Six journalists were killed in Gaza in a targeted attack on a press tent near Al-Shifa Hospital. They were not collateral damage: they were deliberately targeted, according to international organizations, for exercising their right—and ours—to report. Their deaths join nearly 200 journalists murdered in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war, an unprecedented massacre.
In a detail as revealing as it is disturbing, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said that the “evidence” justifying the attack that killed six journalists is classified. The opacity is total: journalists die, “believe the evidence we have, but we don’t show it.”
While silencing those who testify to reality, Israel is discussing with South Sudan the possibility of “transferring” Palestinians from Gaza to that conflict-torn African country. It is part of a broader effort to facilitate mass “emigration.” For a financially impoverished South Sudan, any alliance (Israel, the United States), economic benefits, and diplomatic security are welcome.
Many Palestinians wish to leave temporarily to escape war and a famine on the brink of catastrophe, but they unanimously reject permanent resettlement outside their homeland. They fear that Israel will never allow their return and will take advantage of a massive exodus to annex Gaza and advance Jewish settlements—illegal under international law. Still, even those who want to leave are unlikely to risk living in one of the most unstable and dangerous countries in the world.
These murdered journalists were direct witnesses to this humanitarian catastrophe and the existential dilemmas facing the people of Gaza. In the centerfolds of today’s edition, we give voice to Abdulrahman and Hadeel, the couple behind the account @Two_Gazans, which shows the world, through social media, the extreme hunger, water shortages, and desperation experienced in the enclave. The life they describe—cooking with plastic and old clothes, choosing between watering crops and drinking water, watching bodies collapse from lack of nutrients—is precisely the kind of reality that journalists like those who were killed documented.
In a recent interview, Netanyahu declared that he felt he was on a “historic and spiritual mission” to build Greater Israel—the Zionist thesis of territorial expansion and sovereignty over Palestine and parts of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt.
This ethnic supremacism, marginalization, and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people is Netanyahu’s true ultimate goal: religious expansionism, no matter the cost. And that says everything about what we see happening every day in Palestine. And without journalists, it becomes much easier.
* Editor-in-Chief of PLATAFORMA
