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journalism
Gaza Journalists Demand End to Israel's Impunity for 'Genocide Against Us'
"We have been let down by the international community, particularly the international media organizations," said Abubaker Abed, sharing a message from Palestinian journalists.
Jan 09, 2025
Palestinian journalists gathered outside al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah this week to call attention to Israeli forces' genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip, their slaughter of those reporting on the ground, and the global community's failure to hold Israel accountable for the bloodshed.
On Thursday, the day after the event, Abubaker Abed, a Palestinian sports journalist now covering Israel's war on Gaza, shared on social media a short video of his remarks in English, which he said were delivered on behalf of all the reporters in blue vests who surrounded him and the podium.
Since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Palestinian reporters across Gaza have covered what Abed called "the most well-documented and first livestreamed genocide in history," as Israel—armed by the United States—has launched airstrikes and ground raids, and stopped humanitarian aid and international media from entering the coastal enclave.
Abed said that "we've been reporting tirelessly, extensively, and thoroughly on this genocide. It's indeed a genocide against us, which we've been documenting in makeshift tented camps and workplaces... You've seen us shedding tears over our loved ones, colleagues, friends, and family members. You've seen us killed in every possible way. We've been immolated, incinerated, dismembered, and disemboweled—and recently, we've been freezing to death."
"What more ways should you be seeing us killed, then, so that you can move and act and stop the hell inflicted upon us? There are no words to describe what we've been going through, because you've seen our bodies, how they've become fragile, skinny, and fatigued, but we never stopped," he continued, highlighting how Palestinian journalists have worked "to help the population that has seen every sort of torture and tasted every type of death," while the world has refused to "stop Israel's impunity against us."
"Our message is very clear: We are journalists, and we are Palestinian journalists. We have been let down by the international community, particularly the international media organizations," Abed declared. "We haven't seen any sort of support—a single word of support. Even the press vests we're wearing right now mark us as a target. They do not protect us at all, because we are Palestinians. Maybe if we were Ukrainians or of any other citizenship, with blond hair and blue eyes, the world would rage and rant for us. But because we are Palestinians, we have only one right, which is to die and be maimed."
"We are just documenting a genocide against us," he concluded. "After almost a year and a half, we want you to stand foot-by-foot with us, because we are like any other journalists, reporters, and media workers all across the globe—no matter the origin, the color, or the race. Journalism is not a crime. We are not a target."
Some journalists around the world reposted Abed's video and called out their colleagues for ignoring Israel's decimation of Gaza or reporting on it in ways favorable to the far-right Israeli government and its supporters, including the United States.
"The past 15+ months have been one of the most shameful periods in the history of Western journalism,"
said Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of Drop Site News, which has published Abed's reporting from Gaza. "The refusal of so many journalists to speak out in defense of our Palestinian colleagues in Gaza as they and their families have been hunted down and killed is a bloody stain."
The New Yorker editor Erin Overbey similarly said that "the staggering silence of Western journalists this past year as their Palestinian colleagues have been targeted, intimidated, and killed by Israeli forces during the genocide in Gaza will go down as one of the most shameful periods in media/journalism and human rights history."
British writer Owen Jones
said: "How to describe the refusal of Western journalists to speak out about the biggest slaughter of journalists in the history of human civilization? Damning. Racist. Nauseating. You will never be forgiven. History will damn those who stayed silent—every last fucking one."
Hamza Yusuf, a London-based British Palestinian writer, said that "we will never forget that whilst Palestinian journalists in Gaza were being systematically slaughtered by Israel, their industry peers at best looked on with indifference and at worst used their positions and their coverage to whitewash Israel's crimes. Blood on their hands."
As of Thursday, health officials in Gaza put the death toll from Israel's 15-month assault at 46,006, with at least 109,378 other Palestinians wounded, the vast majority of the enclave's population displaced, and civilian infrastructure in ruins. Israel faces global accusations of genocide, including in a case at the International Court of Justice.
