Al Jazeera journalist Wael Al-Dahdouh at the funeral of his son Hamza on 7 January [photo: Rabea Abu Naqira]
The Israelis claim,
without providing evidence, that the strike on the car Hanza was in was
aimed at a “terrorist” who they say "operated an aircraft (a drone) in a
way that put IDF forces at risk.” The IDF described Hamza and his
fellow journalist as “suspects.” At the funeral of his son Wael
al-Dahdouh (who was himself wounded and his cameraman killed in an IDF airstrike last month) said this:
Hamza was not just part of me. He was the whole of me. He was the
soul of my soul. These are tears of sadness, of loss. These are tears
of humanity. I call on the world to look closely at what's happening in
Gaza.
Though Israel denies it, what is happening in Gaza is a deliberate
effort to conceal the numerous atrocities being committed by the IDF
against civilians as it prosecutes its war on Hamas. Only very rarely
have the Israelis allowed Western journalists into the Strip, the most
recent being in mid-December when the CNN’s Clarissa Ward filmed at a UAE-sponsored field hospital in Rafah. The BBC’s Lucy Williamson, the corporation’s Paris correspondent embedded
with the Israeli army in November as the IDF attempted to shore up
claims, subsequently proven false, that Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City
was a Hamas command centre.
In response to the killing of Hamza al-Dahdouh and his colleague
Mustafa Thuraya Mark Regev a former Israeli ambassador to the UK and
currently a senior advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the BBC:
We're the only country in the Middle East that actually does have
a free press. We're the only country in the entire region where the
press can write bad things and criticise the leaders of government. To
say Israel deliberately targets the press is ridiculous.
Regev’s bald assertion, as with so many other claims made by the
Israelis in this war, is at odds with reality. Reporters Without Borders
(RSF) in commenting on the killing of the Reuters video journalist
Issam Abdullah in Southern Lebanon 13 October noted.
Two strikes in the same place in such a short space of time (just
over 30 seconds), from the same direction, clearly indicate precise
targeting.
It is unlikely that the journalists were mistaken for combatants,
especially as they were not hiding: in order to have a clear field of
vision, they had been in the open for more than an hour, on the top of a
hill. They were wearing helmets and bullet-proof waistcoats marked
‘press’. Their car was also identified as ‘press’ thanks to a marking on
the roof, according to witnesses.
His killing has echoes of the shooting of Shireen Abu-Akleh the
distinguished American-Palestinian journalist shot by an IDF sniper on
11 May 2022. The IDF sought to place blame for her death on militant
gunmen and it was only after independent analysis and eye witness
accounts disproved that claim did the Israelis grudgingly a year later
offer an apology.
No one has been held accountable for what the IDF now says was an
accidental shooting. Abu-Akleh was wearing a helmet and a
high-visibility press flak jacket and standing with colleagues when she
was shot and killed.
The killing of journalists in the Gaza war has drawn no response from the UK government. Rather what is exercising Tory grandees
is the take-over bid of the Telegraph titles by Abu Dhabi’s ruling
Al-Nahyan family. That is a proposal so galling that people like Sir
Iain Duncan Smith have been moved to criticise the UAE as a state that
as he put it in a 5 January interview on the Today programme “doesn’t
have a great record on press freedom and a very poor record on human
rights. No title,” he proffered “should come under the influence of a
foreign government.”
No journalists should be killed for reporting the facts as they find
them. More than 70 have already died in the Gaza war for simply
attempting to do just that. You can find the CPJ's list of slain
journalists here.