The shroud of silence over Gaza

The press gaggle gathered last month by the Israeli government at the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza could see the concrete walls snaking through the sand and debris dunes, the Israeli watch towers and a couple of army vehicles driving through.

This is as close as foreign journalists have been able to get to Gaza, other than rare trips carefully organized by the Israel Defense Forces into the strip, where journalists are instructed not to speak to any Palestinians — in the unlikely chance that they come across any while surrounded by the Israeli army.

A journalist asks Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Sharren Haskel, why the press is not permitted to enter.

“If I were a reporter, I would check my facts,” she responds, dodging the question.

The journalist pushes back, arguing that that is exactly why the foreign press is demanding access.

“You see Gaza, it’s a very dangerous area,” Haskel counters, without a trace of irony given that the biggest danger to the media in Gaza is Israel. The Committee to Protect Journalists has recorded nearly 200 journalists and media workers killed by Israel since Oct. 7, 2023, with at least two dozen of those killings determined by the committee to be deliberate murders.

Gaza’s journalists don’t just have to dodge death to report. There are often communications blackouts, or telecom systems go down due to a lack of fuel or because fiber lines are cut — generally by Israeli bombings.

Over the summer, for example, telecom teams in Gaza had only just managed to restore connectivity to damaged fiber routes that had cut off Gaza City and the north for nearly a week before the lines in southern and central Gaza took a hit.

But for all their efforts, for all the emotional toll that Palestinian journalists go through, their reporting is often discredited and dismissed, not just by Israel and its supporters but often by their colleagues in the foreign media, stuck on the outside, unable to see for themselves and either unable or unwilling to really push back on Israel’s lines.

Over and over Israeli officials have repeated statements slandering Gaza’s Palestinian press corps, claiming in some cases that they are members of Hamas or rejecting their reporting as biased and calling into question what they are witnessing and risking their lives to share with the rest of the world.

In one such example, Israeli government spokesman David Mercer said in a recent interview on a British TV network: “Every bit of news that comes out of Gaza is controlled by the terrorist organization.” Then he lectured the anchor on how journalists need to verify and do their jobs.

Before Oct. 7, during previous “escalations,” foreign journalists have signed waivers absolving Israel of any responsibility for their safety and security. I myself have done this in my previous journalism work, as a senior correspondent with CNN.

I have been to Gaza four times with my charity, the International Network for Aid, Relief and Assistance, since Oct. 7, before Israel denied me entry earlier this year, with no reason given. It’s worth noting that denials of entry for humanitarian and medical missions are up to 50% and humanitarian organizations are now subjected to vague rhetoric warning them not to “delegitimize Israel” or else risk denial of their staff and aid trucks.

Had the foreign press been permitted to enter Gaza, journalists would have seen what we all see when we’re on the ground there, they would have seen and heard what Palestinian journalists have been reporting all along.

They would have been able to counter Israel’s claim that “Hamas is stealing the aid,” having witnessed themselves the gangs of looters in the “red zone” and understood that they are not and could not be Hamas, out there in the open in an area that is under full Israeli control with drones constantly buzzing overhead.

They would have visited malnutrition centers and hospitals and seen children take their last breaths as their bodies waste away from starvation that Israel continues to claim does not exist even though the U.N.-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification declared a famine as of last month. They would have seen the wasteland of apocalyptic destruction, the pain in people’s eyes, the fear that just ripples through the population.

They would have a firsthand understanding of the absurdity of Israel telling people to evacuate to “safe zones” with fake promises of “shelter, food, water and medical care.”

I had nearly two decades as a journalist reporting from some of the world’s most challenging areas from Syria to Afghanistan, and I have yet to meet a government or regime that denies journalists entry when it has nothing to hide.

It’s not that we don’t know what is happening in Gaza; we do know, from Palestinian journalists’ reports. But Israel’s narrative is lent more credibility than those of people who are living through and witnessing it themselves. This is hardly a new phenomenon; for decades Palestinians have been systematically dehumanized, their journalistic work dismissed. That perspective does permeate the perspective of many in the foreign — especially the Western — press corps.

If they were allowed to enter, what they would see within minutes would take a sledgehammer to assumptions about Palestinian journalists and to the credibility of the Israeli narrative.

Arwa Damon, a former senior international correspondent for CNN, is the founder of the International Network for Aid, Relief and Assistance and the director of the documentary “Seize the Summit.” X: @IamArwaDamon