On the Ground in Gaza

Covering war as a journalist is always dangerous. Reporting on the war raging in the Middle East is particularly treacherous, though. Journalists face incredible challenges on the ground in Gaza but also struggle with the fog of war and clouds of grief that loom over this bloody conflict.

photo by Craig Manners

I experience the war through the eyes of Marwan Athamneh who manages the Jerusalem bureau of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN), where I am chairman of the board. Every day Athamneh monitors the conditions of MBN journalists in Gaza, the West Bank, the northern and southern borders of Israel and the conditions in Jerusalem, where tensions between Arab citizens of Israel and Israelis run high. When he can get to the office, Athamneh runs studios for Alhurra, the main MBN broadcast outlet that airs its reports in Arabic. He also struggles to keep up with the logistical needs of MBN war correspondents.   

The MBN is funded by a grant from the U.S. Congress to promote something rare in the region -- fair and balanced news coverage for the Middle East and North Africa in their own language. The MBN, which openly discloses its ties to America, is often viewed -- wrongly -- as a mouthpiece for the State Department, a perception that can be deadly, particularly in war zones like the West Bank and Gaza, where it has reporters and cameramen.   

With his periodic reports, Athamneh gives me a rare view of the war on the ground and the dual perils MBN journalists face covering a dangerous story while struggling to ensure the safely of their families – wives, husbands, children and other relatives who live in a place under the relentless bomb and missile attacks from both sides of the conflict.

“Our people in Gaza are working in very hostile environments,” he tells me. Logistical challenges complicate their jobs. “Due to the lack of fuel, our crew car in Gaza ran out of gas and there’s no place in Gaza where you can find some.” He is working to find some transportation options. Meanwhile, MBN reporters, like all journalists in a war zone, improvise. They travel around to film stories, hitching rides with other media outlets that can still use their cars and seeking refuge in churches or hospitals considered, at times erroneously, safe places to write, rest and sleep. At times, one of the male reporters sleeps in the car while his colleague sleeps outside in a tent with many other journalists. When the MBN’s female reporter in Gaza stays for the night, she sleeps in the car.   

MBN journalists have more on their minds than personal safety. Athamneh told me of the significant hurdles they’ve encountered moving their families to safer quarters. One reporter, Saif A Souiti, went to Gaza City as the Israelis pounded it with bombs. “He moved his family to a ‘safer’ place close to Khan Youis, in the central part of Gaza and south of the line that made by Israel to divide the strip into two parts.,” Athamneh says.

Another, Wessam Yassin, also moved her son to Khan Youis. She goes to see him at night and then returns to resume coverage of the war. “She works very hard with long hours under much stress,” he says. “She leaves during the nights to join her boy and her family” living in houses crammed with fifty to a hundred people since there’s no other place for them to stay. “And these are the lucky people,” Althamneh says. ”Amir, our cameraman, took his family to Rafah, the most southern part of Gaza,” he says, “and tries to get there every three to four days to check on his family and kids.” Cell phone service in Gaza now is spotty at best.

Tharwat Abedal Rahim Harbi Shaqrah, a thirty-five-year-old single MBN journalist, covers the occupied territories in the West Bank. Her family worries about her safety but she rarely turns down assignments and works in a region where Jewish settlers stage increasingly violent attacks on Palestinians.

Athamneh also monitors coverage of the war by other news organizations where the fog of war creeps across the news landscape creating  malicious misinformation and misperceptions, forcing journalists to sift fact from fiction as bombs drop and war rages around them.

“I keep moving between the Israeli and the Arab channels,” Athamneh tells me, “and it seems like two different matters or two different wars. If you see the Israeli side, you may feel that Hamas occupied Israel. And if you follow Aljazeera Arabic, you feel that Israel killed every single Palestinian in Gaza City.”

Some of the reporting by MBN and other news organizations is truly heartbreaking. The Daily, a podcast by the New York Times, interviewed three doctors working in working in Gaza who described what the war looks like from inside a hospital. The report was gut-wrenching. One of the doctors told of amputating the foot of a ten-year-old boy. Harrowing tales of children orphaned by the war brought one doctor to tears. MBN reporters had stayed at that hospital but have since moved on to another.  

Equally disturbing and dangerous are the charges and countercharges each side in the war lobs at the other trying to evade responsibility for the carnage.

Israel, understandably, feels it us under an existential threat that started when Hamas on October seventh staged its brutal attack, murdering about twelve hundred innocent people. The militants still hold two-hundred and forty hostages in its network of tunnels under hospitals and schools, deliberately making the sick, elderly, women and children targets for Israeli bombs. There are some reports that a hostage exchange is in the works.

Palestinians, for equally good reasons, see an existential threat to their future. Besides the relentless bombing campaign that has killed some eleven thousand people in Gaza, Israeli Settlers in the West Bank, armed and enabled by Israel’s right-wing government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, obviously want to violently drive the Palestinians from their homes and land, something that has happened before in the volatile politics of the Holy Land. As one Palestinian said to me: “They don’t understand. Palestinians will never leave our land again.” 

Meanwhile, the rhetoric continues to heat up. The Netanyahu government seems to have no plan or exit strategy for the war other than its’ vow to destroy Hamas at any cost and to label as antisemitic anyone who criticizes Israel’s motives.

There’s no question that a deplorable wave of antisemitism is on the rise around the world. But more bigotry and hatred, regardless of its source, will not end a war that is taking a huge human toll. In fact, some Israelis think the bombs should stop falling before the campaign creates more of the antisemitism that stirs fear in their hearts.  

“To my fellow Jewish people: the actions of the State of Israel are being committed in the name of our preservation worldwide,” Jason Stanley, a Yale University philosophy professor whose family includes many Holocaust victims wrote in the Guardian. “It is incumbent on those of us who are Jewish to clearly and openly call for a halt to Israel’s assault on Gaza. If we do not succeed in stopping the bombing, our children and grandchildren are at risk of inheriting a double identity: not just as targets of mass killings of civilians but also as those who stood by when mass killings were committed in their names.”

As the days pass with no relief in sight, the danger increases that the war will expand beyond Gaza and into other potentially volatile areas like Lebanon. Already, America has moved aircraft carrier groups into the region to deter attacks from Iran and one Israeli defense minister threatened to attack Beirut if Hezbollah stages attacks beyond the limited forays it has already staged on Israel’s northern border.

The New York Times reported that some four hundred government officials signed a letter protesting America’s unqualified support of Israel, although the Biden administration is ratcheting up pressure for a ceasefire. None of this helps the MBN reporters on the ground, though.  

Athamneh prays his MBN colleagues will not become victims of a war that shows few signs of easing. He says he keeps questioning them about their safety. “I kept asking them if it’s safe to go out of the Nasser Medical Center,” where they were staying and where they witnessed a lot of bad and difficult scenes. “For two days during the last week,” he says, “I lost connection with them while there were very heavy airstrikes all over the Gaza Strip, including around the medical center. It was so terrifying, and I couldn’t sleep. When I told my wife about it, our kid, Ibrahim, heard me. And the next day before he left for school, he asked me: ‘Did you succeed in talking to your friends in Gaza? Are they OK? I pray for them to be safe.’”   

—James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.

Any opinions or observations in this blog are purely those of the author and do not represent the official positions of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN) or of the U.S. State Department’s Agency for Global Media, which administers federal grants to the MBN.