The photo of this child still haunts me...
How can so many people not care?
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18/04/2025
16/04/2025
All journalists, none should have to die
French journalists in Paris, Bastille, on Wed. 16 April, from 6 to 8pm, in support of
Palestinian colleagues, including Edwy Plenel from Mediapart, and journalists
from France 24, AFP, Le Monde, and us at Radio France Internationale (RFI):
Palestinian colleagues, including Edwy Plenel from Mediapart, and journalists
from France 24, AFP, Le Monde, and us at Radio France Internationale (RFI):
Photo Sipa / Sadak Souici/Zuma
Several hundred people gathered this Wednesday in Paris and Marseille, in response to a call from journalists' organisations to show their solidarity with their colleagues killed in Gaza. I was there with RFI colleagues.
Nearly 200 journalists have been killed in Gaza since the war began in October 2023.
In Paris, some 200 journalists, including Mediapart founder Edwy Plenel, symbolically lay down on the steps of the Opéra Bastille as the names of the victims were read out.
Video insight:
15/04/2025
Journalists, we stand in solidarity with our colleagues in Gaza
I'll be there
[ENGLISH VERSION]
Journalists, we stand in solidarity
with our colleagues in Gaza
Israeli bombardments of the Gaza Strip have killed nearly two hundred Palestinian journalists in eighteen months. To denounce this massacre, unprecedented in the history of the profession, the main French organisations for the defense of journalists and freedom of the press are calling on the profession to gather on Wednesday, April 16, at 6:00 pm, in Paris (in front of the Opéra-Bastille) and in Marseille (Vieux-Port).
It is not common for a journalist to write his own obituary at the age of 23. Yet this is what Hossam Shabat, the Al-Jazeera Moubasher correspondent in the Gaza Strip, did. The young man, aware that Israeli bombardments on the Palestinian territory had drastically reduced the life expectancy of members of his profession, composed a short text, to be published if anything were to happen to him.
These words were finally posted on social networks on Monday, March 24. “If you are reading this, it means that I have been killed,” begins the message in which the Al-Jazeera reporter talks about his nights sleeping on the floor, the hunger that never stopped gnawing at him and his struggle to "document the horrors minute by minute.” “I will finally be able to rest, something I have not been able to do for the past eighteen months," concludes the Palestinian reporter, killed by an Israeli drone strike on the car he was traveling in, in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza. A vehicle that bore the TV logo and the Al-Jazeera logo.
In a year and a half of war in the coastal enclave, Israeli operations have caused the death of nearly 200 Palestinian media professionals, according to international organisations for the defence of journalists such as Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), in conjunction with the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS). In the history of our profession, all conflicts combined, it is a carnage of a magnitude never seen before, as demonstrated by a recent study by Brown university.
At least forty of these journalists, like Hossam Shabat, were killed with pen, microphone or camera in hand. This was the case of Ahmed Al-Louh, 39, a cameraman for Al-Jazeera, who died in an air strike while filming a report in the Nusseirat refugee camp on December 15, 2024. In a similar manner, Ibrahim Mouhareb, 26, a contributor to the newspaper Al-Hadath, was killed by tank fire on August 18, 2024, while covering the Israeli army's withdrawal from a neighbourhood in Khan Younes. These cases have been carefully documented by the aforementioned organisations.
All these colleagues wore helmets and bulletproof vests with the word PRESS on them, clearly identifying them as media professionals. Some had received phone threats from Israeli military officials or had been identified as members of armed groups in Gaza by the army spokesperson, without the latter providing credible evidence to support these claims. All of these elements suggest that they were deliberately targeted by the Israeli army.
Other colleagues from Gaza died in the bombing of their homes or the tents where they had taken refuge with their families, like tens of thousands of other Palestinians. This is the case of Wafa Al-Udaini, founder of the 16-October journalists' collective, who was killed in a strike on the city of Deir Al-Balah on September 30, 2024, along with her husband and their two children. And of Ahmed Fatima, a figure at the Gaza Press House, an NGO supported by European donors, which trained a new generation of journalists.
