Palestine Letter: When genocide makes basic journalism impossible

It used to be very easy to find someone in Gaza to interview; all I needed was a person’s name, and then I knew where I could go to ask about them and their families, until eventually finding the person I needed to contact. 

 As reporters from Gaza, we know where most families are located. For example, if I have a person’s name to interview and his last name is Najar, I will go to Khan Younis, where this family is, and ask about the person I want. His relatives will lead me to him, even if he had moved to a different area, they would know because we had addresses and communication was easy. 

Now all of that has changed, and such a simple journalistic task has become nearly impossible because of the genocide. 

Now, families are scattered, addresses are non-existent as most buildings have been destroyed, and people now live amongst rubble or in a sea of tents. 

Everyone in the Gaza Strip has faced displacement at least multiple times over the past year. Addresses and knowledge about the locations of the families in the Gaza Strip are not helpful anymore because no one is in their own home any longer, or even their neighborhood, or city. 

I started to recognize this issue when I was in Gaza during the genocide and I heard the story of an older man, Bashir Hiji. Hiji’s story went viral when a photo of him surfaced on social media in November 2023 of Israeli soldiers trying to “help” him. The photo of the Israeli army helping Palestinians was shared widely, and was being used by Israel as propaganda. But after that moment was captured,  when the military finished with the pictures, they killed Hajji and left him on the ground. 

We knew the name of the older man in the photo the Israeli army published. He is from a family in the al-Zaytoun area of Gaza City, and I was in Khan Younis at the time the story broke. After making lots of calls, I was given a lead that his family may have evacuated from Zaytoun to Khan Younis. So I went to several displacement centers in Khan Younis asking about anyone from the Hiji family. I was hoping that someone would connect me to the elderly man’s family so I could interview them to tell the world the real story about what the Israeli army did to their father. 

I walked through the sea of tents and different displacement centers, tent by tent, asking about this family. In the process, I heard countless other stories that surely needed to be told. But in the end, I could not find anyone from the Hiji family, and I was reminded of one of the most simple things needed to be a journalist – to contact people for an interview – had become so impossible. 

I tell this story because I faced the same problem recently. I was trying to reach two families to ask about their loved ones who were killed and turned up in a truck full of decomposing bodies that was returned to Gaza by the Israeli occupation. 

Usually, I would go to Rafah or Khan Younis, where both of these families are located. But not anymore. The people of Rafah are scattered, and the people of Khan Younis might be in Rafah. Or are they even alive? I don’t know. No one knows.

It has taken me and a team of reporters I’m working with months to try and find any of those two martyrs’ families, and so far, we have not reached them. 

Not only are the stories we telling tragic, but even the process we must undergo in order to tell them is a painful reminder of what this genocide has done to us. The genocide has made the majority of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip homeless, displaced, and scattered.