Reporters contend with lack of access, harassment, censorship, arrests and danger to bring the front lines to readers worldwide
Reporters contend with lack of access, harassment, censorship, arrests and danger to bring the front lines to readers worldwide
When Hamas militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — killing 1,139 and kidnapping 251 hostages — it sparked a swift, brutal response from Israel. In retaliation, Israel launched a sustained bombing campaign that leveled much of Gaza, killing at least 41,020 Palestinians, injuring 94,925 and displacing an untold number (as of September 2024), according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. The war triggered a humanitarian crisis and threatens to destabilize the region further.
By any measure, this has been a grueling war for the international community of journalists to cover. Foreign correspondents have been prevented from going into Gaza. They’ve been censored, detained, surveilled, cyber-attacked and harassed.
As of mid-September 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that 116 journalists have been killed covering this war.
Reporting for The Guardian
Julian Borger is The Guardian’s world affairs editor. He’s a long-time correspondent who has reported from the Middle East, the United States and Eastern Europe. Borger authored two books, the memoir, “I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust,” and “The Butcher’s Trail: How the Search for Balkan War Criminals Became the World’s Most Successful Manhunt.” And since Oct. 7, he’s been part of a rotating team covering the Israel-Hamas war.
Borger said the team is comprised of five reporters.
“The number of people really depends on how much is going on. At one point, we had four people on the ground soon after Oct. 7,” Borger recalled. It’s a small but effective team.
Borger said they rely on two local fixers — one in East Jerusalem and one in West Jerusalem — who help them plan, approach sources and strategically move around the region.
The greatest challenge their team and others have faced is access. For all but a select few, getting into Gaza has been impossible.
“You just can’t,” Borger said. “There’s never been anything like it, where you’ve had a war going on for so long, and it’s absolutely hermetically sealed.”
Early in the conflict, Borger said that a Guardian reporter traveled to Gaza with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Though Borger didn’t elaborate on the problems their reporter faced, he did say it was “not something we wanted to repeat,” citing “a lot of issues and ethical issues going on there.”
Last February, more than 50 journalists and newsroom leaders — including Katharine Viner, The Guardian’s editor-in-chief — signed an open letter to the governments of Israel and Egypt, demanding “free and unfettered access to Gaza for all foreign media.”
There have been a number of reports that Israel is censoring news organizations. An Associated Press team had its broadcasting equipment seized by Israel’s Communications Ministry, and Israeli police raided Al Jazeera’s offices and had the station taken off the air, FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) reported.
In late August, Human Rights Watch submitted a plea to the European Union to “take action against the Israeli authorities’ unprecedented killing of journalists and other violations of media freedom.”
There is an enduring danger for reporters operating in Gaza.
“The overwhelming majority of deaths have been in Gaza, so this is not principally a story about journalism, but about the mass killing of civilians among whom there are journalists,” he observed. “There have been suspicions that journalists have been particularly targeted. That may be true, but it’s unproven. I think it’s mostly a reflection of the bombing of civilian areas.”
“Our foreign editor has to make judgments given the situation. Obviously, you take on some moral responsibility when someone is chasing a story for you across Gaza,” Borger said.
While a cease-fire is debated, there is a sense that, even then, this conflict may not be over. Asked what an enduring story like this means for their newsroom — knowing that the region will remain contentious even if a resolution manifests — Borger said it’s not likely that they would grow the team in anticipation of that.
“We won’t hire people based on that, but if things get very busy in a region, we’ll often transfer people from one region to another. … It’s really a matter of improvising,” he said.
The Middle East has been a region of the world long plagued by violence and political unrest.
Earlier in his career, Borger spent 18 months reporting from Jerusalem. It was 2000, and peace was on the negotiation table at the Camp David Summit. Borger recalled how an agreement seemed imminent, but negotiations broke down the night before the signing.
“Since then, it has gone far backward in terms of a way to reach a peaceful settlement,” Borger said.