On November 13, 2023, a missile struck the floor of the building where he lived with his wife and their six-year-old son in Gaza City. His parents survived the explosion, but his child was injured in the face. Ahmed Fatima picked him up and rushed him into the street to take him to the hospital. He had barely covered fifty meters when a second missile struck near him, killing him. Six days later, on November 19, the founder and director of the Gaza Press House, Bilal Jadallah, was also killed when an Israeli tank fired on his vehicle.
Others survived, but in what condition? The photojournalist Fadi Al-Wahidi, 25, has been paraplegic since a bullet severed his spinal cord on October 9, 2024, while he was filming yet another forced displacement of civilians, as reported by the investigative media outlet Forbidden Stories. Wael Al-Dahdouh, Al-Jazeera's famous correspondent in Gaza, learned of the death of his wife and two of his children in a bombing, live on air, on October 25, 2023. For Palestinian journalists, “covering” the death of a colleague or loved one has become part of a macabre routine.
We also mourn the deaths of the four Israeli journalists who perished in the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, as well as those of nine Lebanese and one Syrian colleagues in Israeli strikes. But Gaza is the urgent issue of today. For all human rights defenders, one thing is clear: the Israeli army is seeking to impose a media blackout on Gaza, to silence, as much as possible, the witnesses of war crimes committed by its troops, at a time when a growing number of international NGOs and UN bodies are describing them as acts of genocide. This desire to obstruct information is also reflected in the Israeli government's refusal to allow the foreign press into the Gaza Strip.
Let us not forget the situation in the occupied West Bank, where in a few days' time we will commemorate the third anniversary of the death of Shireen Abu Akleh. The star correspondent for Al-Jazeera was shot in Jenin on May 11, 2022, by an Israeli soldier who has not been held accountable for his crime. The attack on March 24 by settlers on Hamdan Ballal, co-director of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, who was then arrested by soldiers in the ambulance taking him for treatment,
is a testament to the violence to which those who try to report on the reality of the Israeli occupation expose themselves. It also reveals the impunity almost systematically offered to those who seek to silence them.
As journalists, deeply committed to the freedom to inform, it is our duty to denounce this policy, to show our solidarity with our Palestinian colleagues and to demand, again and again, the right to enter Gaza. We are not asking this because we feel that the coverage of Gaza is incomplete in the absence of Western journalists. It is to support and protect, through our presence, our Palestinian colleagues who are showing incredible courage by sending us images and testimonies of the immeasurable tragedy currently taking place in Gaza.
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A large collective made up of France’s main journalists' unions (SNJ, SNJ-CGT and CFDT-Journalistes), Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the Albert Londres Prize, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), the Reporters Solidaires collective and the SCAM journalists' commission therefore invites you to gather on Wednesday, April 16, at 6 p.m., in front of the stairs of the Opéra-Bastille in Paris and in the Vieux-Port in Marseille, around the following slogans:
Gaza
Stop the massacre of Palestinian journalists
End the impunity of the perpetrators of these crimes
Immediate opening of this territory to the international press
