Palestinian journalist Saeed Amin Abu Hassanein, who spent 20 years in the fields of audio engineering and radio mixing, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip on April 23. The bombing also claimed the lives of his wife, Asmaa Jihad Abu Hassanein, and their young daughter, Sarah Saeed Abu Hassanein. Photo: Al-Aqsa Radio

Gaza’s journalists diligently go to work even as they await their likely deaths. Unarmed witnesses to the truth, they have continued to do their jobs documenting reality only to be killed in droves by Israeli airstrikes. For them, journalism has long become more than a risk: It is a literal act of suicide. Working as a journalist means working toward a shroud; it means fighting to keep one’s spirit alive when death is everywhere.

Targeting journalists is part of a deliberate Israeli plan to prevent the world from seeing what is happening in the killing fields of Gaza.

By the end of May 2025, Israel had killed as many as 222 journalists and media workers since October 2023, according to the Government Media Office in Gaza. Al Jazeera notes that this is more than the total number of journalists killed in both world wars, the Vietnam War, the war in Yugoslavia, and the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

Most of them were annihilated with their families during heavy airstrikes targeting their homes, displacement camps, or hospital beds, or while reporting in front of cameras. Others were shot execution-style.

Many of them were not reporters but rather news editors, technicians, camera operators and sound engineers—unsung heroes of journalism. In Gaza those who work for media organizations behind the scenes also risk their lives.

A few examples of the many journalists killed, some prominent and others less so, include Khaled Abu Seif and Nour Qandil and their young daughter in Deir Al-Balah. The Israeli Occupation Forces assassinated photographer Aziz al-Hajjar, his wife, and children in northern Gaza and took the life of journalist Abdul Rahman al-Abadla in the south. Ahmed al-Zanati, his wife, and their two children were all killed by an Israeli airstrike on his tent in Al-Mawasi, a “safe” area.

An Israeli drone targeted journalist Hassan Islayh in the dilapidated Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis. Islayh was being treated for injuries he sustained from an Israeli bombing of a media tent on April 7, 2025. In this attack, his colleague, Helmi al-Faqawi, burned to death. Two days later, two other journalists—Hassan Samour and Ahmed al-Helou—were also killed in Israeli attacks.

On April 17, Fatima Hassouna, a prominent photojournalist whose life during the genocide was the subject of a documentary to be screened at Cannes, was targeted. She was killed the day before the screening in her home with 10 members of her family.

On April 23, 2025, Saeed Amin Abu Hassanein, a sound engineer at Al-Aqsa Radio, was martyred with his wife, Asmaa Jihad Abu Hassanein, and their 15-year-old daughter, Sarah, on Al-Bi’a Street in central Deir Al-Balah, when an Israeli warplane launched a missile directly at them while they were walking.

Saeed was a colleague and close friend of my uncle Ahmed, a video editor at Al-Aqsa TV. Ever since that moment, Ahmed’s life turned upside down; this tragedy plunged him and his family into despair.

Initially, my uncle believed that only senior journalists or those in visible field roles were at risk. But when he learned that his colleague, an unarmed sound engineer, was deliberately targeted and killed, the news filled him with fear.

My uncle realized that no one in the media is safe. Anyone attempting to expose these crimes and break the deliberate media blackout would be targeted.

Press vests, helmets, cameras, and accreditation cards no longer protected anyone. In fact, wearing identifying markers as journalists or staff working for them placed them in danger.

Fearing for his family’s safety, Uncle Ahmed had to make the heartbreaking decision to distance himself from them and go into hiding. He had to leave his young children in a school-turned-displacement center in Khan Younis while remaining exposed himself. He has been physically and psychologically exhausted, with little opportunity for even minimal rest.

Journalist Omar Al-Diraoui before the occupation bombed his house in Al-Zawaida, central Gaza Strip. Photo provided by Reem’s Uncle Ahmed

He was not alone; many like him were forced to sleep on the streets, in cars, or in gutted newsrooms, avoiding phone contact with their families in a desperate attempt to protect them through physical separation.

Is there anything worse than knowing that proximity to your loved ones threatened their lives?

Is there a more dreadful feeling than knowing that your presence beside your children in these miserable conditions creates a burden on them instead of a source of comfort and safety? And all this just because you edit videos or enhance the sound quality that conveys the news from Gaza?

Exactly what kind of press freedom are Gaza journalists allowed to celebrate? Their press “freedom” requires them to abandon their families to do their jobs or to be buried with them in a family grave.

Despite all this, my uncle remains determined to continue his work, knowing that it is the only way for the world to know what is happening in Gaza and to see the extent of the destruction and genocide committed by Israel.

“Even if we are threatened and assassinated, even if we lose our loved ones, our voice will not be silenced, and we will not stop conveying the truth and the facts,” he said.

Press freedom in Gaza is not merely a human rights issue; it is a life and death saga. What is happening should not be treated as numbers in annual reports but as a systematic crime against the truth and as the silencing and even erasure of the victims of ongoing systematic crimes.

If the entire world can claim to be unable to protect Palestinian journalists, the least it can do is not be complicit through silence. Silence is complicity in crime.

This article is co-published with Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.