Israel’s Backers Play Blind, Deaf and Dumb While Journalists Pay With Blood in Gaza

The world awoke on Sunday January 7, 2024 at the start of the third month of Israel’s latest war on Palestine, not to the expected sum-total of deaths, destruction and displacement after 13 weeks of relentless carpet-bombing of Gaza, but to the sad news that yet-another two Palestinian journalists were killed.

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This time it was Hamza Al Dahdouh, son of Al Jazeera News Network’s Gaza Bureau Chief Wael Al Dahdouh and AFP journalist Mustapha Thuraya, close friends and colleagues who died side-by-side, killed by a drone attack while driving to an assignment.

The targeted killing brought to 109 Palestinian journalists and media workers killed while bringing the truth on Gaza to light.

Wael and the Al Dahdouh family had already lost Hamza’s mother, sister, brother and nephew -- killed together last October, soon after relocating, under Israeli evacuation orders, to a supposedly ‘safe’ zone.

The father-and-son team and the hundreds of other journalists, covered the war and its effects from Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and other occupied Palestinian territories.

The Al Jazeera bureau chief had earlier lost his wife and daughter, son and grandson – and now his eldest son – and retrieved other dead members of his extended family, by hand, from under rubble of their bombed home. 

Wael had encouraged Hamza -- his first child -- to pursue a university course in journalism, after which they proudly worked, with other Arab colleagues, to cover the continuing Palestinian horror story – until Hamza’s assassination.

The senior Al Dahdouh has covered Gaza for over two decades and was also recently injured on duty by Israeli bombardments.

Other Al Jazeera colleagues killed thus far include Samer Abu Daqqa, who died after an Israeli attack on a school, while another lost 21 family members also killed by aerial bombardments by night in another supposedly ‘safe’ zone.

But despite losing so many family members in just three months, Wael remains totally committed to continuing in what he proudly describes as the journalist’s “humanitarian mission” of pursuing the truth under all and any circumstances.

Addressing the world’s press minutes after the newsman and his son became the latest story, the mourning father said Hamza was “The soul of my soul” and his were filled with“tears of farewell and sorrow, of humanity and dignity, but not of fear or defeat…” He said he and all other Palestinian journalists had “chosen this road consciously” and while they paid the ultimate price in blood, “we will continue working...”

According to the grieving Al Jazeera bureau chief, “I am bidding farewell to my son like everyone else has been doing every day, hour and minute since October 7,” but insisted their work will continue, no matter the cost.

Wael appealed to “the international community” to do more to restrain Israel’s slaughtering of Palestinians in Gaza and other occupied territories, while hoping his son Hamza “will be the last journalist killed and the last bloodshed in Gaza…”

But journalists aren’t the only ones losing entire families overnight in Gaza.

On the same day Hamza was killed, a group of eight more Palestinians was killed in the Jenin refugee camp -- including four brothers from an extended family -- while warming themselves around an outside fire on that cold winter’s night. 

On the morning Hamza and Mustapha were killed, the statistics of death and destruction in Palestine were terrible:

• 23,000 Palestinians killed (255 daily)
• 9,600 children dead (106 daily) 
• 7,200 women killed (80 daily) 
• 325 Palestinians killed and 5,630 detained in the Occupied West Bank
• 324 health workers killed
• 142 United Nations staff dead
• 8,000 missing under rubble (most feared dead) 
• 20,000 children made orphans and 10,000 with permanent life injuries
• 1.1 million children, including babies, facing malnutrition
• 155,000 pregnant and breastfeeding mothers underfed; and
• 2.3 million Gazans without access to water, food, medicine and electricity in the middle of winter.

All of this has played-out 24/7 in the eyes of the world in the past three months, as Gaza was quickly turned into a ‘No Man’s Land’ where no one is safe anywhere and manmade famine is looming over an entire population deprived of daily necessities for 90+ days.

Yet there’s been a deafening silence from the international media and journalists of the world, who normally shout loudly about allegations of human rights violations and violating freedoms of Western journalists in developing nations.  
      
Compare the silence on Gaza and Palestine to world’s response to the Ukraine War, where state actors manipulate information flows to justify continuation of another bloody war.

Billions of U.S. dollars and Euros that can help heal humanity’s hurts continue being poured into Ukraine and Israel, as Western nations support prolongation of an unsustainable mission in Europe and another brutal and costly fight against an invisible enemy -- with impossible objectives -- in Palestine.

As the bombs continued raining on Gaza on the same day the latest journalists were killed, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken arrived in Qatar on his fifth mission to the region since October, to discuss various plans, options and conditions for another longer or permanent ceasefire and possible total prisoner exchange -- which Israel insists will never happen.

Meanwhile, the killing continues while talks continue in frozen spaces and the war heats-up inside Gaza, on the West Bank, on Israel’s borders with Lebanon and Syria – and in the Red Sea – with every sign of expansion to possibly affect and/or involve Turkey, Egypt and Jordan, Yemen and Iran and other players in the Axis of Resistance that also includes Hezbollah, Houthis and several other pro-Palestinian armed factions in the region, before cessation.

And -- as Palestinian and Arab journalists have been commenting from the beginning of the latest war on their homeland -- Israel continues collective punishment with impunity, in the process killing the messengers to stifle the message, while its supporters on the global stage continue to play blind, deaf and dumb.