Death in Gaza

It’s one of the most troubling documentaries about war that I have ever watched.

Filmed over several weeks by cameraman James Miller, an old school friend, and Saira Shah, the reporter he works with, it tells the story of a generation of young Palestinian children growing up in the Gaza strip.

The little girls in the film speak of how they count their losses. One counts on two hands the number of friends she has lost to the war, while praying that she too won’t die.

The little boys – some not yet into their teens - attempt to navigate between their desire to stay alive with the almost hypnotic pull of Hamas, the only organisation of any note that is offering meaningful resistance to the Israelis.

As the documentary unwinds we witness two young boys beginning to make pathetic home-made bombs to throw at the Israeli tanks and becoming ever more enmeshed in the junior echelons of Hamas.

After the Gaza documentary James and Saira’s intention had been to make another documentary – this time about Israeli children living in the shadow of war. But it was not to be.

On the last day of filming, as they began their walk out of Gaza towards Israel proper, waving white flags and with TV written on their flak jackets, an Israeli sniper shot James in the neck and killed him.

A month later I flew to London from Moscow, where I was the Daily Telegraph’s bureau chief, for his wake. Three years later an inquest in London concluded that James had been murdered. The Israeli government, it said, had ‘not been forthcoming’ in providing details.

James was killed 20 years ago this past May. But it could easily have happened yesterday.

Since the latest war started after the brutal and bloody attack by Hamas on Oct 7^th, Israel has killed between 60 and 100 journalists and media workers, and injured many more. (More than 90 percent of them have been Palestinians.)

To put this into some kind of perspective, the Committee to Protect Journalists says that Israel has killed more journalists in 10 weeks than any other state or entity has ever killed in a whole year.

One estimate says that while Israel has now killed around one percent of Gaza’s population – approximately 20,000 people - it has killed between seven and 10 percent of the journalists working there. It is difficult to escape the conclusion the journalists are being targeted.

Even before the Hamas attack the Committee to Protect Journalists had raised serious concerns about Israel’s killing of journalists. James was one of around 20 reporters the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have killed in the last two decades.

They point to a pattern of denial, obfuscation and outright mendacity in official responses given by the Israelis after each event. Despite numerous official probes by the IDF no soldier has ever been charged or held responsible.

Now the committee says the last two months have marked the deadliest period for reporters since monitoring began in 1992.

One such killing came on Oct 13^th. A group of international journalists had gathered in an open area in southern Lebanon to witness cross-border shelling between Hezbollah and Israel.

They did exactly what I would have done – wore blue body armour with PRESS written on it, stayed in the open where they could be easily identified by combatants, and kept away from built-up areas.

For around 45 minutes the team, which included journalists from Reuters and Agence France Press, two of the world’s leading news agencies which pride themselves on their impartiality, filmed smoke rising from villages that were being shelled. Later they filmed an Israeli tank firing into Lebanon.

Suddenly, without any warning being given, an Israeli tank – one they hadn’t been filming - opened fire at them from less than a mile away. The first round killed Issam Abdallah, a 37-year-old Reuters journalist.

It also seriously injured Christina Assi, an AFP photographer, who received multiple shrapnel wounds to her legs. Five other journalists were wounded. A car belonging to an al-Jazeera team that was close by was blown up by a second tank shell 37 seconds later.

Following the attack, Reuters commissioned independent experts to study the evidence. They presented their detailed findings to the IDF. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht, the IDF’s international spokesman, replied: “We don’t target journalists.”

For years now western correspondents have complained privately about how Israel and their supporters in the west bully and sometimes target the international media.

At a table of journalists in London last month, every one of whom had recently returned from covering the Gaza conflict for an international outlet, that view was unanimous.

Perhaps surprisingly for an outsider, among seasoned international reporters on the ground there is relatively little dispute about the rights and wrongs of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Almost all condemn Hamas’s brutal and despicable methods. You only have to watch James Miller’s documentary to come away deeply troubled by the militants’ death cult and their murderous intolerance.

But equally almost every journalist who has covered the Middle East for any length of time believes the collective punishment Israel inflicts on the Palestinians – whether in the West Bank or in Gaza – is egregious, immoral, and ultimately counter-productive.

It is almost invariably opinion writers, columnists and ideologues in London, New York and elsewhere that are willing to defend Israel’s military tactics.

At a joint lecture I gave this month in Transylvania a conservative think tank analyst from the US defended Israel’s policy in Gaza as a necessary ‘mowing of the grass’ as if the most intransigent conflict in the Middle East was a horticultural problem.

With around 10,000 Palestinian children now dead as a result of Israeli air strikes, tank shells and artillery and more than a million people displaced, such glibness smacks of inhumanity.

“The journalists on the ground actually do a good job in difficult circumstances,” one correspondent told me after recently returning from the region. “They really do try to write the truth. It’s the guest writers and columnists who push a rabid pro-Israeli line.”

And so, from the Israeli point of view, the more the papers are dominated by opinion-writers and columnists the better it is for them.

Conversely, the more coverage there is on the ground from independent reporters, the worse for them. Which is, no doubt, why they keep killing reporters

NEWS & LINKS

+ If you want to see James Miller’s Death in Gaza, filmed in 2003, the best place I have found to watch it is here.