Since October 7, 2023, Palestine has only seen shades of black.
In twelve months, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), a global organization representing 600,000 media professionals spread across 150 countries, has counted at least 138 deaths since the start of the war in Gaza (127 Palestinians) and its consequences in Lebanon (5 ), in Israel (4) and Syria (1). This is the heaviest death toll in the history of journalism. For comparison, the other major conflict in the world between Ukraine and Russia killed 18 Ukrainian journalists after thirty-two months of conflict. IFJ investigations, with the help of its Palestinian affiliate, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS), were able to clearly demonstrate that many of these victims had been targeted by the Israeli army, which the world organization has yet called to respect international law in October 2023.
This war in Gaza, which has now spread to Lebanon, is the will of the government of one man, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who tramples all international conventions and even allows himself to come on September 27 to boast of his military actions against civilians at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, under the pretext of combating terrorism. Yet since the US conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, all reports have shown that indiscriminate war and arbitrary strikes against terrorism are ineffective; on the contrary, they strengthen radical ideologies and amplify the actions of the movements fought. Not to mention that all these indiscriminate attacks against civilians create at least two generations of hatred and resentment against their attackers and their descendants.
Total dehumanization
Since October 2023, the IFJ has increased calls to the United Nations: for a ceasefire to be signed to allow civilian populations to leave the Gaza Strip, a territory of approximately 365 km2, or a third of the surface area. from Paris; so that humanitarian and logistical aid is delivered as close as possible to the populations, including protective equipment for journalists; and for foreign journalists and media workers to enter the enclave to document the war. Nothing happened. The Netanyahu government remains deaf and blind, despite the incessant actions of UN Secretary-General António Guterres. On the contrary, Israel ordered the continuation of strikes by its army, financed mainly by the United States (68%) and Germany (30%).
In terms of media coverage, after the deadly attack on October 7 perpetrated by Hamas in southern Israel which left more than 1,200 dead and 251 hostages, the IFJ urged journalists around the world to respect the truth and to check the facts, after the publication of one of the biggest fake news stories in recent decades on so-called decapitated babies. Since then, debates have raged within the editorial staff. Some fear being accused of being pro-Palestinian; the others to be under the orders of the Hebrew State.
The consequence of this small-time professionalism, a sort of assumed self-censorship, is a total dehumanization of the Palestinian populations who have almost no one, apart from themselves, to tell the story of the daily nightmare that is theirs. When internet connections are authorized or in working order, only publications on the social media platforms of Gazan journalists allow the world to be informed. The vast majority of media around the world are in fact cut off from a reality that escapes them and their only available sources are journalists who are members of the PJS and the IFJ, who take all the risks to film and photograph with their phones. They are the only ones to fulfill their mission of informing on the ground, even though they lack everything and the essentials; the subsistence minimum is sold at a high price on the black market.
On the Israeli side, the dehumanization of Palestinian civilians is orchestrated by the journalists themselves. In an interview with AFP, one of Channel 14’s Israeli journalists, Hallel Bitton-Rosen, bluntly stated that her work focuses on “supporting the fighting forces who protect the country and citizens against vile terrorists who carried out the ‘terrible massacre’. Self-censorship or propaganda?
Fortunately, many journalists worthy of their name professionally assume their mission and relay the work of their sisters and brothers in Gaza, while cross-checking their sources with the official communications of the two belligerents.
Media Solidarity Centers
For their part, the International Federation of Journalists and its member unions raised several hundred thousand euros for journalists in Gaza via its International Security Fund and opened at the end of July a first solidarity center for the media in the south of the enclave, in the Khan Younis region. Even if today the number of centers amounts to two, with the help of UNESCO in particular, it is not much, it must be admitted, but it is the sine qua non condition for journalists from the Gaza Strip continue their mission to inform in relative security.
A few days before the first anniversary of the macabre October 7, the Gaza war will certainly be one conflict too many for the United Nations, as the Second World War was for the League of Nations in 1946. The UN Security Council is totally paralyzed, sclerotic and powerless in the face of an Israeli government which enjoys scandalous impunity. When the dust from the rubble of Gaza has settled, the historians of the 2030s will judge the international community harshly, if we can still speak of a community as it is so divided, and in particular the great global “powers”, in the West and in the World. Arab, who at best issued weak and disconnected statements, at worst financed the arming of the Israeli government. The international community must assume its responsibilities. NOW.
If international justice fulfills its duties, leaders of Israel and Hamas should be in the dock with charges ranging from war crimes to crimes against humanity, but many other political leaders will face trial for complicity in crimes. . “Apart from our sisters and brothers in the IFJ, we no longer expect anything from anyone,” lamented a Palestinian journalist in Gaza in September. “There have been so many deaths that we have nothing left to lose, not even our lives. If hell exists, I think I’m living it right now. It’s a real massacre. You can hardly imagine it.”