There’s also the potential for the war to escalate, draw in other nations and attract militant groups. Already, Hezbollah has joined the fight, firing rockets into Israel’s northern towns in retaliation for Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
“They do not want a full-scale war,” Borger said. “But they want to show the Arab world that they are leaders of the resistance.” Hezbollah’s rockets have displaced approximately 80,000 Israelis, Borger estimated — Israelis who are now putting pressure on the government to “deal with that problem once and for all.”
“That makes for a very unstable situation because you have a population and some of the generals pushing for war on a new front,” Borger said.
Political pressure to allow Jews to pray at Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) in Jerusalem could further destabilize the entire region, too, Borger noted.
“It has the capacity to ignite. You could see the Abraham Accords being reversed, if not severed,” he said. “And you could see a lot of pressure on the various state actors and non-state actors — who are claiming to represent Islam in the region — to take action. … Each of them will be vying for the position of upholders of faith, and that’s a very precarious, volatile situation.”
The war may feel abstract to readers in other parts of the world. Asked about how that impacts his reporting, Borger said, “I think that’s a core of the job — to engage with the human beings who are going through the current situation in the Middle East, to engage them human-to-human, to tell their stories so that people understand it on a human scale. Because without that, it does seem abstract. So, the central task is to tell human stories and explain the impact on families and individuals. If you’re not doing that, I don’t think you’re doing your job.”
Reporting for the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times Middle East Bureau Chief Nabih Bulos has spent much of his career reporting from dangerous war zones, including Ukraine and now the Israel-Hamas war. He reports on the West Bank and, in recent months, has been strategically stationed in Beirut to cover the broadening conflict unfolding in Lebanon.
With just a small team of two or three reporters tasked to the war, it’s impossible to cover the day-to-day events, except in cases of significant occurrences, like Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on northern Israel, the Houthi missile attack on Israel or Israel’s bombing of a humanitarian encampment in Gaza. Often, they take a longer-form feature approach, building stories over time, Bulos explained. One recent story focused on a campaign to distribute the polio vaccine to Palestinians in Gaza.
The newsroom puts this reporting through heightened editorial scrutiny. At least two editors review and approve the team’s work, and they’re particularly thoughtful about the manner in which they describe the parties on either side.
Bulos said their team relies heavily on local sources from within Gaza. That presents a problem beyond mere access. “It’s a big challenge to make sure the people you’re working with are not problematic” — if sources prove to be associated with militant operatives, or if they’re activists trying to control the narrative.
“We are also reliant on local journalists, so we get the trends from them and learn about the day-to-day difficulties,” he said.
The other challenge reporters face — just like everyone else in this war zone — is scarcity and price gouging of basic goods. Aid convoys are routinely ambushed and robbed. Simple things like acquiring currency are no longer routine.
“And then desperation starts to set in with people. You see families who can’t get something as simple as formula or milk powder for babies. It starts to take its toll,” he said.
“Obviously, it affects me, but I’m wary of injecting myself into the story,” he continued. “You have to let the facts speak for themselves. And more to the point, I get to go home.”
Bulos also said he’s cognizant that even amid war, there are lighter moments of resilience, humanity, community and even laughter. These occasions are part of the story, too.
War has a sort of magnetism. Members of the military and journalists have long spoken about the relief of leaving a war zone, only to crave a return to one. That’s how it is for Bulos, who said he sometimes misses being in the thick of conflict. He doesn’t want this disclosure to be seen as flippant or the words of a “tough guy.” Instead, it’s an attraction to the sense of clarity and perspective war inspires.
He hopes his reporting has the same impact on readers, though engaging readers is becoming increasingly difficult. “People can get so much visceral information from social media, and they’re less likely to be affected by the written word or the more curated image,” he observed. “But our aim is indeed to bring this war a bit closer to people.”
Gretchen A. Peck is a contributing editor to Editor & Publisher. She’s reported for E&P since 2010 and welcomes comments at [email protected].