The targeted killing of 23-year-old Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat on March 24 came after months of ceaseless harassment from Israeli occupation forces who would torment him with threatening phone calls and messages, demanding he stop his coverage from the besieged Gaza Strip. These false accusations, Hossam once wrote, “constitute the threat of assassination and a clear attempt to justify our preemptive killing.” Even after being placed on a kill list and then deliberately targeted by Israeli drones in November 2024, which left him injured, he returned to the field and kept reporting from on the ground in Gaza. In February, after 492 days without seeing his mother, they were reunited, a joyous occasion that some believed marked the end of the genocide—not even one month later, his grieving mother would collapse at the sight of her son, dressed in his press gear, now a martyr. Hossam Shabat is one of 208 Palestinian journalists killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7, 2023. In his final message, published by his colleagues and written in case of his martyrdom, he emphasized his dedication to his homeland and called on the world not to look away.
“By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to report the truth, and now, I am finally at rest—something I haven’t known in the past 18 months,” Shabat wrote. “I did all this because I believe in the Palestinian cause. I believe this land is ours, and it has been the highest honor of my life to die defending it and serving its people. I ask you now: do not stop speaking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting, keep telling our stories—until Palestine is free.”
Palestinian writer and poet Refaat Alareer, killed by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023, once wrote that “a Palestinian in Gaza born in 2008 has witnessed seven wars: 2008–2009, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2022, 2023A and 2023B. And as the habit goes in Gaza, people can be seven wars old or four wars old.” Hossam Shabat was born into and forced to endure the man-made siege of his land, and decades of massacres that took not only his youth, but his life. “Last year, around this time, I was a journalism student worrying about my exams,” Hossam wrote. “I never thought I would be given the biggest assignment of my life just a week later. I didn’t know that instead of taking my final exam, I would be covering the genocide of my own people. That young college student is long gone; what I witnessed in the past year changed me forever.”
Before his assassination, Israel also killed Shabat’s colleague Mohammad Mansour, a correspondent for Palestine Today, along with his wife and child in Khan Younis. In a video from the aftermath of the Israeli attack on his son, Mansour’s elderly father clutched his hands, placing his microphone between them, begging him to get up and speak: “Get up and speak. Speak. Tell the world [what is happening]. If only I was a journalist and could continue this path for you.”
Shabat’s colleague, author and journalist Jeremy Scahill, described Hossam as “a lyrical, poetic, somehow optimistic, human being with remarkable courage [and] dedication.” In a statement released by Drop Site News, one of the outlets to feature Hossam Shabat’s work, the publication held Israel and the United States directly responsible for the killing of Shabat. “More than 200 of our Palestinian media colleagues have been killed by Israel—supplied with weapons and given blanket impunity by most Western governments—over the past seventeen months… the silence of so many of our colleagues in the Western media is a stain on the profession.” Reacting to the killing of Hossam Shabat, a Palestinian Twitter user said that “[t]he idea that Western journalists are responsible for Hossam’s martyrdom today is not a slogan. Their total journalistic malpractice and regurgitation of Zionist propaganda has left Palestinian journalists exposed, as a precious few who publish the truth, and, therefore: targets.”
Speaking to Palestinians in Gaza for Splinter, each one, both young and old, said that the killing of Hossam Shabat felt like the death of their own son and brother. Adnan, a father of three who has faced forced internal displacement at least six times, said that he would give his life in exchange for Hossam to live another day amongst his people. “Hossam was the voice of Gaza. He was the eyes of our people. He was a young man who deserved a life of freedom and joy. He should have graduated from university and gotten married and had children, and instead our nation buries another martyr who chose to fight on behalf of his land with his voice, so that he can show the world the crimes being carried out against us. Our hearts are broken for him and for his pure family. Palestine has lost another son.”
Palestinian author and founder of the publication Electronic Intifada stressed that Hossam’s “vest and helmet didn’t protect him.” On the contrary, Israel has made it its mission to go after any and all journalists in Gaza, along with their families—crimes that are not only fueled by Western armaments but by Western impunity and the silence of countless Western stenographers who have done little more than serve as willing mouthpieces of the US-Israeli genocide. Palestinian journalist Ahmad Hijazi, reporting from Gaza in December 2023, said that “the press vest cannot protect any journalist, it can only protect us from the cold.” During a recent broadcast from Gaza for Al Jazeera, Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif mourned his colleague, describing him as “not just a brother or another passing journalist, but a pure soul walking the earth. He lived the news in every detail, and witnessed his people’s suffering, conveying their voices and their pain.”
“Every day I looked for Hossam’s updates,” Amal, a 36-year-old woman from Gaza tells Splinter. “We saw a young man filled with courage, hope, and love for his people. His smile was contagious, even when we knew it hid so much pain. He made us proud to say we are from Gaza. His death has shattered us. What will it take for the people of the world to rise up? How many more Hossam’s must perish for this to end?”
Hossam Shabat, at just 23-years-old, has more than fulfilled his duty as a journalist during his short time on earth. Through his eyes we saw a Gaza that is resilient, enduring, and unwilling to submit to subjugation. In besieged Gaza, Hossam Shabat was born, and there he would be killed, without ever experiencing a single day in his 23 years untouched by Israel’s brutal colonial violence, which perpetually closed in on his people like a tightening noose. And yet, through his work and the efforts of countless other Palestinians mercilessly targeted by Israel throughout occupied Palestine—from Fadel Shana’a to Shireen Abu Akleh—the people of the world have discovered Palestine and its people beyond the orientalist confines of the Western press. For many outside the region, this genocide was the first time they had heard the voice of the Palestinian people, unchained and proud. The world is a much darker place without them, but their stories and their voices, against all odds, will remain—like a thorn in the occupier’s eye.
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