In Gaza, a press vest is no longer a protective piece of clothing, but a moving target on a journalist’s back.
The ongoing offence in Gaza has become the most reported genocide in history, and when rockets blow-up buildings and civilians are brutalised, journalists are not protected from Israel’s wrath.
Journalists have been purposefully targeted and assassinated in Gaza during Israel’s siege in Palestine. Their voices were torn from their throats, their offices bombed, equipment destroyed, and their families threatened and killed.
The answer to why this is the case is simple: journalists are silenced because they speak the truth to power. The Committee to Project Journalists’ (CPJ) chief executive officer, Jodie Ginsberg said in a statement: “Every journalist killed is another blow to our understanding of the world.”
Approximately 168 journalists have been martyred to date in Gaza with the most recent assassination on Sunday, August 18. Over 100 reporters have been detained or injured, and more than 50 remain incarcerated. But it is important to remember “behind each number, there is a life,” said Inayet Wadee, presenter at Salaamedia.
One journalist who has been able to make it out alive is Youmna El-Sayed, Al Jazeera’s English correspondent in Gaza. El-Sayed has been reporting on the conflict for a decade, her daughter was born into an open-air prison and still lives in one.
Arriving in South Africa on Tuesday, August 20, El-Sayed barely stopped to breathe a sigh of relief before she shared her story, and the stories of those still abandoned in Gaza, with a room full of journalists hosted by Salaamedia in Sandton.
United Nation experts describe the Gaza genocide as the “most dangerous conflict for journalists in recent history”. More recently, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal and amounts to apartheid.
Waking up to rockets sailing through the sky and bullets raining down on the road, El-Sayed knew that fateful day in October last year was the start of something bigger than the decades of oppression and repression seen before.
Kissing her children on their sleeping heads, she left her house, never to return. In the past, civilians were given a five-minute grace period to flee their homes and run before they were blown apart, but this time around, no such privilege existed.
This week, El-Sayed finally “left this hell, [she] was able to come out, and was given another chance to live, and the only thing to help [her] survive this survivor’s guilt was continuing to speak about Gaza from the outside.”
The first time El-Sayed cried was not when she had to flee her home, or watch her colleagues be killed around her, but only when she realised in succeeding as a journalist, she failed as a mother.
Her daughter had screamed at her: “They’re going to kill us because of you!” This came after she had received a phone call from an Israel Defence Force officer warning her to leave Gaza or be killed.
However, when asked why she keeps reporting in such terrifying conditions, El-Sayed said: “the feeling of bitterness…that taste of abandonment by the world, for me as Youmna, was enough motivation to keep going. And I know for so many other colleagues it is that motivation [too].”
Where she lost her professional sense of duty, she found her humanitarian one because of the “hundreds of thousand of innocent who depend on [her]. But, no matter what, she still mourns the loss of her soul that will forever be buried in Gaza.
El-Sayed reminded journalists that they are the voice for the voiceless, and silencing them means silencing millions of civilians, thereby denying a basic human right to massive portions of the world.
FEATURED IMAGE: Youmna El-Sayed is the face of journalists in Gaza, and she tells their stories in partnership with Salaamedia who held a press conference on Wednesday, August 21, at Hyatt House in Sandton. Photo: Victoria Hill
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