Wael al-Dahdouh: ‘Gaza's journalists are forced to tread on our pain, and go out and report’

Al Jazeera correspondent Wael al-Dahdouh’s family was killed in an Israeli airstrike on a refugee camp at the start of the war; he received the news when he was live on air. At the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, on 18 April, he spoke as part of a panel on covering war and conflict, where he vividly relived the experience of finding his family’s bodies, the shock of his grief, and his determination to go back to work. His remarks, translated from Arabic and edited, are presented here in the form of a monologue

This is the hardest task – the most difficult – that any journalist who has lived through the experience we lived through in Gaza can face.

The hesitation comes from how to speak in your own voice about your own personal suffering. Our role as journalists is always to describe the suffering of others, the pain of others, the sorrow of others. But to inhabit that role and speak as the person describing your own pain, your own suffering, the suffering of your family, the people closest and most precious to you – that is, without question, an extremely difficult task.

Imagine you are a journalist. Your entire concern is to cover events to the highest standard, professionally, according to every benchmark in the world. And then suddenly you find that the world around you has completely stopped and everything has collapsed.

You leave your family the moment war begins and you go out to cover it – but the war never leaves you. And so suddenly, live on air while you are speaking, you hear that your family has been targeted, that there are martyrs and wounded, and it is required of you to deal with this, live on air.

I remember that evening well, when I received the news. I went to the place where my family had taken shelter. I found the place destroyed – pitch darkness, the smell of blood, the smell of gunpowder. People wandering, not knowing. I asked: who was killed? Who survived? Who was wounded? No one could give me an answer that could bring comfort. 

I remember that as I searched through the rubble, I found the body of my infant grandson, Adam, six months old. I picked him up and wished that he were still alive. I tried to give him artificial respiration, but he had already died – and yet I still dreamed that he might breathe again. I rushed to the ambulance and asked them to try resuscitation, hoping he might wake. But sadly, that dream was out of reach. They told me clearly that he had died, like the rest of the family.

Then I began to ask: where is my wife? Where is my son? Where is my daughter? Where are the relatives? Where are the friends? Nothing. Nothing at all. And, sadly, I faced the bitter truth. I found them in a tent set aside for the bodies of the martyrs.

Perhaps one of the simple points I still feel heartache over – one of the things that will stay with me – is that my wife, just days before this happened, had come to me in tears. She said to me, word for word: "Come back to us. We need you. And if we die, we must die together."

But sadly I could not fulfil that wish for her. And even when I went to find her, I could not fulfil that wish – or my own wish – not even in her death. Because I found her in pieces. No features, nothing. They had wrapped her in a sheet or a blanket. I could not look. I could not take a last look at her face.

This criminality did not just rob us of life – it robbed us even of a farewell glance at the face of a life's companion, and of our children. And that, perhaps – that pain – will certainly stay with us for the rest of our lives.

How can a journalist like me – whose entire purpose is to cover events to the highest level of professionalism – suddenly be punished by the Israeli occupation army? 

It is certainly a hard reality, and answering it is even harder. How do you deal with it as a journalist, as a human being, as a person existing in this place that is isolated from the world and being destroyed? I felt that everything – past, present, future, history, geography, culture, heritage – was truly destroyed in that moment.

But as a journalist who believes deeply in his work and its importance, I was compelled to answer that question – to answer that challenge that Israel wanted to impose on me, and, through me, on all our colleagues in Gaza. And so we were forced to tread upon our hearts and our feelings, to tread upon our pain, and to act as if we were made of stone, as if we were machines that feel nothing, grieve nothing, suffer nothing – and go out to report as if nothing had happened. This is the most difficult task that any human being or journalist can carry out in wartime.

When I decided to continue reporting – after burying my family and relatives – I said to my children, with a harshness that was unlike me: "My children, I am going to continue reporting. Either you come with me, or you stay in the hospital – and God be with you. Whatever happens, happens. I will report no matter the consequences, even if it costs me my life."

The word of strength, the word of determination I received from them – at the moment they needed a father's presence most, a father's tenderness, a father's strength – was: "Father, go – and we are with you. Either we all die, or we all live."

You can imagine what I was thinking about at that moment. Believe me — after I decided to continue, I thought: how will I look on television? Will I appear weak, emotionally shaken? Or will I be the consummate professional who leaves no room and no opportunity for the occupier — who killed my family — to question the professionalism of our coverage? And in fact, if any of you had seen me in that moment when I returned to the screen, you would have said that nothing had happened.

