As Israel kills the storytellers of Gaza, this article is a powerful call for global witnesses to pick up the pen, reclaim narrative power, and become the collective keepers of a truth that empires are trying to erase.
More than 265 known career journalists, who represent Al-Jazeera, local networks, or independent outlets, have been assassinated since October 7, 2023. Suppose you expand the term “journalist” beyond the career title to include citizen journalists. In that case, the term applies to anyone who creates and posts a video documenting their life in Gaza, regardless of whether they wear a press vest or not. At which point, the number of assassinations becomes countless; some several thousand, tens of thousands even, out of the roughly 500,000 estimated to have been killed by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza since October 2023. More than World War II and the entire Vietnam War combined.
But what happens to a country when its storytellers, information disseminators, cultural critics, and truth tellers are exterminated en masse?
What They Were Up Against
Palestinian journalists of all kinds have been up against a massive and well-funded Western media infrastructure for decades. Three practical ways to understand the U.S. media’s impact on the story of genocide in Palestine are through the lens of manufacturing consent, the spread of Zionist ideology, and the weaponization of narrative techniques that undermine Palestine while glorifying Israel.
When western news outlets refer to these journalists as “Gaza-born,” it is often intended as a dog whistle—a means to discredit them and their journalism, which, despite being primarily livestreamed video footage and commentary, is considered unreliable until foreign journalists can enter Gaza and corroborate their accounts. Doing this is part of the playbook of manufacturing consent—creating an illusion of public agreement—by delegitimizing and silencing the voices of the victims and replacing their stories with imperial propaganda. What many of us understand as mainstream journalism outlets are often imperial outfits whose chief goal is to maintain the status quo of privilege and power.
Despite knowing this, I still find the staunch and unfettered support for the Israeli regime that many left-leaning outlets like CNN and the New York Times assert—even in the face of documented crimes against humanity. This not-so-subtle slant is another element of manufacturing consent for genocide, using mass media to make the oppressors’ justifications common sense. Whether it was bombing hospitals or schools under the pretext of rooting out Hamas or eradicating nearly all journalists in the region, Western media could find a way to make it sound logical and defensible.
Collaboration among some Western media and the Israeli government isn’t new, nor is it a coincidence. Since October 7, 2023, we have learned that many news outlets like ABC, The New York Times, and CNN, and their parent companies, are financed by self-proclaimed Zionists—a group who believe that Jewish people have the right to a sovereign homeland in historic Palestine by any means necessary. So, when we hear U.S. mainstream media parroting pro-Zionist talking points, underreporting deaths of Palestinians, or justifying them, we have to recognize this as both an ideological war and a larger pattern of Western expansion where Israel exists to serve Western geopolitical goals in the Middle East.
Finally, according to this practical guide on Solidarity Narrative in Crisis, Western journalists use a series of narrative techniques to weaponize nuance, including selective framing, divide-and-conquer, scapegoating, false equivalency, whataboutism, and gaslighting—and we see them all in real time as our Palestinian siblings fight for survival.
Selective framing distorts reality by elevating some facts and obscuring others. For example, data scientist Mona Chalabi shows how The New York Times’ disproportionate focus on Israeli deaths even as Palestinian deaths soar. Divide and conquer weakens solidarity by pitting oppressed groups against one another—a false choice that ignores interconnected struggles. And scapegoating diverts attention from state violence, seen clearly in the censure of Rep. Rashida Tlaib for the long-standing liberation chant, “From the River to the Sea,” which groups like the ADL only recently rebranded as antisemitic to shift focus away from Israel’s killing and displacement of Palestinians.
Concluding graph for this section
They Chose Courage
Despite the well-funded establishment media’s pro-Zionist agenda, truth managed to break through, especially on social media where everyday influencers have decentralized who shapes public opinion and what narratives take hold.
In late 2023 and early 2024, new young reporters in Gaza utilized their knowledge and resources to document their experiences and those of their neighbors. Bisan Owda, Motaz Azaiza, Plestia Alaquad, Hind Khoudary, and many others utilized their English fluency to reach the world, particularly Gen Z, via Instagram, to build empathy and expose injustice—acting as a counterfactual to Israeli propaganda. They were joined by Arab-speaking journalists, including Wael Al-Dahdouh, Saleh Al-Jafarawi, and Hossam Shbat, with the help of Instagram accounts such as @eye.on.palestine, @translating.falasteen, and @AJPlus, which served as translators. Together, they garnered millions of followers across the world and sustained pro-Palestine and anti-imperialist sentiment among westerners by documenting war crimes against their people. These stories solidified the feelings of rage and injustice felt by millions. They reinforced the role of these young journalists as beacons of truth, shining a light on the abject cruelty of the Israeli occupation and genocide.
