Outside the home of Hussam al-Masri, a Palestinian photojournalist killed by Israel this week, mourners gathered to offer condolences.
But no dates were passed around, nor was there the traditional smell of thick coffee being poured into small cups for mourners outside his family home in western Khan Younis. In Gaza, where Israel is imposing a policy of forced starvation, coffee now costs $50 an ounce.
Before Hussam was killed on Monday alongside four other journalists, including Middle East Eye correspondents Mohamed Salama and Ahmed Abu Aziz, his home had already been destroyed by Israeli attacks. Neighbours who came here to mourn sat on slabs of stone arranged in a circle around the torn tarpaulins where his family, stunned and grieving, huddled for shelter.
Hussam’s wife Samaher – who suffers from a severe skin disease that has been getting worse amid the lack of treatment in besieged Gaza, to the point where she can barely move – has now lost her husband, who was her primary support system. As mourners gathered at their home, their 15-year-old son, Ahmad, sat in silence. Their 18-year-old daughter, Shatha, remembered that their dad would have turned 50 next year.
“Photography had been his passion for 20 years, and he worked for Palestine TV and Reuters because he always wanted the world to see what was happening here in Gaza,” Shatha told MEE. “Now they killed him because he showed the world.”
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In our camp, Hussam was no stranger. He was kin, married to our neighbour’s daughter. As my cousin Mohammed put it: “He is one of us. He was not only our neighbour and our friend, but our voice. His only crime was documenting genocide.”
Israel’s double-tap strike on Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza on Monday killed 21 people, including the five journalists. The first missile struck around 11am local time (09:00 BST), as doctors were doing their morning rounds. Minutes later, after rescuers had rushed to the scene, Israel forces hit again.
Vicious propaganda
My brother, a physician at Nasser Hospital, was working on the ground floor in the radiology department when the first bomb hit. He and his colleagues continued treating the wounded, even as the building shook. Among those killed was a sixth-year medical student whose family had been waiting to see him graduate and wear his white coat. Instead, they buried him.
The targeting of Nasser Hospital encapsulates the dual assault Israel is waging: on those who heal and on those who bear witness, including Hussam and his colleagues.
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Since 7 October 2023, Israel has waged a war on truth, choosing vicious propaganda at every turn. It has worked to destroy the reputation of any organisation or individual who can offer credible testimony about the genocide, including by smearing the United Nations refugees agency, Unrwa. Even the protesters in the streets of Tel Aviv have been dismissed as “strengthening Hamas”.
At the same time, Israel has kept international journalists locked out of Gaza, in an approach that UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres says has allowed “disinformation and false narratives to flourish”.
The final – and most horrific – tool in the Israeli armoury is the persecution and execution of journalists. A recent report from +972 magazine reveals how Israel deployed a special military unit to track and target Palestinian journalists in Gaza. The practical evidence for this is strong.
Each silenced journalist represents not only a stolen life, but a stolen story; a missing piece of truth, a further attempt to write Palestinians out of history
Since October 2023, Israel has killed more than 270 journalists and media workers in Gaza. These numbers surpass every conflict zone in modern history, with Israel killing more journalists during the past 22 months in Gaza than the combined toll of media workers from both World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the Afghanistan War combined.
Groups focused on media freedom have sounded the alarm. The Committee to Protect Journalists has called it the deadliest conflict on record for media workers. The International Federation of Journalists cited a mortality rate of 10 percent among media workers – and that was more than a year ago. Reporters Without Borders has filed complaints at the International Criminal Court.
Journalists around the world are clearly in shock at the scale of the killings of their colleagues – but there has been no meaningful, coordinated action to protest it.
International law is unequivocal: the killing of journalists is a crime. After months of mounting evidence, no state or institution can claim ignorance. We owe Hussam – and all those like him – not only mourning, but decisive action. Their sacrifice must galvanise the world to demand accountability and insist that the Palestinian narrative, long suppressed and silenced, be heard in full. Anything less is complicity.
As a collective, media workers must demand an immediate halt to Israel’s killing of Palestinian journalists. Coordinated action, such as a planned temporary stoppage of all news coverage in order to draw attention to this issue, could be a good place to start.
Stolen stories
These killings are not random. Journalists in Gaza climb to rooftops and hilltops to secure a faint signal, upload photographs, identify strike zones and tell the story. Israel’s strikes have turned those very spaces – hospitals, media offices, homes – into death traps. Each attack is not only an assault on individual lives, but on the very act of bearing witness.
This point must be highlighted clearly: the target is not only these journalists, but the Palestinian narrative itself. It is a strategy of erasure. Each silenced journalist represents not only a stolen life, but a stolen story; a missing piece of truth, a further attempt to write Palestinians out of history.
Ahmed Abu Aziz: MEE’s Gaza correspondent who reported through pain and loss
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For more than a century, Palestinians have been silenced – their testimonies dismissed, their archives erased, their memories attacked. Israel’s killing of journalists today is a continuation of that long project of suppression; an attempt to deny Palestinians the right to narrate their own history.
The strike on Monday is a crime of the gravest order. To deliberately target a hospital – a space protected under international law – and kill journalists, medics and rescue workers constitutes a flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions, and an assault on the very infrastructure of life and survival. And this is not an aberration; it is part of a systematic pattern of violations.
What happened to Hussam and his four colleagues feels very personal to me. When I worked in Gaza as a journalist and translator, I sat on the stairways of Nasser Hospital. I knew well the walls that now lie in ruins.
But their killing is also profoundly political, in the context of Israel’s systematic efforts to extinguish Palestinian voices.
The continued flow of weapons and political cover makes western states not bystanders, but active partners in these crimes. Sanctions and arms embargoes are not optional gestures of disapproval; they are the minimum obligations of a world order that still claims to uphold human rights and international law.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