Figures for press deaths have varied. The International Federation of Journalists—which works with its affiliate, the Palestinian Journalists' Syndicate, to verify information—has documented the killings of 148 Palestinian media workers while the Committee to Protect Journalists has a list of 152 confirmed fatalities, at least 13 of which the group classifies as murders by Israeli forces.
At the end of last year, Al Jazeerapublished a long-form article titled "Know Their Names" and reported that "from October 7, 2023, to December 25, 2024, at least 217 journalists and media workers had been killed in Gaza. Five more were killed on December 26 when an Israeli airstrike targeted a news van near al-Awda Hospital."
"Eighty percent of the journalists and media workers killed were between the ages of 20 and 40, a stark statistic that captures the young age of those who risk their lives to document the conflict," according to
Al Jazeera. "They were reporters and writers, photographers and video directors, analysts and editors, sound engineers and voiceover artists, and even founders of media outlets. Their stories remind us of the heavy price paid by those who strive to document humanity's darkest moments."
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The Waning Beatification of President Biden
the legacy curation of the Biden administration in the greater elsewhere of our world will focus on a succession of war crimes and strategic privations in Gaza sponsored by the United States.
Jan 03, 2025
When U.S. President Joe Biden announced last July that he would not seek a second term, left-leaning pundits, politicians, and late-night comics waxed lyrical in elevating Biden to near-mythic status, framing his big choice as proof of sacrificing personal ambition for the salvation of American democracy.
After the presidential elections and as his presidency unceremoniously fades, serious talk about Joe’s legacy has fallen sloppy dead (channeling Grace Slick) and been replaced by disorganized clamor over Vice President Kamala Harris’ decisive defeat.
Still, it remains odd that Biden’s decision to pass the electoral torch to his vice president was ever cast as a salvific moment in modern American politics. Long before the election results, the legacy pillow talk showed an embarrassing blind spot in the internal discourse of the country.
In this moment of horrific violence, veils have been lifted, and, as a result, what America and Americans think about the Middle East has lost its luster internationally.
As the Biden redemption arc threaded through the media logic of the mainstream public sphere, global discourses about Biden’s legacy had pursued a different path. The Biden-Harris-Blinken team, for the most part, has been viewed in much of the world for presiding over what scholars, jurists, courts, members of Congress, and respected human rights groups have called or made adjacent references to being genocide or genocidal violence in Gaza—an “Industrial scale slaughterhouse.”
Despite the populist narratology justifying the American diplomatic shield for Israeli bellicosity and an unending supply of war kits, the legacy curation of the Biden administration in the greater elsewhere of our world will focus on a succession of war crimes and strategic privations in Gaza sponsored by the United States, executed by the Israelis, and underwritten by the epistemic violence of dehumanizing a resolute people who have been killed, displaced, occupied, and politically and economically hamstrung for more than 75 years, if not a century, as historian Rashid Khalidi argues.
The “October 7” signifier, in other words, received little purchase beyond Western milieus.
As for real legacy stakes, they exist and are high. The unchecked violence in Gaza has been described as the “graveyard of liberal values” and “Western ideals.” And “many of the most important principles of humanitarian law,” have also been laid to rest without the dignity of any exequies.
As a consequence, the hegemonic influence of American media narratives on a global scale has unraveled, with the credibility of major Western news organizations tanking and “irreparably damaged.” Even from within, major Western outlets face allegations of journalistic malpractice, by staff from CNN andBBC, for example, protesting editorial impositions on reporters to take an Israel-biased slant in their Gaza coverage.
Such failings have managed to quicken concepts typically locked in academia. For example, New York University professor Miranda Fricker’s theoretical works on “epistemic injustice” hold more active meaning now. The structures of mediation spotlight one perspective, while entire groups are denied credibility as knowers of their own contexts and denied meaningful space in the media ecology.
Likewise, Northwestern’s José Medina’s “epistemic responsibility” is now heard as a call for the dismantling of media structures that amplify one-sided narratives while deliberately silencing others. This unchecked dynamic aligns with what I term the “epistemology of repetition,” where context-stripped narratives gain the veneer of truth for no higher reason than sheer repetition, with any attempt at rigor and fact-checking labeled as antisemitic.
