The pattern of killing cannot be denied. Is there a lack of sympathy because the victims aren’t American or European?
CHRIS MCGREAL FROM THE GUARDIAN
I am in awe of Wael Dahdouh’s strength to haul himself back in front of the camera and focus on the suffering of others even as he has repeatedly endured his own personal hell. The face of Al Jazeera’s reporting throughout Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza was on air in October when he learned that his wife, seven-year-old daughter, 15-year-old son and one-year-old grandson were killed in an attack. Still he went on reporting.
Last month, Dahdouh himself was wounded and his cameraman, Samer Abu Daqqa, killed in the Israeli bombing of a UN-run school used as a shelter. Then on Sunday, an Israeli drone strike on a car in southern Gaza killed Dahdouh’s eldest son, 27-year-old Hamza, who also worked for Al Jazeera, along with another journalist.
Dahdouh took a break from reporting to attend the funeral of his son and then returned to the airwaves. “Nothing is harder than the pain of loss, and when you experience this pain time after time, it becomes harder and more severe,” he told Al Jazeera. “I wish that the blood of my son Hamza will be the last from journalists and the last from people here in Gaza, and for this massacre to stop.”
Hamza and his colleague, Mustafa Thuraya, a videographer for Agence France Press, were the latest of scores of journalists killed by Israel in its assault on Gaza in response to the Hamas cross-border attack in October. Israel says it does not target journalists but that is hard to square with the fact that its military aimed two missiles directly at the car carrying Hamza. The Israel Defense Forces, which has a track record of false claims about the circumstances in which it has killed journalists, initially said that there was a “terrorist” with a camera drone in the vehicle. But the reporters were not flying the drone when the car was struck and it is difficult to believe that, if the military was following the journalists’ actions, it did not recognise them as media workers.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) calculates that Israel has killed more than 70 media workers in the latest war in Gaza, making it the deadliest conflict for journalists in decades. Others put the toll at more than 100.
The CPJ says that the scale and circumstances of the killings, including direct threats to reporters and their families by Israeli officials, is evidence that Palestinian reporters in Gaza are being targeted. Murdered, in other words. If so, it’s a war crime and, as Al Jazeera has demanded, the international criminal court should add these killings to its investigation of Israel’s other alleged breaches of the Geneva conventions across occupied Palestine.
Journalists accept there are inherent dangers in reporting conflicts, whether they choose to go to the war as correspondents for foreign news organisations, or the war comes to them and their families against their wishes, as for Dahdouh. Colleagues I knew personally – some friends, others more professional acquaintances – have lost their lives doing their jobs as journalists. From David Blundy, shot by a sniper on a street in El Salvador in 1989, to Marie Colvin, killed by shelling in Syria in 2012. Others died in South African townships, on the streets of Somalia, in fighting during the Libyan revolution, or were gunned down by rebels in Sierra Leone.
Each reporter calculates the risks, and whether they are worth taking. Is it safe to go down that road? The answer might not be what immediately seems obvious. Generally it was safer to approach a militia roadblock during the Rwandan genocide than those manned by rebels in Liberia or Sierra Leone.
