Wael al Dahdouh He is one of the faces of the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza since the beginning of Israeli military operations, after the bloody Hamas attacks on October 7. Al Dahdouh is the news chief of the Qatari television correspondent Al Jazeera and has lost his wife, a 7-year-old daughter and two sons, one of them also a journalist, in the bombings.. The images of Al Dahdouh dressed in the bulletproof vest marked with the press badge, devastated at the funeral and immediately returning to work have become a symbol of the tragedy.
More than 20,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli offensive. Among them, dozens of journalists. According to figures updated as of January 11 from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ in its figures in English), since the beginning of the conflict 79 journalists and media employees have died (72 Palestinians, four Israelis and three Lebanese); 16 reporters have been injured; three are missing and 21 have been arrested. The authorities of the Gaza Strip put the number of journalists killed in Gaza during the war at 110, which also includes ‘influencers’ and intellectuals. Israel’s justification, when issued, is the usual one in these cases: it links the victims to terrorist groups.
Several of these journalists worked for Al Jazeera. Most reported for local Palestinian media and some for other Arab countries and the Turkish news agency. Al Jazeera has, since its founding in 1996, a tragic history of dead journalists: 12 reporters died on the war front in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and the West Bank until the start of the war in Gaza. Its offices were attacked in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It makes you think.
It is easy to imagine what would happen if in any war conflict one of the parties killed 72 Western media journalists in bombings, in some cases direct. The scandal would be huge. On the other hand, beyond the professional associations of journalists, the movements of solidarity with the Palestinian people and some honorable exceptions, The death of journalists in Gaza raises little dust. A discretion proportional to the silence and criticism from only half of the official Western world regarding the terrible humanitarian situation in Gaza. In the case of journalists, the fact that the Western press in so many cases puts its hands in its pockets and whistles the other way is another example of the global consequences that the Gaza war has and will have in the medium term. Break, with the support of the Western establishment, the laws of international governance and, in the case of journalists, the right to information of reporters in conflict zones It is not going to be free to the rest of the world. In Ukraine they know it well.
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Are the reporters killed in Gaza fewer journalists? They do not work in large media outlets in Western countries, and that in itself is a handicap for their deaths to be the cause of a global scandal. But above all they are Palestinians, and that is the main reason for the indifferencebecause the thousands of dead and missing Gazans are not enough for global indignation either. Not all journalists are the same nor are all lives worth the same, that is another message from Gaza that resonates throughout the world and that many are taking note of..
There is another difference between Wael al Dahdouh and Western journalists who have ever covered armed conflicts, in Gaza itself or elsewhere: Al Dahdouh can’t go anywhere. Unlike the war correspondents whose access to Gaza is blocked by Israel, Al Dahdouh does not have a passport that allows him to leave the front when blood, death and desolation overcome him. The corpses that he films, the funerals that he covers, the rubble that he walks over, the dead that he counts, the tragedy that he reports on, the pain that overcomes him, are his own. They are his own, those of his family, those of his neighbors, those of his people. After each blow, he has gotten up and continued reporting on that great open-air cemetery, also for journalists, that is today Gaza.