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Around half past six in the evening on Tuesday, after she’d been out reporting, Shrouq Aila, a Palestinian journalist in Gaza, headed home. “I’m super exhausted because I haven’t had a meal,” she said. She had last eaten the day before—only once, and it was just rice. She was fortunate to get hold of a few dates, she told me, but she left them for her two-year-old daughter, Dania. Aila said that Dania is growing up on paltry food, much of it without nutritional value, “because she has spent more than half of her age in such dire circumstances.”
Those circumstances, for the past year and a half, have led to extreme levels of starvation in Gaza—where, according to the United Nations, the local health ministry has recorded more than a hundred Palestinian deaths from malnutrition, including fifteen within a recent twenty-four-hour period. Hundreds more have been killed while trying to get food, per the UN, and one in three is going days without eating.
Journalists are among them. This week, the editorial committee of Agence France-Presse, an international news agency headquartered in Paris, released a statement warning of the consequences. “Without immediate intervention, the last reporters in Gaza will die,” the message went. AFP staff journalists left last year, as members of the international press were banned from the territory. The organization has since worked with freelancers, including visual journalists, “now the only ones left to report what is happening in the Gaza Strip.” These reporters have survived air strikes, economic collapse, and lack of access to healthcare. (Since October 2023, according to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, more than 230 journalists and media workers in Gaza have been killed.) “We are watching their situation get worse,” the statement continued. “They’re young but their strength is leaving them. Most are no longer physically able to get around the enclave to do their work. Their heartbreaking cries for help are now daily.” Their most pressing needs are food and water.
“I have just gone out to look for anything edible for my family, though I doubt I’ll find much,” Abdulrahman Ismail, a young visual journalist in Gaza, told me on Tuesday evening. (He’d recently spent forty-eight hours without food, until he came across a little girl in the market selling half a piece of bread, which he bought for six dollars.) More than two hours later, he reported back: he’d found nothing. He quoted a colleague: “I used to chase the truth. Now I chase calories.”
Aila noted, too, that water, where she can find it, is often non-potable. “There are many diseases,” she said. “I have stored water bottles at my home, and those are the only ones that I can drink. Otherwise, I will be facing diarrhea, colon problems, and so on.” Ismail told me, “Some of us drink salt water just to remain standing while we work. Others chew dried herbs or wild leaves to quiet the screaming inside. There are moments when my hands tremble too hard to hold a pen, when I can’t focus my eyes on the camera lens in front of me.” He added, “The hunger scrambles everything—thought, memory, even language.”
AFP’s call drove attention to the plight of journalists beyond its network. “Journalists in Gaza have risked bombs, bullets, and now starvation to tell the stories those in power don’t want told. Their courage is remarkable,” Seth Stern, the director of advocacy of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told me. “Journalists and historians will find a way to tell the world the truth, and the scale of the atrocities will be undeniable. And no matter what else they do while in power, governments and presidents that supported these horrors, and tolerated the killing of journalists who reported on them, will be remembered first and foremost for their complicity.” Anthony Bellanger, the general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, released a statement imploring the Israeli government to stop “weaponising starvation against the people of Gaza” and to “allow foreign journalists to enter Gaza and facilitate the evacuations of local journalists in need.”
“As these journalists face starvation, displacement, and constant threat of attack, the international community risks losing its last independent source of reporting from inside Gaza,” Sara Qudah, the regional director for the Middle East and North Africa at the Committee to Protect Journalists, told me. “That’s not just a loss of information—it’s a collapse in transparency, a blow to advocacy for civilians, and a dangerous opening for impunity. Silencing journalists under these conditions is not simply a media freedom issue—it’s a crisis of global accountability.”
The lack of access to food, now an acute situation, has been in the making for months. Early this year, Abubaker Abed, a Palestinian journalist who had been reporting from Gaza, was diagnosed with malnutrition. “I would always get so exhausted and fatigued,” he said. In April, his deteriorating health—combined with other threats to his physical safety—forced him to leave. He is now living in Ireland, keeping in touch with colleagues remotely. One of them, he noted, can hardly go outside, much less report the news: “His main priority at the moment is to find food for his family,” Abed said.
Aila faces the same impossible choice. “It was very hot today,” she told me—temperatures in Gaza have been above ninety degrees. “I felt like I’m about to lose my consciousness at any moment because of working in the sun without having had anything to eat or drink.”
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