New Delhi: In September, I will begin my journalism traineeship.

I have never been one for personal heroes. But if I could claim even a fraction of the courage of the 186 journalists killed by Israel in Gaza, I would consider my career worth something.

Palestinian journalists told the stories the powerful did not want told while much of the world argued over whether it was even permissible to speak up – whether it was even polite, let alone ethical – to condemn a genocide in progress. They worked with full knowledge that the occupation would hunt them down.

For nearly two years, Israel has sealed Gaza off from international reporters. Every scrap of footage, every casualty list, every image of mass graves has come from Palestinians who became journalists by necessity. They worked while displaced, hungry, mourning their families, knowing their press vests were targets.

Let me say again: Palestinian journalists are documenting the bombardment from inside their own wrecked streets, queuing for bread and risking death at aid distribution points before racing to capture images of the latest strike.

And what did the West’s prestige media do? Some media corporations and their allies treated Israeli statements as gospel. The rest of the world was – and is – drip-fed headlines parroting Israeli handouts. Palestinian health data is bracketed with caveats (“Hamas-run ministry says”) as if civilian deaths become less real when the numbers come from the colonised.

In Germany, for example, Bild, the country’s most-read tabloid, went further, running a stenographer’s copy of an Israeli military press release to brand the assassinated journalist Anas al-Sharif with the headline: Getöteter Journalist soll Terrorist gewesen sein – Israelische Armee behauptet: Er war Hamas-Drahtzieher und arbeitete für Al Jazeera. 

That translates as: “Killed journalist said to be a terrorist – Israeli army claims he was a Hamas ringleader and worked for Al Jazeera.”

This and several such stories, as Hanno Hauenstein notes in The Guardian, reproduced the Israeli claim verbatim, without independent verification, sealing the accusation in the public record before the dead could be buried.

The BBC’s Jerusalem correspondent Jon Donnison wrote in live reporting at 13:49 CEST on 11 August: “[…] there is the question of proportionality. In targeting Sharif, the IDF killed four other Al Jazeera journalists with no suggestion of any links to Hamas.”

The invocation of “proportionality” here is not just morally grotesque, it is journalistically reckless. As Jonathan Cook, winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism, points out, it implies there could ever be a calculable, acceptable ratio of civilian journalists killed to justify an assassination. In international law, targeting one journalist is already a war crime. To casually wonder whether five might be too many is to weigh lives like statistics, not human beings. Such framing not only dehumanises the victims – it erodes the very principle of press protection in war.

The BBC, in a separate instance, pulled back from airing a documentary – Doctors Under Attack – that it had commissioned, which met its own editorial standards and was backed by overwhelming evidence from doctors and humanitarian bodies.

One of Europe’s largest journalist associations, the Deutscher Journalisten-Verband (DJV), even issued a statement warning journalists of unspecified “manipulation attempts” involving photos of “severely emaciated children published in international media whose condition is apparently not due to the famine in Gaza.”

Instead of condemning the atrocity depicted, the DJV chose to spotlight the supposed risk of misinformation, a move that casts suspicion not just on the photos, but on the credibility of Palestinian suffering itself.

Some media have chosen the silence of bureaucratic cowardice over the clarity of truth. Governments and recruiters now whisper warnings to young journalists: avoid certain words, avoid certain truths.

Direct action groups like Palestine Action are banned and smeared as terrorists for spraying paint on a British plane. The tragic irony is that the same government chokes back its voice on Israel’s genocide. Even genocide scholars are dismissed (21:56), as the renowned Israeli-American scholar Professor Omer Bartov painfully admits (23:44). The principle that the accused cannot investigate themselves is ignored, with Israel invited to examine its own crimes. Fifteen emergency medics were shot dead at point-blank range by Israeli forces. Their bodies and flattened ambulance were buried in sand to hide the evidence. Only a grave gave them back.

Change the geography to Ukraine and the vocabulary transforms. No “Hamas-run ministry” – only “the Ukrainian government said.” No “special military operation” – only “Russia’s unprovoked aggression.” It is “Russia-Ukraine war,” not “Gaza conflict.” 

Hawkish urgency for one people; caveats and suspicion for another. One would be a fool to call it an accident. It is the colonial mind at work.

None of this diminishes the horror of Russia’s war on Ukraine. It exposes the hierarchy of language in Western reporting – a hierarchy that decides whose dead deserve unqualified mourning and humanised stories, and whose killers deserve debate.

Despite receiving more daily coverage than many ongoing conflicts in Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, Sudan and Chad, Gaza is narrated through a vocabulary that strips its people of humanity. The very words used to describe the violence imply inevitability and mutual blame, rather than an act of deliberate destruction.

But the reporting on other conflicts is not markedly different. The Atlantic’s September 2025 cover called Sudan ‘The War About Nothing’. There’s record-price gold, a militia born of a dictatorship’s dirty work, an economic collapse after oil-rich South Sudan’s secession, and warring military regimes propped up by global powers. If anything, it is the war about everything. 

The Continent offers the alternative: five Sudanese reporters telling the story with nuance. The two covers – one reductionist, one grounded – speak for themselves.

This flattening of complexity into dismissive shorthand mirrors how Palestine’s reality is reduced and reframed. In all these cases, the stripped-down narrative shapes public perception before facts or context can take root. And in Gaza, it erases not only the living but the truth of the dead.

Anas al-Sharif, murdered alongside four Al Jazeera colleagues, left his final will and words. He wrote of gratitude, of love, of his dream for Palestine’s future. There is no hatred, no call for revenge – only a dream of freedom.

I am about to step into a profession where the expectation, at least in Western newsrooms, is that I will swallow my words. That I will understand the “nuance” that makes one child’s life count more than another’s in the headlines. That I will avoid saying what is plainly true if it risks offending the powerful.

I hope I fail at that. 

I don’t know if I could stand with the clarity and courage of Anas al-Sharif and his colleagues, knowing the bullet was coming for me. But I want to try.

I hope I have an iota of the courage of those journalists in Gaza. Just an iota. Go well, my heroes.

Pius Fozan is a photojournalist, researcher at the Media and Journalism Research Center, and regular contributor to The European Correspondent, Scroll, and The Wire.

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