In May, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) wrote about the desperate situation facing journalists in Gaza, who were having to report while dangerously hungry. My colleagues documented the gnawing hunger, dizziness, brain fog and sickness all experienced by an exhausted Palestinian press corps already living and working in terrifying conditions. Eight weeks later, that desperate situation is now catastrophic.
Several news organizations are now warning that their journalists – those documenting what is happening inside Gaza – will die unless urgent action is taken to stop Israel’s deliberate refusal to allow sufficient food into the territory. “Since AFP was founded in August 1944, we have lost journalists in conflicts, we have had wounded and prisoners in our ranks, but none of us can recall seeing a colleague die of hunger,” an association of journalists from the Agence France-Presse wrote in a statement on Monday. “We refuse to watch them die.” Two days later, the Qatari broadcast network Al Jazeera said its journalists – like all Palestinians in Gaza– were “fighting for their own survival” and warned: “If we fail to act now, we risk a future where there may be no one left to tell our stories.”
Al Jazeera shared a heart-wrenching post from the Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Anas Al Sharif in which he writes: “I haven’t stopped covering [the crisis] for a moment in 21 months, and today, I say it outright … And with indescribable pain. I am drowning in hunger, trembling in exhaustion, and resisting the fainting that follows me every moment … Gaza is dying. And we die with it.”
Al Sharif’s story is one we have heard over and over again from reporters inside Gaza. On Sunday, Sally Thabet, correspondent for Al-Kofiya satellite channel, fainted after a live broadcast on 20 July because she had not eaten all day. She told CPJ she regained consciousness in the hospital, where doctors gave her an intravenous drip for rehydration and nutrition. In an online video, she described how she and her three daughters are starving. The Palestinian journalist Shuruq As’ad, founder of the Palestine Journalism Hub, said Thabet was the third journalist to collapse on air from starvation that week.
I have been a reporter for more than a quarter of a century. I know all too well that journalists have always faced risks in reporting in war zones. I have many journalist friends who bear the scars – both physical and mental – of covering such conflicts, and many whose colleagues have been killed in fighting from Libya to Syria, from Bosnia to Sierra Leone. Most take these risks knowingly. But this is not that situation. These are not the usual risks faced by reporters in conflict: a stray bullet, a landmine, ambush. This is something else. This is systematic silencing by Israel. Starvation is its latest and terrible manifestation, but we must be clear that the threats facing journalists in Gaza are not new – nor is the international community’s abject failure to address them. More journalists and media workers were killed in 2024 than in any other year since CPJ began keeping records. Nearly two-thirds of all those killed in 2024 were Palestinians killed by Israel. There has been no accountability for any of these killings, despite evidence of numerous targeted attacks.
Very few of these journalists chose to become war correspondents. They are war correspondents because war is their daily, inescapable reality. They report because there is no one else to do so as Israel continues to refuse access to journalists from outside Gaza to the territory, a refusal that is without precedent in the history of modern warfare. These restrictions on international access place an unbearable burden on those who are forced to remain and bear witness. CPJ has documented the deliberate targeting of journalists; their offices have been bombed, their homes destroyed. They have been forced to move repeatedly, finding shelter in flimsy tents. They struggle with frequent communications blackouts and damaged equipment. They are barred from leaving Gaza and evacuation is all but impossible, even with life-threatening and life-altering injuries. Unlike in other ongoing conflicts, such as Ukraine, which also has a high number of domestic reporters who now report on and from a war zone, Gaza’s journalists have no colleagues who can replace them from elsewhere, who can provide them with much-needed rest and respite.
Now these journalists are starving to death before our eyes. The international community has the information it needs to act to reverse this course. We know what is happening in Gaza. We know because of the journalists who have documented the attacks at aid stations, who have filmed the starving children and the bombed hospitals, and who are now recording their own demise.
There is an adage in journalism circles that explains reporters’ reluctance to write about themselves: No journalist wants to become the story. If we do not act now, there will be no one left in Gaza to tell anyone’s story. And that silence – those deaths – will be on us.