In “Revisioning Journalism During a Genocide,” Ana-Maria Monjardino succinctly describes this large-scale ideological shift among media consumers:
“Western media’s coverage of the Gaza genocide has revealed fundamental cracks in the facade of journalistic objectivity. Mainstream outlets have frequently marginalized or discredited Palestinian perspectives, often echoing narratives that align with Israeli state interests. In stark contrast, Palestinian journalists—reporting from within a besieged landscape—have become frontline truth-tellers. Through raw, emotional storytelling, they are not only documenting atrocities but also redefining journalism as a form of resistance and a reclaiming of ethical purpose.”
It speaks to the magnitude of each of their lives and work that so many people from so very far away, with many different mother tongues, saw so much of themselves in these young journalists. We followed their journeys over two years, watching them report in real-time and rooting for them to survive with every dropped bomb, waiting with bated breath for their reports each morning. But most of them did not return.
In life and in death, these journalists showed what it means to have faith in their people and their cause. Their steadfastness was extraordinary, but we should not turn their sacrifice into something supernatural. Their deaths were a profound injustice—lives that the IDF should not have snuffed, families who deserved to have them home, not memorialized as martyrs. They were once children in a seaside city trapped behind walls, shaped by everything they witnessed and then forced to watch that city be destroyed.
They were not born braver than anyone else. They were placed in conditions no one should ever face, and yet they chose courage. Every oppressed person carries within them the capacity for such courage because it is forged, not gifted. It is the decision to live with dignity in a world determined to erase you, and to fight not only for yourself but for your community and for those yet to come. This is the choice all oppressed people confront, especially now.
Who Picks Up The Mantle?
The “death of the messenger” refers not only to the literal deaths of so many Palestinian journalists, scholars, and historians, but also to the death of journalism and media communication as we know it. Journalism and media communication are undergoing radical transformations in their roles within society. An increasing number of people distrust establishment media, exacerbated by the guerrilla reporting of on-the-ground journalists in Gaza, many of whom paid the ultimate price for documenting the truth about the nature of Israel’s war crimes and exposing them to the world. The implosion of mainstream media, in tandem with deliberate attacks on the free press and on journalists themselves, forces us to ask: What happens to a country when its storytellers, information disseminators, cultural critics, and truth tellers are exterminated en masse?
First, we have to reckon with our power as witnesses. We are part of the event. When the storytellers are executed, it is up to the public to pick up the mantle and find ways to continue speaking. Each person who has borne witness now has the chance to reconsider how they themselves fit into the tapestry of history we are weaving together. To be a witness in times of fascism, to utilize Sarah Azaiza’s role of the witness to its fullest potential, is to honour what one witnesses by documenting, preserving, and continuing the story to the best of one’s ability, which was left half-written.
We do not just fight for our freedom now; we fight for the preservation of our histories. We are fighting the narrative of our oppressors’.
Second, we can pick up the pen and reclaim our narrative power—consciously finding ways to preserve what it means to be alive right now, so when the time comes, future generations will have understood what it took to get where they are.
Finally, we have to pick up the mantle together. A revolution cannot survive on the back of a single person. Despite what we’ve been taught, there is no single hero of a story. No one person can be glorified. The revolutionaries we remember are remembered because they were assassinated, imprisoned, or exiled. Revolutions are sustained by the collective, and every one of us has a responsibility—and an opportunity—to shape the course of history.
As Stuart Hall reminds us, the ideological struggle in our minds and spirits is as decisive as any physical confrontation. If the meaning behind a struggle is not sustained, the struggle itself loses purpose.
So the questions become: What role can we play in resisting censorship and rising fascism? How do we bear witness in a way that refuses to let our oppressors write the story of this moment?
We answer by showing up—collectively, consistently, courageously. By refusing silence. By insisting on the truth. And by remembering that while no single one of us is the hero, all of us together keep the revolution alive.
