#war reporting

[nourasbashapal]

It is heartbreaking how little media attention this has received.

This year, the European Press Prize was awarded to an investigative report by the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant.

Titled "What the Wounds Tell," the investigation by journalists Maud Effting and Willem Feenstra documents 114 cases of children in Gaza, all under the age of 15, who were shot once in the head or chest.

Almost all of them were killed or left with severe, permanent injuries.

The journalists chose to focus on children under 15 because they were easier to identify. Many were much younger, only 3, 4, or 7 years old.

The report states:

"A single bullet wound to these parts of the body is a clear indication that these children were deliberately targeted."

[victusinveritas]

So this is fine. We have always been at war with Eurasia energy.

[bowlby4]

[hussyknee]

Ayat Khaddura, 27, was a digital content and podcast presenter in North Gaza. She was one of the five journalists murdered by Israel's targeted air strike on Nov 20, along with her sister and grandmother in her home. She posted this video in the knowledge that these were probably her last moments.

Video description:

A young Arab woman in a hijab and abaya speaks into her camera in Arabic in a high, frightened voice. The subtitles read: "This might be the last video from me. Today the Occupation Forces dropped phosphorus bombs on the Beit Lahia residential area, and frightening sound bombs. And uhm, they dropped letters from the sky ordering us to evacuate. So of course nearly everyone evacuated for the most part. Everyone ran into the streets in a crazy way. No one knows where they're coming or going. Uhm, we're all split up and around. Me and some others stayed at home. The others evacuated and left. We don't know where they've gone, that's for sure. The situation is terrifying, the scenes are horrifying [voice breaking as she starts to cry], the situation is extremely difficult. May God have mercy on us." [She closes her eyes as she starts to cry openly. End clip.]

[New clip.] The same young woman is seated on a desk in front of a world map wearing a jacket over a t-shirt and her hijab. Large video caption reads "Message from Ayat Khaddura who was martyred yesterday". Her voice is sad and resigned, and her face is tired and tear-stained as she speaks in Arabic. Subtitles read:

"We are human beings, just like other human beings around the world. We had many big dreams, but unfortunately today our dreams are that if we are killed we will be martyred in one piece, one body (not torn to pieces) so that people can recognise us, and we will not be cut off in pieces and put in a bag. [struggles not to cry.] When we are martyred there will be a shroud for us and we will be buried in a grave. Our dreams have become that the war will stop, that we stop hearing the sound of bombing. We never imagined we would reach such a stage and live such a life that does not have the lowest basic necessities. [Blinks back tears.] There are things we can't talk about, there are things that people photographed and did not document. When the war will end, who will continue to talk to people? What happened to us, how we lived, what we saw. Everything is being destroyed before our eyes." [Looks down with a sob. End video.]

Israel dropping leaflets onto trapped and hiding people minutes before bombing them is nothing but a sick PR exercise— there's nowhere safe to go, no telling where the bombs will drop, no way to not leave family members behind while fleeing. Many people in North Gaza decided not to evacuate to the South, not only because similar calls to go South have ended in Israeli airstrikes massacring the refugees, but the possibility of being killed while trying to make the journey, the lack of food and water to sustain them, and inability to leave old and disabled family members behind. Some like Hind Khaudary, who had the opportunity to leave the Gaza strip entirely through foreign embassies, stayed behind to continue reporting the situation unfolding in the North. Meanwhile, Israel is continuing to bomb the South, despite their own evacuation orders.

Ayat is one of the fifty-three Middle Eastern journalists killed since Oct. 7. Forty-six of them were Palestinian, most massacred along with their families. Air strikes on other journalists managed to kill only their families instead. This is the deadliest period for journalists recorded by the Committee to Protect Journalists in its thirty years of existence. In fact, Israel killed one of the CPJ's own journalists documenting the murders around the same time as Ayat.

Nearly all these are targeted strikes. Israel controls the census in Gaza and therefore has information on where everyone lives. They also track journalists cellphones and use surveillance drones and quadcopters (drone snipers). Journalists and their families are known to receive threatening phone calls from unknown numbers before they're eventually attacked.

As to why Israel is so concerned about journalists? For the same reason the Biden Administration has stated openly.

But the administration remains wary about Netanyahu’s endgame and seeming lack of a plan for what to do once Hamas is defeated. There was no sense that the pause would turn into a lengthier cease-fire, a senior administration official said. And there was some concern in the administration about an unintended consequence of the pause: that it would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel.

