Who Remembers The Journalists?

On August 12th, Writers Against the War on Gaza - WAWOG - launched a project, The Living Record, eulogizing the over 260 Palestinian journalists targeted and killed by Israel, through recorded oral testimonies of their loved ones and colleagues.

The Living Record is the largest oral archive produced since the genocide began. From Gaza, fifty journalists and media workers give eulogies for their martyred colleagues—many of whom are also their best friends, their brothers, their husbands—including Mariam Abu Dagga, Hamzah Al Dahdouh, Hassan Esleih, Ismail al-Ghoul, Hussam al-Masri, and Hossam Shabat. Visitors can navigate interconnected pages detailing each journalist’s hopes, dreams, and accomplishments alongside testimonies delivered by their colleagues in Gaza. In addition to audio recordings in Arabic, each testimony has transcriptions in both English and Arabic that are synchronized to the audio stream. We hear their voices speaking in Arabic, reading along in either Arabic or English. We see the faces of those they loved so much. - WAWOG Press Release, August 12, 2026

On August 14th, WAWOG, the Palestine Feminist Collective and the Palestinian Youth Movement held an event, Keeping the Record Alive, in tribute to Anas al-Sharif and Gaza’s slaughtered journalists. I had the honor of speaking at this event. The video featured is the talk and below you will find the (incomplete) transcript. I spoke following the showing of harrowing testimonies from Palestinian journalists about their lost loved ones - reminding us, in their devastation, that every martyr is a universe.

On March 24th of last year, Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat was martyred at the age of 23, when he was targeted and killed by the Israeli occupation forces. We all have had moments throughout the last three years that broke something in us, something that has no prospect of being fixed. For me, it was Hossam’s murder. But something unexpected happened that day, I received a message from his Twitter account - we had a history of exchanging messages across platforms and seeing that particular notification made me catch my breath - what if the news of his murder had been wrong?

But Hossam was gone - the message, from his account, was from a friend of his who shared things Hossam had said, saying in passing that he saw and read everything.

In other words, Hossam - like all Palestinian journalists, like all Palestinians we were watching online - wasn’t just documenting and sharing the extermination of his people, but was also witnessing in real time the world’s most powerful institutions and people debate and dispute whether he and his people could be believed.

Hossam saw and read everything.

Every inch of our country is complicit - a word that still feels insufficient to describe exactly what we did, what we allowed, what we justified and what we buried. But tonight, we speak of the complicity of our storytellers, our institution journalism - the co-authors of the extermination.

In the genocide of the Palestinians, responsibility cannot be confined to the Israeli officials whose specific task was to manufacture post-hoc justifications for killing journalists. Obviously, the responsibility for pulling a trigger, firing a missile or ordering a strike belongs first to the state and military carrying it out. It also cannot be confined to the American officials who paid for those bullets and bombs. It cannot be confined to them because there is another kind of responsibility that belongs to the institutions that made those killings narratively survivable. If Israel knows that after it kills a Palestinian journalist it can simply release a dossier, invoke Hamas, circulate a photograph or an alleged intelligence claim, and watch major Western newsrooms reproduce that framing, that is part of the environment in which impunity becomes not only possible but the only outcome. Journalism is not outside the violence simply because journalists are not the ones firing the weapons.

Western media institutions helped manufacture the epistemic conditions in which Palestinian journalists could be killed and then discredited after death. For decades, and with extraordinary force throughout this genocide, they trained their audiences to understand Palestinian testimony as inherently suspect and Israeli testimony as inherently credible. A Palestinian is always to be questioned, an Israeli to always be believed.

Palestinian journalists were rarely permitted to simply be journalists: they were “Hamas-affiliated,” “Hamas-linked,” “propagandists,” or people working in a territory “controlled by Hamas.” And if Hamas is manufactured as being “evil incarnate” - as our news media helped establish early on - then what does that make those “linked” to them?

And so their photographs, reporting, and even their deaths were subjected to standards of proof that Israeli claims were almost never required to meet. When Israel accused a journalist of being a militant, major news organizations often reproduced the accusation before any evidence could be presented, allowing the accusation itself to become part of the public record. Israel’s so-called “legitimization cell” - the military unit that worked to link Palestinian journalists to armed resistance - did not create that vulnerability from nothing, it operated inside a media environment that our institutions had built for decades.

Israel was not simply treated as one party among two competing accounts; it was made the final authority over Palestinian reality - the state killing Palestinians was also granted the power to narrate their deaths. It was the primary, if not only, credible narrator.

This belongs to a much longer history in which Palestinians have been denied the authority to explain their own lives - transformed into unreliable narrators.

And that’s why preserving the record matters. Remembering who these heroes - the greatest journalists of our time - were, matters. Their lives mattered and still matter, their dreams, hopes, wishes, fears - all of those things matter. Testimonies about them matter.

And we have to remember not only who was killed, but what was said about them before and after: which accusations were published, whose claims were granted authority, which images were withheld, which deaths were rendered in the passive voice, which editors insisted there was not yet enough evidence to name what Palestinians could already see happening around them. The archive must include the journalism itself. Institutional memory has a way of turning perpetrators into witnesses and participants into observers. Our power lies in refusing that laundering - in preserving the names, headlines, broadcasts, silences and testimonies and ensuring that those who helped make Palestinian truth - and thus life - disposable do not get to appoint themselves custodians of its history.