But I was determined to deliver the message in full, and to respond to this unparalleled challenge with an even greater one — in keeping with my professionalism, my humanity, and my journalism.

The experience of a journalist in Gaza is different from that of journalists anywhere else in the world. For those who don't know, Gaza is a very small enclave – 365 square kilometres. It has two gates: one into Egypt and one into occupied Israel. It is surrounded by walls, barbed wire, and, to the west, the sea. Israel boasted throughout this period that it could control precisely how much food entered Gaza – calculated in calories to keep the population alive. That was its boast.

Gaza had been under siege for nearly 20 years before this war – this war of annihilation. And so when this war began, Israel closed the gates, cut electricity, cut water, began destroying homes on top of their residents, and banned foreign journalists from entering Gaza to report alongside us – so that there would be no witnesses to the war crimes being committed.

This certainly made us feel great danger – I will not hide that – but it also gave us an immense responsibility and a great challenge: the necessity of pressing forward to break the siege Israel had imposed, and to keep the world connected to every event taking place inside this besieged, isolated enclave.

And when Israel began targeting journalists alongside civilians, it added another layer of challenge. But our position was clear: there is no safe place in Gaza. No tent, no home, no hospital, no school, nowhere. And so there was no escape for us but to press forward in carrying out our duty, professionally.

At that time, we felt we were acting on behalf of the entire world in our work as journalists – on behalf of our colleagues around the world, on behalf of all of you – to secure humanity's right to know what was happening in Gaza.

This certainly added enormous burdens to us. But in return, we felt that these sacrifices, this price – that the world, and first among them our journalist colleagues and press institutions, should meet it with a form of reciprocity, a return of the favour if that’s the right expression: solidarity, engagement, and far greater action than we saw.

But the truth is, we sometimes felt the world had left us on our own – watching as we were targeted and killed, us and our families. This hurt us deeply. We were expecting colleagues to take steps: to pressure unions, press guilds, parliaments, governments, and the United Nations, to stop this genocide.

This genocide – yes, we are living through it. But truth itself is also being annihilated. Journalism, the message of journalism, the human values of journalism, the human values we all share despite our different colours and languages – those are what are being annihilated. We were messengers of truth and messengers of humanity. We were trying to defend those things.

Some steps were taken, but they never came close to what we hoped for – what we expected from humanity, and certainly from our colleagues.

We need stronger action to ensure accountability for those who commit these violations. Most of the criminals currently enjoy impunity. But we still document these violations, because we are building a foundation for justice in the future. It is hard to say that right now. But journalists need to be safe, and to have legal support. Solidarity is critical at this time.

During this war, Israel tried to target journalists – and succeeded. As it did so, it tried to question our role and our credibility. I can point to what was written by an Israeli investigative journalist: that a new unit was established within the Israeli army whose primary task was to research the addresses of journalists, influencers, and activists – in preparation for targeting them, and to prepare material to discredit their role, and thereby justify the killings Israel was carrying out.

Two hundred and sixty-two of our colleagues – men and women – and hundreds of our family members were killed. And yet no investigation was opened into the killings. No evidence was provided, no cooperation offered, no investigative committees from around the world were received. They killed this number of journalists – a number unprecedented even in the great world wars. This was a major crime.

In contrast, what did journalists on the other side do? Even Israeli journalists were ultimately serving in the occupation army. We saw an anchor in a studio, in the heart of the occupation state, delivering the news with a pistol at her waist, inside the studio. A reporter in the field, in safe Israel, carried an M16. Some Israeli journalists moved into our residential areas – the area where I was born and raised – while the army destroyed and killed, and they stood beside it laughing, filming themselves.

Some wore full military uniforms and participated in army operations. One journalist in south Lebanon blew up a house belonging to Lebanese citizens. When asked why, he laughed dismissively and said the house overlooked Israel.

What does a journalist like me want – who lost his home, his office, his family, his daughter, his son, who was targeted and survived by a miracle – when so many colleagues and entire generations of journalists were lost? Nothing less than seeing the criminal in the dock, with justice served. Not only so that the crimes do not continue and spread elsewhere, but so that humanity does not become complicit in killing our people, our victims, our colleagues, twice: once when they were killed, and again when the world remained silent and let the perpetrator walk free.”

Main image shows Wael Al-Dahdouh, Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Gaza, hugging his daughter at the funeral of his son Hamza Al-Dahdouh, a journalist, who was killed in Rafah. January 2024. Photo: Mohammed Abed / AFP