Please spread news of these journalists' murders, show their faces, say their names. While Western journalists from CNN and BCC are embedded with IOF teams to safely "report" on Gaza, Palestinian journalists who have been reporting there for years, wearing a press jacket and helmet they know won't protect them, are documenting and broadcasting the situation on the ground, watching their colleagues being picked off one by one for the last month and half, not knowing when it will be their turn. Ayat was not a combatant. She was a young woman a lot like most on this site, young and angry at injustice, armed with only a degree and internet connection to fight for her people. She wanted the world to witness her last moments: documenting the situation till the end, her terror of dying, how she clung to her faith and wanted to live. Hers and her compatriots work is to resist letting their people disappear among the vast uncounted; she resisted it to her last breath.

Empires and colonizers win wars by reducing people to numbers. When people become numbers they become collateral, cattle, "unavoidable casualties". This is what Palestinians have fought for decades to show: "We Are Not Numbers". If the West wants to kill human beings with impunity, everyone gets to see exactly which lives and loves and hopes it's snuffing out forever.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"The glowing newspaper stories about heroic Finns in battle created new role models for young children who became enthusiastic about the Winter War. They sometimes ripped their mothers’ white sheets and dressed up as Winter War soldiers, took out their skis, if they had any, and went to the parks and ravines to play war games. One FOC [Finnish Organization of Canada] member recalls his 1939 experiences as a young lad:

My parents didn’t allow us to have any guns, they were pacifists, so we had to make our own. I remember dressing up in sheets and going to the park where all the kids played Finns and Russians. The problem was that none of the kids wanted to be Russians as it was more fun to glide on skis in white camouflage and ambush the enemy.

Children learned about the Winter War in their schools and there was no doubt who the heroes were. In the media’s quest for Finnish “brilliance,” they claimed to have found it in Canada’s high schools. One reporter was given the assignment to visit high schools in search of the Finnish connection. Anne Merrill’s special report in the Star Weekly sets the tone in her bold headline: “Young Finns prove brilliant scholars.” Merrill explained how the school curriculum now included Finland.

Gallant little Finland! Words like these are heard every day. Schools in their social studies, not unmindful of this heroic country, are learning its geography, looking it up on school maps and, through current events, grasping much of its significant history.

The reporter visited several high schools, finding and interviewing the best Finnish Canadian students, some of whom told her that they too would have liked to volunteer to fight in Finland "if they were only old enough.” Finnish children were not used tot his kind of attention; suddenly and unexpectedly they had become heroes in their schoolyards.

By the second week of the war, the predictions of quick annihilation of Finland disappeared and the newspapers began to describe the miracle in snow, suggesting the possibility of a victory for Finland. At first, Canadian correspondents were dependent on news services and the propaganda put out by various belligerent countries and the nearly eighty foreign reporters cooped up in hotel Kamp in Helsinki. Kamp’s bar was reinforced and made into a bomb-shelter. As one historian commented, the problem was that the well-intentioned reporters did not have accurate information. “Holed up as the newsmen were in the Kamp Hotel in Helsinki, press rooms became an anthill where news was announced — and also created.” Mannerheim did not allow journalists, with few exceptions, to the front lines. When he was encouraged to use the journalists more efficiently for public relations purposes, he replied: “This is not any film, this is war.”

When reporters ventured to interview Finnish war heroes, they found them sombre and reluctant to take any credit for their success or to embellish their stories. For example, one frustrated reporter managed to get an interview with Lieutenant Tatu Huhanantti, a pilot who had just shot down three Russian aircraft in one battle:

Question: Would you please tell me how this battle took place? What happened? Answer: Well, first I shot down one enemy aircraft. Question: And then? Answer: And then I shot down another aircraft. Question: What happened after that? Answer: I fired again and I shot another one down.

- Varpu Lindström, From Heroes to Enemies: Finns in Canada 1937-1947. Beaverton, Ontario: Aspasia Books, 2000. p. 67-69

[ahb-writes]

I've seen a lot of places where people just disappear. Where their bodies literally disintegrate into the sand or into the earth and there's no photograph of them that their family has and there's no marker for them, of where they died, and I think it's a terrible thing to be slaughtered in a war, but to be eviscerated and not have anybody even notice your passing is particularly haunting to me. And I believe in bearing witness to the dignity of people here and also the indignity that is being done to people here.

Anderson Cooper, reporting from Lviv, Ukraine (08 March 2022)

[goonrapislife]

“The work is plenty in the hands of few…”

The way I see it, creme of the crop is reserved for the souls who don’t realize the farm is in jeopardy.

[qrsyria]

Syrian journalist Nour Al-Nukri ❤