With the support of : SDJ de l’AFP, SDJ d’Arrêt sur Images, SDJ d’Arte, association des Journalistes Antiracistes et Racisé·e·s (AJAR), association des Journalistes de l’environnement (AJE), SDJ de BFM TV, SDJ de Blast, SDJ de Capital, SDJ de Challenges, rédaction du Courrier de l’Atlas, SDJ de Courrier International, rédaction de La Croix, SDJ du Figaro, SDJ de France 2 Rédaction nationale, SDJ de France 3 Rédaction nationale, SDJ de France 24, SDJ de FranceInfo TV et franceinfo.fr, SDP de L’Humanité, SDJ de L’Informé, SDJ de Konbini, rédaction de Là-Bas Si J’y Suis, SDJ de LCI, SDJP de Libération, SDJ de M6, SDJ de Mediapart, SDR du Monde, SDR du Nouvel Observateur, rédaction de Orient XXI, SDJ du Parisien, SDR du Point, SDJ de Politis, SDJ de Premières Lignes TV, SDJ de Radio France, SDJ de Radio France Internationale (RFI), SDJ de RMC, rédaction de Saphirnews, SDJ de Sept à Huit, SDJ de Telerama, SDJ de TF1, SDJ de La Tribune, SDJ de TV5 Monde, SDJ de L’Usine Nouvelle, SDR de La Vie, SDJ de 60 millions de consommateurs
Solidarité
Journalistes, nous nous déclarons solidaires de nos collègues de Gaza
Les bombardements israéliens sur la bande de Gaza ont tué près de deux cents journalistes palestiniens en dix-huit mois. Pour dénoncer cette hécatombe, jamais vue dans l'histoire de ce métier, les principales organisations de défense des journalistes et de la liberté de la presse françaises appellent la profession à se rassembler, mercredi 16 avril, à 18h00, à Paris (devant l'Opéra-Bastille) et à Marseille (Vieux-Port).
Ce n’est pas courant pour un journaliste d’écrire son testament à l'âge de 23 ans. C’est pourtant ce qu’a fait Hossam Shabat, correspondant de la chaîne qatarie Al-Jazeera Moubasher dans la bande de Gaza. Le jeune homme, conscient que les bombardements israéliens sur le territoire palestinien ont drastiquement réduit l’espérance de vie des membres de sa profession, a composé un court texte, à publier s’il devait lui arriver malheur.
Ces mots ont finalement été postés sur les réseaux sociaux lundi 24 mars. “Si vous lisez ceci, cela signifie que j’ai été tué”, commence le message dans lequel le reporter d’Al-Jazeera évoque ses nuits à dormir sur le trottoir, la faim qui n’a jamais cessé de le tenailler et son combat pour “documenter les horreurs minute par minute”. “Je vais enfin pouvoir me reposer, quelque chose que je n’ai pas pu faire durant les dix-huit mois passés”, conclut le reporter palestinien, tué par un tir de drone israélien sur la voiture dans laquelle il circulait, à Beit Lahiya, dans le nord de Gaza. Un véhicule qui portait le sigle TV et le logo d’Al-Jazeera.
En un an et demi de guerre dans l’enclave côtière, les opérations israéliennes ont causé la mort de près de 200 professionnels des médias palestiniens, selon les organisations internationales de défense des journalistes telles Reporters sans frontières (RSF), le Comité pour la protection des journalistes (CPJ) et la Fédération internationale des journalistes (FIJ), en lien avec le Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS). Dans l’histoire de notre profession, tous conflits confondus, c’est une hécatombe d’une magnitude jamais vue, comme le démontre une récente étude de l’université américaine Brown.
Au moins une quarantaine de ces journalistes, à l’instar de Hossam Shabat, ont été tués stylo, micro ou caméra à la main. C’est le cas de Ahmed Al-Louh, 39 ans, caméraman de la chaîne Al- Jazeera, qui a péri dans une frappe aérienne, alors qu’il tournait un reportage dans le camp de réfugiés de Nusseirat, le 15 décembre 2024. Et de Ibrahim Mouhareb, 26 ans, collaborateur du journal Al-Hadath, tué par le tir d’un char, le 18 août 2024, alors qu’il couvrait le retrait de l’armée israélienne d’un quartier de Khan Younes. Des cas soigneusement documentés par les organisations précitées.
Tous ces confrères et consoeurs portaient un casque et un gilet pare-balles, floqué du sigle PRESS, les identifiant clairement comme des professionnels des médias. Certains avaient reçu des menaces téléphoniques de responsables militaires israéliens ou bien avaient été désignés comme des membres de groupes armés gazaouis par le porte-parole de l’armée, sans que celui-ci ne fournisse de preuves crédibles à l’appui de ces accusations. Autant d’éléments qui incitent à penser qu’ils ont été délibérément visés par l’armée israélienne.
