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Gaza- Since the outbreak of the Israeli occupation’s aggression against Gaza on the 7th of last month, young journalist Anas Al-Sharif has only met his young daughter and pregnant wife twice, and quickly, because he was busy at all times covering developments in the aggression in the northern areas of the Gaza Strip.
Al-Sharif (27 years old) lives with compound anxiety for himself and his family. He tells Al Jazeera Net, “The occupation is waging a fierce war in which no one is immune. Journalists and their families have become part of the victims of this war. They were martyred and wounded in air strikes that targeted them in the field and inside their homes.”
The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate and the Government Information Office documented the martyrdom of 35 journalists and media activists, the wounding of dozens of others, and the destruction of media headquarters and offices, in addition to tragedies that befell journalists who lost their entire families, or members of their families, by bombing their homes as well as the homes to which they were displaced, with the aim of terrorizing them and silencing the true voice.
Survivor and witness
The honorable journalist himself miraculously survived air strikes targeting areas in the northern Gaza Strip, where he happened to be during his field work. He also lost a number of his cousins during the bombing. He said that the recurrence of Israeli crimes against journalists and their families gives him great concern for his young family and his family.
What relieves this young journalist – in his opinion – is that he is doing patriotic and professional work to reveal the extent of the massacres committed by the killing and destruction machines of the occupation army against civilians.
Among these massacres, which Al-Sharif was the only one to document, was the Israeli air strikes that the Jabalia refugee camp was subjected to on Tuesday evening in particular, which destroyed a large number of homes above the heads of their residents, and resulted in 500 martyrs, wounded and missing persons.
Al-Sharif himself was almost one of the victims of this massacre. He said, “A few seconds and a few steps prevented my martyrdom. I was a few meters away from this residential square, when heavy missiles rained down on it, causing massive destruction in dozens of homes.”
In order to continue carrying out his mission, Anas suffers hardships and obstacles, and he knows very little sleep or food. Since the outbreak of this aggression, he has not slept more than two hours a day, with a lot of anxiety and waking up frightened by the sounds of explosions in the vicinity of the Indonesian hospital, where the journalists are sheltering in… Jabalia camp and the northern Gaza Strip during the night hours, which brings with it a lot of terror, death and destruction.
Painful scenes
Al-Sharif’s name has emerged since the beginning of the aggression, as a persistent journalist who follows the Israeli bombing by air, land and sea. His influential video clips were spread on social media platforms, and some of them were broadcast by major news channels, the most important of which is Al Jazeera.
What makes him able to continue and continue, despite the dangers facing him and other journalists like him in the field, is the amount of interaction with the human stories that he documents. However, Al-Sharif’s accounts were blocked and disabled after the number of his followers reached hundreds of thousands. However, he did not surrender to the restrictions imposed on Palestinian content, and opened accounts. New, and within a few hours tens of thousands followed it.
The young journalist believes that many of the stories he witnessed will remain engraved in his memory and he will not forget them for the rest of his life. The most painful of them is the scene of a young man digging through the rubble of his destroyed house with his hands in search of his mother, while his tongue does not stop repeating in a tone close to screaming, “God is sufficient for us, and He is the best disposer of affairs.” .
In another scene, no less painful, family members were screaming from under the rubble of their house, calling for help, while civil defense crews were helpless due to the lack of human staff and required mechanisms.
First experience in war
The young journalist, Moataz Azaizeh, became one of the most prominent Palestinian media voices followed globally by reporting the repercussions of the Israeli bombing on children, families, and neighborhoods in Gaza, in the English language.
More than 12 million people around the world follow Azaizeh on his Instagram account. Despite losing 15 members of his family in the Israeli bombing, he continued to broadcast the Gaza tragedy to the world.
As for the journalist in her twenties, Belestia Al-Akkad, she was also on a date with one of the painful scenes, starring the child “Melissa,” who is one year and four months old. She is the only survivor of the bombing of a four-story house, and under its rubble she lost her mother, who was pregnant with twins in her ninth month, and her father. She and her brother and uncles were left alone with her aunt, who was not present at the time of the bombing.
Belistia (22 years old), is an English-speaking journalist who works for Western media outlets. She publishes stories on her account on the Instagram platform, which saw a huge jump in the number of its followers from only 3,000 before the start to about two million followers, and one of the scenes received about a million views.
Belestia finds great interaction from its foreign followers. She told Al Jazeera Net, “It is important to use foreign languages, especially English, in covering the war on Gaza, and to put the world in a picture of what is happening on the ground.”
Belistia has lived through several wars and rounds of escalation launched by Israel in the Gaza Strip over the past years, but this is her first experience working as a journalist in the field of war, which she – like the rest of the people of Gaza – classifies as the most violent and ferocious.
In addition to the dangers of working in the field, Belistia lives with anxiety for her family, which was forced to flee from Gaza City to several places, before settling in the city of Khan Yunis in the south of the Gaza Strip.
She says, “We as journalists are no longer safe from a missile or shell, after the repeated targeting of colleagues who became martyrs or were injured.” However, the most dangerous thing – in her opinion – is the targeting of journalists’ families inside their homes, which makes her constantly worried about her family.
A child teaches the Shahada to his brother
In addition to this concern, the collapse of communications and Internet services and the depletion of fuel compound the complexities of the work of Belistia and journalists in Gaza, one of whom is journalist Hani Abu Rizq, who resides in Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the city of Deir Al-Balah amid tragic circumstances – after he was displaced from Gaza City.
Abu Rizq (29 years old) stood out among the names of journalists from the young generation, who employ modern techniques in documenting the aggression, and among the most prominent stories he documented, he won Short video clip A wide interaction between two Palestinian children, one of whom taught martyrdom to his brother who was injured as a result of an Israeli raid.
Abu Rizq works day and night, monitoring remarkable human stories among the piles of destroyed homes. He told Al Jazeera Net, “We are not numbers. Behind every martyr, every wounded person, and under every stone in Gaza is a story that must be documented and known to the world.”
He believes that the positions of people around the world differ from many of their regimes, which is demonstrated by the volume of interaction with stories published about the repercussions of the war on Gaza, and Abu Rizq himself sensed this from the increase in the number of his followers from 80,000 to more than half a million on the Instagram platform, and he said. “Israel is committing massacres, and we must collect and document evidence.”
