On December 8, 2023, the Israeli army invaded my family’s neighborhood in northern Gaza, with the sound of shells and the drone of aircraft overhead. Soldiers forced us to raise our hands and separated us by gender. Men, including my father, were ordered to strip and taken for interrogation. A military dog blocked my path as we were being forced out of our house. My father was interrogated and then released, and we left together as a family. We ran through the cold, rainy night, our minds on survival.
That same week, our neighbor Abu Salim was killed by a drone missile, and the Al-Nakhala family’s house was set on fire while they were inside. When I later searched for any news from our neighborhood, I found nothing. I knew I had to record what I witnessed—if I did not, who would tell the world?
From the beginning of Israel’s siege on Gaza in October 2023, English-language mainstream news coverage largely focused on Israeli airstrikes and displacement conditions in southern Gaza and hostage-related developments, while giving limited attention to northern Gaza. It largely ignored the ground invasion, the siege, and the starvation, as though northern Gaza was empty. In reality, at least 400,000 people remained trapped here, with almost no food, water, or medical care.
As the invasion intensified, Israel issued sweeping evacuation orders for northern Gaza in October 2023, directing roughly 1.1 million residents to move south within twenty-four hours. News bureaus and local reporters evacuated, leaving the north with very few professional journalists on the ground. At the same time, foreign journalists were barred from entering Gaza, a restriction the Committee to Protect Journalists said created a “news void” across northern Gaza.
In some cases, pressure on journalists in Gaza extended beyond general evacuation orders. The family of an Al Jazeera correspondent received a direct warning to leave their home in Gaza City ahead of intensified bombardment, highlighting the risks faced by reporters and their families while continuing to document events on the ground.
A June 2025 joint public appeal from more than 200 press organizations demanded Israeli authorities allow foreign journalists into Gaza, warning that the ban was creating space for misinformation to flourish. The Biden Administration did not press Israel to lift the restrictions. In August 2025, the Trump Administration expressed support for allowing reporters in, but there was no sustained or visible diplomatic pressure. The U.S. government’s overall inaction left the story of northern Gaza largely in the hands of the people living it.
Ordinary residents stepped in to capture what traditional news platforms could not, using smartphones, posting to social media, and sharing story ideas with journalists outside Gaza, often without training or protection. Some of these people emerged as citizen journalists who gained global visibility, including figures such as Bisan Owda, whose reporting for her series It’s Bisan from Gaza and I’m Still Alive received major international recognition, including a 2024 Peabody Award and a 2024 News and Documentary Emmy Award.
Mohammad Tamous was twenty years old when the war began and had volunteered with Palestinian Civil Defense, an emergency response service responsible for search and rescue, firefighting, and emergency medical services. For Mohammad, that looked like responding to calls from bombed sites, arriving at collapsed buildings, and searching through rubble for survivors. On November 22, 2023, while responding to a collapsed building in the North Gaza city of Beit Lahiya, an Israeli strike hit the five-story structure directly. Mohammad survived, but his civil defense colleague did not—and no one reported the incident.
“I thought: Why doesn’t the world see what is happening to us?” he tells The Progressive.
From that moment, he began documenting every rescue and emergency response mission. But he quickly ran into a problem—he couldn’t film and carry out rescue work at the same time. For a while, he held his phone in one hand while working with the other. Then he approached a tailor, and together they designed a chest mount that secured the phone and freed his hands.
“After that, I could document and do my job normally,” he says. The device became so recognizable that other journalists and media workers asked for their own.
In October 2024, in the Jabalia refugee camp, he recorded the aftermath of an attack on Yemen Al-Said Hospital, which was engulfed in flames after a strike. A tent within the hospital grounds, sheltering displaced people, was hit. Civil defense volunteers, including Mohammad, rushed toward the fire as gunfire erupted around them. Mohammad held the camera, narrating the scene while bodies were pulled from the wreckage.
As the siege tightened, Mohammad became one of the few remaining witnesses to it. There were no medical or civil defense services and no international journalists. “We were dying slowly,” he says, “and no one knew anything about us.” He documented the conditions facing survivors, including access to food and water, as well as incidents of violence and killings,sending footage to news channels while posting on his own social media pages.
About 85 percent of his audience is international—people he communicates with through translation tools. “Many people have become very attached to me,” he says. “When I disappear for two days, they write asking what happened.” Some have told him they want to visit. Others have said they want him to visit them.
For Mohammad, the camera lets him show what no one else could. For Ohood Nassar, writing is the only way to keep the people she lost alive in memory.
In January 2024, Ohood learned that her closest friend, Maryam Hamad, had died through a Facebook post. She had been unable to connect to the Internet for weeks, so she couldn’t reach Maryam. By the time the connection was restored, Maryam had already been killed when a tank shell struck the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestine Refugees school where she and her family were sheltering. It took a month for Ohood to receive the news.
The two were friends for fourteen years. Before the war, Ohood was a university student and volunteer teacher with no background in journalism. She was twenty-one when she wrote her first article, a eulogy for Maryam. “I wanted everyone to know her and remember her,” she tells The Progressive. She published it on We Are Not Numbers, a Palestinian youth writing platform connecting local stories with international audiences. Her next piece was about her own graduation. About thirty-five articles followed across different platforms and outlets.
“At first, my work was only personal,” she says. “Then I started writing reports, and that is when I began to feel like a journalist.” Her reporting now covers the war’s impact on civilians and untold stories, including the use of virtual reality therapy when doctors could no longer provide traditional care.
Ohood has noticed that international audiences respond most to personal stories, with editors and mentors abroad drawn to accounts documenting her own life during the war. Today, she chooses her topics with caution. “The assassination of journalists is one of the reasons I sometimes refuse to write certain articles,” she says. “Out of fear.”
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, about 250 journalists and media workers have been killed since October 2023, making it the deadliest conflict on record for the press.
In early January 2024, U.S. National Security Council Coordinator John Kirby told reporters that the United States had not seen evidence that Israeli forces were deliberately targeting journalists. The position has not shifted under the Trump Administration. When State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce was asked in August 2025 whether the United States would support an independent investigation into the killing of a team of Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza, she repeated Israeli claims that correspondent Anas al-Sharif “was part of Hamas,” adding that “Hamas, historically, has had members who are embedded in society, including posing as journalists.”
Yet, in the two years since October 7, 2023, the U.S. government has spent $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel, a figure that does not include additional arms sales agreements committed for future delivery.
The void left by these deaths and by the ban on foreign reporters has been filled largely by people like Mohammad and Ohood, who are often unpaid, unprotected, and working without appropriate equipment, determined to show the world what they witness.