D’autres de nos collègues de Gaza sont morts dans le bombardement de leur domicile ou de la tente où ils s’étaient réfugiés avec leurs familles, comme des dizaines de milliers d’autres Palestiniens. C’est le cas de Wafa Al-Udaini, fondatrice du collectif de journalistes 16-Octobre, tuée dans une frappe sur la ville de Deir Al-Balah, le 30 septembre 2024, avec son mari et leurs deux enfants. Et de Ahmed Fatima, une figure de la Maison de la presse de Gaza, une ONG soutenue par des bailleurs européens, qui formait une nouvelle génération de journalistes.
Le 13 novembre 2023, un missile a frappé l’étage de l’immeuble où il résidait avec son épouse et leur fils de six ans, à Gaza-ville. Les parents ont réchappé à l’explosion mais l’enfant a été blessé au visage. Ahmed Fatima l’a pris dans ses bras et s’est précipité dans la rue pour l’amener à l'hôpital. À peine avait-il parcouru cinquante mètres qu’un second missile s’abattait à proximité de lui et le tuait. Six jours plus tard, le 19 novembre, le fondateur et directeur de la Maison de la presse, Bilal Jadallah, mourait à son tour dans le tir d’un char israélien sur son véhicule.
D’autres ont survécu, mais dans quelles conditions ? Le journaliste reporter d’images Fadi Al- Wahidi, 25 ans, est paraplégique depuis qu’une balle lui a sectionné la moelle épinière, le 9 octobre 2024, alors qu’il filmait un énième déplacement forcé de civils, comme l’a rapporté le média d’investigation Forbidden Stories. Wael Al-Dahdouh, célèbre correspondant d’Al-Jazeera à Gaza, a quant à lui appris la mort de sa femme et de deux de ses enfants dans un bombardement, en plein direct, le 25 octobre 2023. Pour les journalistes palestiniens, “couvrir” la mort d’un collègue ou d’un proche fait désormais partie d’une macabre routine.
Nous déplorons également la mort des quatre journalistes israéliens qui ont péri dans l'attaque terroriste menée par le Hamas le 7 octobre 2023, ainsi que celle de neuf confrères libanais et d’une consoeur syrienne lors de frappes israéliennes. Mais l'urgence est aujourd'hui à Gaza. Pour tous les défenseurs des droits humains, un constat s’impose : l’armée israélienne cherche à imposer un black-out médiatique sur Gaza, à réduire au silence, autant que possible, les témoins des crimes de guerre commis par ses troupes, au moment où un nombre croissant d’ONG internationales et d’instances onusiennes les qualifient d’actes génocidaires. Cette volonté de faire obstacle à l’information se traduit également par le refus du gouvernement israélien de laisser la presse étrangère pénétrer dans la bande de Gaza.
N’oublions pas la situation en Cisjordanie occupée, où l’on commémorera, dans quelques jours, les trois ans de la mort de Shireen Abu Akleh. La correspondante vedette d’Al-Jazeera a été abattue à Jénine, le 11 mai 2022, par un soldat israélien qui n’a eu aucun compte à rendre pour son crime. L’agression par des colons, le 24 mars dernier, de Hamdan Ballal, co-réalisateur du documentaire oscarisé No Other Land, qui a été ensuite arrêté par des soldats dans l’ambulance qui l’emmenait se faire soigner, témoigne de la violence à laquelle s’exposent ceux qui tentent de raconter la réalité de l’occupation israélienne. Elle révèle aussi l’impunité offerte quasi systématiquement à ceux qui cherchent à les faire taire.
