After more than 100 days of covering the Israeli military offensive in Gaza, veteran Palestinian journalist Wael Dahdouh, local bureau chief of Qatari network Al Jazeera, left the Strip via the Rafah border crossing with Egypt on Tuesday to seek treatment . Doctor to Qatar. The reporter, who was injured in an Israeli attack in December, has become a journalistic reference in the Arab world in recent months. At the age of 53, his personal ordeal has made him a symbol and reflection of the suffering and tenacity of journalists in the Gaza Strip and the rest of the population of the Palestinian enclave.
“Before the last three months and also during these months, Wael Dahdouh, along with many of our journalists, was a symbol of the attitude of the Palestinians in the face of a genocidal campaign against them, against their voices, against their presence and against its very existence,” says Anan Quzmar, a member of the Palestinian Union of Journalists based in the occupied West Bank city of Tulkarem.
Born into a wealthy family in Gaza City in 1970, Dahdouh began his journalistic career as a reporter for local media before making the leap to Al Jazeera in 2004, where he reported under the strict blockade of the Gaza Strip and four previous devastating Israeli military operations Report chain information. During his youth, Dahdouh spent seven years in prison by Israeli authorities, who arrested him while he was still in high school for participating in the first Intifada (1987-1993). He wanted to study medicine abroad, but Israel's refusal caused him to focus on journalism.
In these three months, Dahdouh has given voice to the cruel daily life in Gaza. In October, an Israeli attack on the Nuseirat refugee camp in the center of the Gaza Strip hit the house where his family lived, killing his 44-year-old wife, two of his children, ages 7 and 15, and a grandson who was less than two months old was old, as Al Jazeera reports. Like so many others in Nuseirat, Dahdouh's family had sought refuge there after leaving their home in Gaza City under orders from the Israeli army to leave the northern strip. Four other children of the journalist, who was still alive at the time of the news, were injured, one of whom had to undergo emergency surgery. The attack killed eight other members of Dahdouh's family circle, who said after the tragedy that this was “the safe zone the occupying army was talking about.”
In mid-December, Dahdouh and cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa, a Belgian-Palestinian journalist who also worked for Al Jazeera, were injured by an Israeli missile believed to have been fired from a drone, the Committee for the Protection of Human Rights reported. Journalists, a US-based organization. Both covered damage from an earlier Israeli attack on a UN school housing internally displaced people in Khan Younis, south of Gaza. Al Jazeera assured that Abu Daqqa, who died shortly afterwards, could not be evacuated from the area immediately because Israeli forces had surrounded the area and prevented rapid access of doctors to treat the wounded. Dahdouh was hit by shrapnel in his right hand and hip.
In early January, another Israeli airstrike on a vehicle in Khan Younis killed another of Dahdouh's sons, Hamza, and an Al Jazeera journalist. The attack also killed videographer Mostafa Thuraya, who worked with foreign media such as the AFP agency. The Israeli army offered different (and contradictory) versions of the motive for the attack, even accusing the reporters of belonging to two Palestinian armed groups. Relatives, colleagues and press freedom groups rejected the Israeli story. And Al Jazeera claimed that the two journalists killed were on their way home after reporting on the aftermath of an airstrike when their vehicle was hit.
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without restrictions.
Subscribe to
Al Jazeera correspondent Wael al Dahdouh is treated at a hospital in Gaza after being injured in an Israeli attack on December 15. – (AFP)
Despite the beatings of the Israeli army, Dahdouh continued his work to portray the grim situation in the Gaza Strip. After praying at several relatives' funerals in October, the reporter said his “duty” was to return to work as quickly as possible. “As you can see, the bombing continues,” he reasoned. After his son Hamza's murder, Dahdouh admitted to American broadcaster NBC that “the costs are very high,” but added that quitting his job in the midst of a humanitarian crisis was “definitely not an option.”
“Dahdouh was personally attacked, his family was attacked and killed, and despite all this he continued to report, which is what made him a target in the first place,” said Quzmar of the Palestinian Journalists Union. “He spoke for all Palestinians, not just journalists, when he said they will be killed twice: once by bombs and the other time by silence and complicity.” [exterior] with the genocide of the people of Gaza,” he added.
Since the beginning of the Israeli military offensive on Gaza and until Thursday, the Committee to Protect Journalists had provisionally documented the murder of at least 76 Palestinian media workers and journalists. The organization has pointed out that the first ten weeks of the escalation of the ongoing conflict were also the deadliest period for journalists since data collection began in 1992.
The Israeli military has a long history of murdering journalists who are not under investigation or whose investigations are not published. Before the offensive, the Committee to Protect Journalists had documented at least 20 cases in which reporters were killed by the Israeli army for which no one was held responsible. One of the cases that caused the greatest outrage was the killing of veteran Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed by Israeli forces in 2022 while covering a military incursion into the occupied West Bank. His death caused great excitement and was followed by one of the longest and most attended funerals in the history of Palestine.
After leaving Gaza via the Rafah border crossing in Egypt, Dahdouh told Egyptian broadcaster Al Qahera News that he planned to return to work once he received medical treatment in Qatar. “God willing, all efforts will culminate in the restoration of the rights of the Palestinian people and the end of these wars and suffering,” he said.
Wael al Dahdouh carries the body of one of his sons, who died along with his wife and another of his daughters in an Israeli bombardment in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza on October 25. MAJDI FATHI (AFP)
Follow all international information on Facebook and Xor in our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_