Real Lives
Amnesty International named Wael Al-Dahdouh its 2025 human rights defender
Image credit: Wael Al-Dahdouh — Nawaat / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 · License
Original Reporting
Wael Al-Dahdouh has been reporting from Gaza since 1998. He has run Al Jazeera's bureau there for most of the past two decades, and the world came to know his face only in the year the work became unsurvivable.
The career is older and larger than that year.
Zaytoun, and seven years#
He was born on 30 April 1970 in Zaytoun, the oldest neighbourhood of Gaza City.
He finished secondary school in 1988, during the first Intifada, and was arrested almost immediately. He served seven years in Israeli prison. He took his degrees afterwards, at the Islamic University of Gaza and Al-Quds University.
The long apprenticeship#
He began in print in 1998, at the Al-Quds newspaper. During the second Intifada he reported for the Voice of Palestine, then for Al Arabiya.
He joined Al Jazeera in 2004 and rose to run its Gaza bureau — the job of deciding, every day, which of a besieged territory's stories the Arab world sees.
By 2013 he had the Peace Through Media Award. By 2023 he had been covering the same strip of land for twenty-five years, through blockades, three major assaults and every election and closure in between.
The year that made him known#
On 25 October 2023 an Israeli strike hit the house in Nuseirat where his family had taken shelter, after they moved south on Israel's own evacuation instruction. His wife Amna, his son Mahmoud, his daughter Sham and his infant grandson Adam were killed, along with at least eight other relatives.
He learned of it while on air. He went to the hospital, and then he went back to work.
In December an Israeli strike on a school killed his cameraman and close friend Samer Abu Daqqa and left Al-Dahdouh seriously wounded in the hand. On 7 January 2024 a drone strike in Khan Younis killed his eldest son Hamza, twenty-seven, who was also an Al Jazeera journalist.
He continued to broadcast.
My colleagues are killed on live television. The world does nothing.
What the juries said#
The recognition that followed was unusually broad, and it came from organisations that do not normally agree on anything.
- Amnesty International Australia named him its 2025 Human Rights Defender, citing his documentation of war crimes.
- He gave the address at the Amnesty Media Awards at BFI Southbank in London in June 2025.
- The National Press Club in Washington gave him its highest award.
- India's Kerala Media Academy named him Mediaperson of the Year.
He has since spoken at SOAS in London on reporting and survival, and travels as one of the few Gaza correspondents able to address international audiences directly.
What the record actually shows#
It would be easy, and wrong, to file Al-Dahdouh under grief. The grief is real and he has never hidden it. But it is not the achievement.
The achievement is twenty-eight years of continuous local reporting from a place most news organisations cover by phone from another country — the sourcing, the contacts, the geography held in one head, the judgement about which claim is solid enough to broadcast.
That is why the bureau kept functioning when almost nothing else in Gaza did, and it is why the prizes came from press institutes rather than only from human rights groups.
He built the newsroom before the world was watching it. He kept it running while the world was.
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