The unbearable task of reporting on Gaza while my colleagues get killed around me

Traumatized and weary, journalists in Gaza file stories between airstrikes, capturing what remains of lives and landscapes before they, too, are erased.

When Israel resumed airstrikes on Gaza on March 18, Amna Asfour, a 36-year-old mother of four in Khan Younis, was jolted awake by a deafening explosion. “My son clung to my arm and whispered, ‘Mama, is it starting again?’” she recounted. During the brief pause in attacks following the January ceasefire, she had dared to hope that her children might sleep without fear. But reality set in quickly that night. “I tell them again: Sleep in your shoes. Keep your bag by the door, though I don’t know where else to go after we’ve already fled four times.”

For 15 months, Palestinians in Gaza have endured relentless bombardment, starvation and displacement. When a ceasefire finally arrived on Jan. 19, it merely offered a brief, fragile pause to bury the dead, tend to the wounded, and cling to the remnants of life before it was disrupted. In Gaza, the expectation of devastation is as constant as breathing.

I covered the first phase of this war from the ground before I fled Gaza for my family’s and my safety. Now, reporting from Cairo as airstrikes continue to fall with unimaginable intensity, I see that for those still on the ground, there is no safety or calm, only the certainty that every lull is merely the prelude to even more destruction.

Even with reports of a new ceasefire deal on the horizon, this latest return of airstrikes has felt more like a confirmation that no pause will ever lead to lasting peace. And the deepening psychological toll — a burden that now rests on the ashes of over a year of agony and terror — means the fear of death or injury has become secondary to the slow erosion of hope.

By the weekend, more than 750 people had been killed — most of them women and children — while hundreds more were wounded. After Israel broke the ceasefire, health officials reported the death toll in Gaza since the war began in October 2023 surpassed 50,000.

For Palestinian journalists, reporting on this war is both a professional duty and an act of survival.

On March 24, the IDF killed two more Palestinian journalists: Al Jazeera Mubasher correspondent Hossam Shabat and Palestine Today reporter Mohammed Mansour. Shabat was killed when his car was targeted in Beit Lahiya, while Mansour died in a bombing that struck his apartment in Khan Younis. The IDF confirmed both killings, claiming both journalists were terrorists. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the deaths and denied that claim, a spokesperson stating, “The deliberate and targeted killing of a journalist, of a civilian, is a war crime.” Al Jazeera had denied earlier claims that Shabat was a terrorist.

Their deaths add to the staggering toll of journalists and media workers killed in the war — more than 200 since October 2023, according to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate — as those who remain continue risking their lives to document the unfolding devastation.

The targeting of media workers in Gaza has been routine. Press vehicles, clearly marked as such, have been struck by Israeli forces, and shelters housing displaced civilians and journalists have not been spared. We’ve seen numerous reports of journalists being personally targeted and threatened by the Israeli military.

Despite these relentless attacks, journalists in Gaza continue to do their job. Abdelhakim Abu Riash, a freelance photojournalist in northern Gaza, says he is “running out of places to report from — and of colleagues to report with.” But stopping isn’t an option, he says, “because then there would be no one to tell the world what’s happening.”

Sulaiman Hijjy, another photojournalist who has been reporting from Gaza, has grown accustomed to this grim reality. Since the airstrikes resumed less than two weeks ago, he found himself reliving the earliest days of the conflict. “For 15 months, I have filmed mass graves, bombed-out neighborhoods, entire families erased in a single airstrike,” he recalled.

“When the ceasefire came, I thought maybe I could breathe.” But there was no relief. Now, Hijjy files stories between airstrikes, capturing what remains of lives and landscapes before they, too, are erased.

The names of our fallen colleagues like Hossam, Mohammed and so many others before them should be voices that echo in newsrooms, not carved into gravestones.

Even reporting from afar, the images of death don’t haunt me as a distant horror; they are a daily reality for me and thousands who remain in Gaza. They remind me that even as I report, I am also mourning. Documenting all of this means standing at the edge of life and loss, and continuing to write even when the world reads our words yet refuses to act. Carrying out this work is to ask, time and again, whether anything we say will ever be enough to break the world’s indifference.

Journalists aren’t the only ones fighting for life and dignity in Gaza. Dr. Yasser Shami, a surgeon at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, described the nearly impossible conditions of providing care in a hospital stripped of resources. “For two months, we tried to prepare,” he recalled. “We had no real supplies, but at least patients weren’t pouring in every minute.”

The current situation in his hospital’s emergency room is even “worse than before,” he says. He recently had to amputate a 9-year-old boy’s leg with no anesthesia. He says the “little boy screamed until he passed out,” before he moved on to the next patient. “I don’t think we’re even allowed the time to grieve here,” he said.

Each day, Shami faces impossible choices: who receives the last dose of antibiotics, who gets the only available ventilator, who might have a chance with urgent care, and who is already beyond saving. There is no proper triage — only a cruel calculus of survival dictated by scarcity.

According to a United Nations report from last December, 136 Israeli strikes on hospitals in Gaza pushed the health care system to the brink of collapse. This dismantling of Gaza’s health infrastructure means that even those who survive the bombs may not survive their wounds.

Medics, surgeons and journalists alike continue to press on, despite ongoing bombardments and the dimming prospect of lasting peace.

Every day, those journalists who have managed somehow to survive pick up their cameras, notebooks and microphones, even when they know they could be next.​ We grieve for those we’ve lost, yet we dare not stop — we owe it to them to keep telling the stories of those who can no longer speak for themselves.

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An original version of this report was first published by the author in MSNBC.