Israeli Press
NYT's former Gaza correspondent says international media fails Gaza's journalists
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The world's leading news organisations are failing the Palestinian journalists of Gaza, Taghreed El-Khodary argues in an opinion piece the Israeli daily Haaretz published on Monday — and they must demand that Israel let their own reporters in, because leaving Gaza's journalists alone to document atrocities is a dereliction of duty.
"Journalists in Gaza mean nothing to everyone," she writes. "We are only useful as long as there is a story to tell."
Her charge is aimed at the newsrooms she knows from inside. Outlets rush to request interviews when a colleague in Gaza is killed, in her telling, and barely condemn the violence against them while they are alive.
The author has stood where they stand#
El-Khodary reported from Gaza for the New York Times from 2001 to 2009. In the 2008-09 war, with Israel barring foreign correspondents at the crossing, she was among the only reporters filing from inside — the same arrangement, war after war, that her piece indicts.
She resigned from the Times in 2010, saying it was "not wise" to stay after the paper's Jerusalem bureau chief was revealed to have a son serving in the Israeli army, and later studied Gaza's future as a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment.
The route to print#
The piece's publishing history is its second argument. The veteran Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab wrote on X that his friend offered the article to major London, New York and Washington papers, and all of them turned it down. Haaretz printed it.
By his account, the indictment of the international press could not find a page in the capitals it addresses — and ran instead in an Israeli newspaper, a year almost to the day after the killing of Anas al-Sharif and his Al Jazeera colleagues in Gaza.