At stake is the fundamental right of Palestinians to be recognized as legitimate sources of their own lived experiences and claims. Denying these rights or covering them with performative both-side-ism silences their histories, aspirations, and love for their land—a love expressed through resistance to occupation and a firm commitment to family, education, and spirituality. Such epistemic violence not only mirrors physical destruction but enables it by erasing the cultural and historical claims of those affected and makes up the narrative scaffolding that typecast Palestinians as forever aggressors and Israelis as perpetual victims, as anthropologist Julie Peteet writes.
From my perch as a media and religious studies academic and a Chicago native teaching in the Middle East for nearly 17 years, I have little hope that American journalism will embrace greater epistemic responsibility toward Palestine. Answering this call would require radical transformations of journalistic premises and praxis. This epistemic responsibility would be considered nothing less than storytelling apostasy.
In this moment of horrific violence, veils have been lifted, and, as a result, what America and Americans think about the Middle East has lost its luster internationally. The distributive imbalances of reportage and the suppression of meaningful counter-narratives have never been so stark. The corporate media giants took a huge gamble with their coverage of Gaza (especially in the early months of the violence), but they lost the bet and injured their credibility abroad, leaving a damning evidentiary trail of blatant bias in news coverage that is “rife with deadly double standards.”
As a result, the American brand has been tarnished, which ultimately is Joe’s legacy.
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Al Jazeera Condemns Palestinian Authority's Suspension of Outlet in West Bank
"The decision to freeze Al Jazeera's work and prevent its journalists from conducting their duties is an attempt to hide the truth about events in the occupied territories, especially what is happening in Jenin and its camps," the network wrote.
Jan 02, 2025
The Qatar-based media network Al Jazeera issued a strongly worded statement Thursday deploring the decision by the Palestinian Authority to temporarily ban the outlet's operations in the West Bank.
The network wrote that "Al Jazeera is shocked by this decision," which it called "nothing but an attempt to dissuade the channel from covering the rapidly escalating events taking place in the occupied territories."
The official Palestinian news agency—WAFA—wrote that the Palestinian Authority made the decision, which was handed down on Wednesday, because of Al Jazeera's "repeated violations of Palestinian laws and regulations." Al Jazeera has been accused of "broadcasting inciteful content" and "interfering in internal Palestinian affairs," but the statement from WAFA didn't offer a further explanation of how the network had broken the law.
The suspension will remain in effect until the network "addresses its legal status in accordance with Palestinian regulations," per WAFA.
The Palestinian Authority has governing authority over parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, including cities like Jenin and Ramallah. The Palestinian Authority is viewed with suspicion by many Palestinian people because of its security coordination with Israel.
In December, forces with the Palestinian Authority stormed the Jenin refugee camp and began a crackdown on armed groups in the camp, which has long been a site of armed struggle and resistance to Israel. Al Jazeeracovered the operation.
In Jenin, a young woman who—according to Democracy Now!—had been active in "documenting the Palestinian Authority's crackdown on armed groups fighting the Israeli occupation," was shot dead this past weekend. The family of the young reporter, Shatha al-Sabbagh, says that the Palestinian Authority security forces are responsible for her death.
A spokesperson from the Palestinian Authority denied this accusation during an interview with Al Jazeera on Sunday.
"The decision to freeze Al Jazeera's work and prevent its journalists from conducting their duties is an attempt to hide the truth about events in the occupied territories, especially what is happening in Jenin and its camps," Al Jazeera wrote in their statement. The network added that the move aligns "with the previous action taken by the Israeli government, which closed Al Jazeera's office in Ramallah."
In May 2024, Israel shutteredAl Jazeera's operations within Israel on security grounds, and a couple months later raided the network's office in Ramallah.
Officials in Israel have long accused Al Jazeera—one of the most prominent media outlets in the Arab world—of being a "mouthpiece" for Hamas, according to The New York Times.
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