By the time Vulture was published this summer, there was nothing left of the places it describes. I found a way to communicate my feelings of horror and impotence through fiction; Palestinian journalists are forced to persist with facts.
Shabat was aware of Israel’s accusations that he was a terrorist; they were first presented last October. Shabat recognised the threat and warned his millions of followers on social media that he was being hunted. But if the world was listening, it did nothing to protect him.
In November 2024, he was injured in an airstrike that struck a home just as he entered it: “The civil defence members were all torn to pieces, parts of the house fell on us.” In his last interview, Shabat describes being fired at on a daily basis while attempting to report. He had been shot three times and survived before he was killed.
A video circulated on social media after his death. In it, Shabat is sat in a car, perhaps the same one he was killed in, speaking with a young girl through his open window. She’s cheerily congratulating him on not being dead, despite rumours to the contrary. “We were crying for you man!” she tells him. She wants to be a journalist, just like him, but how can he expect her to be one if he’s going to get himself killed? “It’s okay to be martyred,” he soothes. More than 50,000 children have reportedly been killed or injured in the Gaza Strip since October 7th. “We will make a journalist out of you,” he promises.
For journalists in Gaza, continuing to work has meant accepting a death sentence. Shabat had the eery calm of a man who had accepted this fate. Like Al-Sharif, he had written a statement to be published in the likely event of his death: “When this all began, I was only 21 years old – a college student with dreams like anyone else. For the past 18 months, I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people… determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury.”
The investigative magazine +972 has uncovered the existence of a special Israeli military unit – the “Legitimisation Cell” – tasked with identifying journalists in Gaza it can portray as terrorists. Its purpose is to blunt global outrage. Given Al-Sharif was killed just days after the security cabinet voted to annex the Gaza Strip, its journalists are among those who suggest his death was timed to allow a media black out ahead of plans to capture Gaza City.
Michael Fakhri, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food recently repeated his finding that Israel is tactically starving Gaza, frustrated that he hasn’t been able to prompt world leaders to act: “It’s genocide. It’s a crime against humanity. It’s a war crime. I have been repeating it and repeating it and repeating it, I feel like Cassandra.” The Greek mythological prophet was cursed that her warnings and predictions would be disbelieved, but the staggering number of dead Palestinian journalists have suffered a worse fate.
They showed and showed, warned and warned, and are being killed over and over again. The world didn’t disbelieve what they were saying – that Gaza is being starved and erased – for some inexplicable reason, it watched, listened and decided to let it happen. By the time we work out why, the chance to do something will have long gone. What will endure, whatever our leaders allow to happen to Gaza next, is the heroism of those Palestinian journalists like Hossam Shabat and Anas al-Sharif who insisted on telling us their tragedy, and knowing nothing was being done to stop it.
Phoebe Greenwood is the author of Vulture, £16.99, Europa Editions
[See also: Palestine’s cycle of despair]
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