Palestinian journalists reported independently under siege; Western media failed to centre them

Palestinian journalists have reported independently under siege for years, many killed doing so. Calls for international access risk implying independence was absent. The record already exists.

For over two years, the Israeli government has “refused to allow journalists into Gaza to report independently”.

That is, according to Jeremy Diamond of CNN, who along with others is supporting a petition by the Foreign Press Association calling for Israel to let international journalists into Gaza.

Journalists have been reporting in Gaza throughout.

Palestinian journalists have been reporting independently and continuously under siege, centring Palestinian testimony and respecting the tenets of journalism, risking their own lives to do so. Most of them, in their hundreds, have since been killed by Israel.

International journalists entering Gaza matter. But do not suggest you are arriving to verify what has already been documented at the cost of lives, families and homes. The record exists. Palestinian journalists told you in real time, through tears of rage and the worst personal and collective losses imaginable.

Your employers could have commissioned and platformed Gaza’s own reporters, as networks such as Al Jazeera have consistently done, recruiting trained journalists living inside Gaza. Anas Al Sharif is one of those journalists, among many well-known names. They did not need access to Gaza to platform Gaza.

They chose not to centre Palestinian journalists. This reflects a refusal to trust them to tell their own stories.

The BBC has been accused of suppressing Palestinian voices and downplaying the extent of atrocities committed in Gaza while crimes against humanity escalated.

CNN’s Clarissa Ward is among those international journalists who repeated Israeli allegations, which were later found to be untrue, and contributed to a climate in which further attacks on Gaza were seen as justified.

But that test is rarely applied to the international press, who are assumed to be neutral in every circumstance.

It is hard to assume they will report responsibly now that Gaza is all but devastated. Access now does not erase the record that already exists.

Sections of the foreign press are complicit in these crimes by reporting only what Israel told them and by playing down what Palestinian journalists and health care workers were testifying to live on camera.

Gaza’s journalists were being killed on the frontline, alongside their families. They swore to keep reporting. They published their wills fully expecting to be targeted. These were young people. Meanwhile, sections of the foreign press were minimising and manufacturing consent, and now switch to the line “to report independently”.

Independence is assumed when the passport is Western.

Stand with them. Protect them. Amplify those who died to tell the truth. You are not arriving to authenticate their suffering. Their genocide is written in their own blood.

“War correspondence” often frames conflict as theatre, the next posting, the next front line. For Gaza’s journalists this has never been an assignment. It is their lives and deaths, on the front lines of a story they never wanted to cover.

Every award, every accolade, every professional advancement attached to this story belongs first to the journalists of Gaza. No one else.