Gaza journalists who left feel immense guilt covering Israel’s war from abroad

Gaza natives Fares Alghoul and Wissam Nassar covered the 2008, 2012, and 2014 wars

Wissam Nassar in the ruins of a home shelled by Israel during the 2014 war. Photo: Wissam Nassar

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Fares Alghoul and Wissam Nassar remember Israel’s war and attacks on Gaza in 2008, 2014 and 2021 like it was yesterday.

Both are native Gaza residents who brought harrowing stories and photos from their besieged home city to major newspapers like The New York Times and agencies such as the Associated Press. Both say they now feel immense guilt covering the war from Canada after they were forced to immigrate to save their children’s lives.

“I made the decision to relocate my family away from Gaza because of the fears and the horrors my children experienced during the previous wars,” Alghoul, who worked for nearly a decade as the AP’s correspondent in Gaza, told The National.

“When I saw the war breaking out in Gaza this year, I realised immediately that this is going to be a big story and wanted to go back to Gaza. But while I was preparing to go back home, Egypt shut down the border. So, it was impossible.”

For Alghoul, his experience as a war correspondent began in 2009 when he was not yet a journalist. On the afternoon of January 3, 2009, an Israeli bomb or missile from an F-16 jet fighter killed two Gazans at the Alghoul family farm, north-west of Beit Lahiya and close to Gaza’s border with Israel.

One of the dead was Akram Alghoul, Fares’s father, who was a judge who worked in the Palestinian Authority courts and resigned after Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in June 2007.

“At the time, I was freelancing, and I was working for the London-based newspaper, The Independent. My coverage was in the form of daily diaries and dispatches about my situation and how we were struggling to protect ourselves from the falling rockets,” Alghoul said.

Alghoul’s reporting from 2009 would eventually land him freelancing jobs with other news outlets, given he was one of few people living in Gaza who wrote primarily in English.

He would go on to experience further wars in his home city, mainly the 2012 and 2014 Israeli assaults on Gaza.

“I remember a story that occurred there, an Israeli air strike on a house in Gaza City that killed about two dozen people that was the hardest thing I have covered in that war. While we were running and chasing stories trying to tell the suffering of the people, there was so much uncertainty, we could not do any calculations because as a journalist you have to try to work both your mind and body and study the options, but you soon find out that you don't have options, because literally no place was safe. You didn't know when or where the rockets would fall in 2014,” Alghoul said.

“That was the most destructive and deadly war. It was long and it lasted for 50 days. But it was nothing compared to this war. It’s so hard reporting from abroad and I feel helpless that I’m not there with my colleagues, with my family. The guilt I feel is immense,” he said.

At least 21 Palestinian journalists have been killed since Israel began its war on the Gaza Strip on October 7.

For Wissam Nassar, a photojournalist from Gaza who now lives in Hamilton, Canada, the war has had an intense effect on his mental health.

Nassar's photographs from Israel’s previous wars on Gaza since 2008 made it to the front pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time magazine and several other global publications. For the past two weeks, he's tried his best to cover the war from his home, but the pain he feels is twice that of covering the war on the ground.

“Trust me, the anguish of covering this war thousands of miles away in the safety of my home in Canada is 100 times worse than covering it on the ground. At least in Gaza, I can physically see my own parents and nephews. With our colleagues, we have the peace of mind that we’re in this together even if at any moment there might be an air strike that kills us,” Nassar said.

Nassar was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2015 for his New York Times photograph of a relative mourning Raed Al Atar, one of three senior Hamas commanders killed in an Israeli military strike on August 21, 2014. He told The National that he spends most of his waking hours, sometimes up to 20 hours a day, since October 7 trying to keep up with the news and guide young journalists who are freelancing for major news outlets.

“I’m in constant touch with young photo and video journalists like Motaz Azaiza and Ali Jadallah. They’re doing incredible work. We’re so proud of them but veterans like me and Fares have years of experience and we keep in touch with them because for many like them, this is their first war as a journalist,” Nassar told The National.

Azaiza was a young photojournalist with more than a million followers on Instagram when the latest war began two weeks ago. His account now has more than 8.3 million followers despite being banned at least once by Instagram and X, formerly known as Twitter, over his coverage of Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip.

He gathered more attention after he filmed the aftermath of an Israeli attack that targeted his family home in the Deir Al Balah refugee camp. At least 15 members of his family, most of them women and children, were killed.

“I keep telling Motaz and Ali to be careful. It’s easier said than done but they have to remember that no photo or story is worth more than their life. Gaza needs them to stay alive so that its people’s stories will continue to be told for years to come, during wartime and after,” Nassar said.