En tant que journalistes, viscéralement attachés à la liberté d’informer, il est de notre devoir de dénoncer cette politique, de manifester notre solidarité avec nos collègues palestiniens et de réclamer, encore et toujours, le droit d’entrer dans Gaza. Si nous demandons cela, ce n'est pas parce que nous estimons que la couverture de Gaza est incomplète en l’absence de journalistes
occidentaux. C’est pour relayer et protéger, par notre présence, nos confrères et consoeurs palestiniens qui font preuve d’un courage inouï, en nous faisant parvenir les images et les témoignages de la tragédie incommensurable actuellement en cours à Gaza.
Un large collectif composé des principaux syndicats de journalistes (SNJ, SNJ-CGT et CFDT- Journalistes), de Reporters sans frontières, du Prix Albert Londres, de la Fédération internationale des journalistes (FIJ), de la Fédération européenne des Journalistes (FEJ), du collectif Reporters solidaires et de la commission journalistes de la SCAM vous invite donc à vous rassembler, le mercredi 16 avril, à 18h, devant les escaliers de l’Opéra-Bastille, à Paris et sur le Vieux-Port à Marseille, autour des mots d’ordre suivants :
Gaza
Stop au massacre des journalistes palestiniens
Halte à l’impunité des auteurs de ces crimes
Ouverture immédiate de ce territoire à la presse internationale
Avec le soutien des sociétés de journalistes suivantes (par ordre alphabétique) :
Société des journalistes de l’AFP
Société des journalistes d’Arrêt sur Images
Société des journalistes de Arte
Société des journalistes de BFM TV
Société des journalistes de Blast
Société des journalistes de Capital
Société des journalistes de Challenges
Rédaction du Courrier de l’Atlas
Société des journalistes de Mediapart
Société des rédacteurs du Monde
Société des rédacteurs du Nouvel Observateur
Rédaction de Orient XXI
Société des journalistes du Parisien
Société des journalistes de Politis
Société des journalistes de Premières Lignes TV
Société des journalistes de Radio France
Société des journalistes de Radio France Internationale (RFI)
Société des journalistes de RMC
Rédaction de Saphirnews
Société des journalistes de Sept à Huit
Société des journalistes de Telerama
Société des journalistes de TF1
Société des rédacteurs de La Tribune
Société des journalistes de TV5 Monde
Société des journalistes de L’Usine Nouvelle Société des rédacteurs de La Vie
Société des journalistes de 60 millions de consommateurs
Association des Journalistes Antiracistes et Racisé·e·s
Associations des journalistes de l’environnement
Société des journalistes de Courrier International
du Figaro
de France 2 Rédaction
de France 3 Rédaction
de France 24, de FranceInfo TV
Société des personnels de l’Humanité
Société des journalistes de L’Informé
Société des journalistes de Konbini
Société des journalistes de LCI
Société des journalistes et du personnel de Libération
Société des journalistes de M6
14/04/2025
Gaza: these words, entirely
Gaza is a ‘killing field’ where people are being starved. How long will the world tolerate this?
What is happening is, quite simply, annihilation. Yet our politicians keep funding it and media outlets normalise it
Where do I even start? In recent weeks I’ve sat down to try and write about Gaza and, every time I steel myself to write about one atrocity, another atrocity is committed. Palestinian journalists have been burned alive, babies have frozen to death, medics have been executed and buried in mass graves, kids are being killed in their sleep. Meanwhile, in the US and Germany, speaking out about dead Palestinian babies can land you on a deportation list. Arguing that international human rights law should be respected can put you at risk of being snatched off the street and stuck in a detention centre.
I don’t know where to start and I don’t know what is really left to say at this point. After 18 months of endless carnage, it should be clear to everyone that this is not a war. That this is not self-defence. What is happening in Gaza is, quite simply, annihilation. A litany of genocide experts have stated this. Respected international organisations like Amnesty International have concluded that Israel is committing genocide – and yet our politicians are still funding this.
