Dahdouh’s family were among the more than one million Gaza residents displaced by the war, now in its 19th day. A number of his other relatives are still missing, and it remains unclear how many others were killed.
For Al Jazeera journalist Wael Dahdouh, much of Wednesday was spent reporting from the war torn Gaza City that has been at the receiving end of ruthless Israeli airstrikes. But his job turned personal when he learnt that the same strikes killed his wife, son, and daughter.
Dahdouh at the time was helping broadcast live images of the besieged territory’s night sky on the Qatari-based satellite channel. Moments later, the channel switched to footage of Dahdouh entering al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza, with his colleagues behind him, holding him and then giving way to grief as he crouched over the body of his dead son in a tent filled with body bags. “They take revenge on us in our children?” he asked, kneeling over his son’s bloodied body, still wearing his protective press vest from that day’s work. His son wanted to be a journalist like his father, the outlet reported.
Dahdouh’s family were among the more than one million Gaza residents displaced by the war, now in its 19th day. According to Al Jazeera, Dahdouh’s family members fled to the Nuseirat Refugee Camp, located in an area of Gaza which is among the regions Israel said would be considered ‘safe zones’. The network said an Israeli airstrike hit the camp, killing his family members. A number of his other relatives are still missing, and it remains unclear how many others were killed.
A committed journalist, Dahdouh is well-known as the face of Palestinians during many wars. He is revered in his native Gaza for telling people’s stories of suffering, especially the targeting of journalists, and the killing of women and children and other hardships to those outside the war zone. His colleagues referred to him as the ‘voice of Gaza’.
His fellow journalists were visibly emotional and shaken while reporting the deaths of Dahdouh’s family on Wednesday. Al Jazeera’s Gaza correspondent Youmna Elsayed said it was a “shock that we reporters, who report to the world what’s happening around us, have to report the story of our colleagues or of our own families.” But they maintained that Dahdouh’s voice will go on. “This is a man who has honestly and credibly been reporting from his homeland for so many years. And now it hit him personally. It came home to haunt him, but he’s still resilient, and he will continue to be so,” Al Jazeera political analyst Marwan Bishara told the network.
Like Dahdouh, several journalists who are currently in the middle of the war zone, and form a vital part of the world’s understanding of the conflict, have become targets in the war between Israel and Hamas.
At least 24 journalists have been killed in the war as of October 25, 2023, according to the latest tally released Wednesday by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Of these, 20 were Palestinian, three were Israeli and one was Lebanese. At least eight other journalists have been reported injured, while three others are believed missing or detained, according to the CPJ, which also noted that the current tally might be an undercount.
The organisation's emergency director, Lucy Westcott, told NPR that the Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza were essential to the “world's understanding of what's going on on the ground in Gaza.” Ever since the ongoing war began, media narratives set out by popular western media houses do not mention the wider political context and the ‘unprovoked attack’ by Hamas on October 7 becomes the sole point of focus. The ongoing war has at least claimed over 6,000 lives on both sides. But for some media houses, people in Palestine ‘died’ and people in Israel were ‘killed’.
At such a crucial juncture, when millions of people across the world depend on the media to understand the extent of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, journalistic voices from the besieged city – who perform their duties in the middle of bodies, the injured, and the destruction – and their family members, are caught in the crossfire.
Marwan Bishara, a senior political analyst at Al Jazeera told the channel that Dahdouh, like other journalists in Gaza, “lives in the midst of death and mayhem and destruction.” “Listening to him, you would expect a man so angry to be cursing, but he’s not. His revenge is to tell the truth,” Bishara said.