Palestinians aren’t just being exterminated with US-supplied bombs. The more insidious killer now is disease and starvation. On 2 March – more than a month ago – Israel cut off supplies to Gaza in an attempt to change the terms of the ceasefire agreement. Calling this an “aid blockade”, as headlines tend to do, doesn’t do justice to the horror of what is happening: this is not an “aid blockade” so much as it is a starvation campaign.
Gaza, after all, has been reduced to rubble; it’s not like there is food growing in the strip that people can rely on. An analysis of satellite imagery by the UN in November found that more than 90% of cattle had died and about 70% of land for crops in Gaza has been destroyed or damaged since the beginning of this iteration of the war in the territory.
Water is also being used as a weapon of war. In early March, a week after stopping any food or other humanitarian supplies from getting into Gaza, Israel cut off the electricity supply to Gaza’s main operational desalination plant. The situation now could not be more desperate. “Gaza is a killing field, and civilians are in an endless death loop,” the UN secretary general, António Guterres, said on Tuesday.
This is not an ‘aid blockade’ so much as it is a starvation campaign
Emboldened by Donald Trump and his visions of building hotels and casinos on top of these killing fields, Israel is not even trying to hide its aims any more. It wants to rid Gaza of Palestinians and annex the West Bank. And it will starve, kill and terrorize Palestinians until they “voluntarily” agree to leave en masse to somewhere like Sudan or Somalia – those being a couple of the countries the US and Israel have recently floated as potential relocation areas.
“We will see to the general security in the Gaza Strip and will allow the realization of the Trump plan for voluntary migration,” Benjamin Netanyahu recently said. “This is the plan. We are not hiding this and are ready to discuss it at any time.”
The deputy parliament speaker Nissim Vaturi, meanwhile, recently went on Kol BaRama radio, to call for the Gazafication of the West Bank. “We need to separate the children and women and kill the adults in Gaza. We are being too considerate,” Vaturi said. “We will soon turn Jenin [in the West Bank] into Gaza,” he added.
If this is the first time you’ve seen this statement, by the way, it’s because it wasn’t covered by the same mainstream western outlets that have devoted thousands of words to asking if a college student saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a call for genocide. Although, to be fair, if the western media did cover every public incitement to genocide made by Israeli politicians and thought leaders, then there would be no space to cover anything else.
Rather than calling out these incitements, certain elements of the media seem keen to normalize the people making them. Last month, for example, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s former defense minister, joined the ADL for a fireside chat in New York with CNN’s Bianna Golodryga. The international criminal court, let me remind you, has issued an arrest warrant for Gallant for war crimes. The court found “reasonable grounds” to believe Gallant and Netanyahu “bear criminal responsibility for the following crimes as co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”. CNN, I should note, has done some excellent reporting on Gaza. But for the network to sit down for a cozy “fireside chat” with Gallant – while Palestinian journalists are being burned alive, no less – is appalling.
Normally, when I write an opinion piece, it feels like I’m having a little tete-a-tete with the reader. But I don’t really know who I’m writing this piece for. If you’ve read up to here then there’s a good chance you already agree with me, that you’re already appalled by what’s happening and that you’re using your own voice as best you can. And if you are not devastated at this point, then there is simply no convincing you to care.
I have written a lot of op-eds where I’m essentially just begging people – including some of my colleagues in the western media – to give a damn about Palestinian suffering. To remember that Palestinians are humans too. To remember that starving civilians is a war crime, one which should not be sanitized with the passive voice and obfuscating language. To understand that this isn’t some distant foreign policy issue: this genocide is US-taxpayer funded. Meanwhile, unprecedented attempts to suppress free speech in the US on Palestine have turned this into a domestic issue.
I’m done begging people to care about Palestinians now. I’m writing this not because I hope to change any minds, but because the only power I have – the only power that many of us have – is to continually raise our voices and say that we do not consent to this.
“One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this,” the journalist Omar El Akkad wrote. When that day comes, nobody can pretend they didn’t know.
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