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THIS SUNDAY, WE thought we would choose seven longreads that focus on Gaza.
We’ve hand-picked some of the week’s best reporting on what is going on on the ground in the besieged territory that deserve your attention.
The normal markers of childhood in Gaza have been replaced by hunger, fear and trauma. Most no longer have access to education, and thousands have been orphaned. Some of those children tell their stories in this piece.
(The New York Times Magazine, approx 14 mins reading time)
Before the war, Ms. Abu Hilal said, Tala was the star of her class and sometimes got up in the middle of the night to cram for tests. “I wanted to be a doctor,” Tala said in an interview alongside her mother. “I wanted my daddy to build a hospital for me. I wanted to treat everyone for free. My daddy is in heaven now.” Their father, Ashraf Abu Hilal, a former janitor, tried to return to their home last August, seeking to retrieve some goods that he could sell for food, according to Ms. Abu Hilal. He never returned. A day later, his brother spotted him lying dead in a nearby street, Ms. Abu Hilal said. Nearby gunfire prevented the brother from reaching Ashraf’s body or discerning how he had died, Ms. Abu Hilal added. By the time they could reach the street safely, months later, little was left of the body, she said. (The Israeli military said it was unaware of the episode.) “I hear how other kids call their dads — and their dad’s reply,” Ms. Abu Hilal recalled Hala telling her. “I wish baba could answer me, too.”
Israel does not allow international journalists into Gaza, and those already working there are being killed and facing starvation. In this piece, AFP’s global news director speaks about the situation facing freelancers and other journalists trying to do their jobs.
(Reuters, approx 10 mins reading time)
From the very beginning, our journalists who were there, and now the people who work for us, have had to focus on trying to keep their families and relatives alive and fed. And that takes up a huge amount of time, stress and work every day. Sometimes that involves moving house, apartment, or place, because the dangers are coming and going all the time. That’s a big part of the daily struggle; it’s sometimes astonishing they manage to do any work at all. And then you have to imagine currently doing that in a context where people are extremely weak from lack of food. Our freelancers are all surviving on small amounts of food. They are all tired. Some of them have lost 20 or 30 kilos. They are all involved in that battle for food. A lot of them talk about dizziness, headaches, and weakness. Some days, they are just not able to get up. Another thing to bear in mind is that there’s no real transport in Gaza. We think of Gaza as being a small place, which it is, but an event can happen, and to get there, some of our people will have to walk up to 25 kilometres a day.
Marion McKeone speaks to an NHS nurse working in a field hospital in Gaza about the suffering and starvation he is witnessing there.
(The Journal, approx 9 mins reading time)
As starvation takes root in Gaza, cases like Adel’s are becoming increasingly common. “The images you’re seeing now are a result of weeks and months of malnutrition,” he says. “Their bodies have become so damaged by malnutrition we’re dealing with infections, with diarrhoea and respiratory diseases and all that has a massive impact on their ability to recover.” “We’re seeing an increasing number of children and adults with disabilities and women who are pregnant coming in in the latter stages of malnutrition. Many of them have reached a stage that is ultimately unrecoverable.” Compounding the crisis is the lack of even the most basic medical supplies. “We put in an order five or six months ago for (medications and equipment) which we’ve had sitting in our warehouse in Stockport since then, just waiting for permission to bring it in,” Andersen says. “We do what we can, but we’ve run out of even basic medications. We’re running out of antibiotics. Even for something as simple as a wound infection, he says, not having the right antibiotics can mean the difference between life and death.”
Ghada Abdulfattah reports on the daily struggle of families to feed themselves in Gaza.
(The Atlantic, approx 8 mins reading time)
In the late evening, Asala’s children again started asking about food. She tried to hush Nada with water, and to distract the others, telling them that the tikkiya might come again tomorrow, or the camp committee might give them something. In past weeks, Asala would sometimes walk to her neighbor’s tents to ask if anyone had a spare loaf of bread. The answer was almost always “no.” Now and then Mohammad hears about aid trucks passing through the border to supply organizations such as the World Food Program. He joins the crowds of men who follow these trucks, but he often returns empty-handed. At times, Asala has followed him secretly. “I just want to bring something home,” she told me. She described a dangerous scramble, crowds swelling with desperation: “Some bring sticks. Some guns.” Once, her husband returned with a few cans of tomato paste he found on the ground, crushed under people’s feet. “They were cracked open and mixed with sand. I took it anyway.”
Six Al Jazeera journalists were killed by an Israeli strike last week. According to Reporters Without Borders, they are among more than 200 media professionals who have been killed by the IDF in Gaza.
This piece is an investigation into an Israeli military unit that has been tasked with portraying Gaza-based journalists as undercover Hamas operatives.
(+972 Magazine, approx 7 mins reading time)
The source described a recurring pattern in the unit’s work: whenever criticism of Israel in the media intensified on a particular issue, the Legitimization Cell was told to find intelligence that could be declassified and employed publicly to counter the narrative. “If the global media is talking about Israel killing innocent journalists, then immediately there’s a push to find one journalist who might not be so innocent — as if that somehow makes killing the other 20 acceptable,” the intelligence source said. Often, it was Israel’s political echelon that dictated to the army which intelligence areas the unit should focus on, another source added. Information gathered by the Legitimization Cell was also passed regularly to the Americans through direct channels. Intelligence officers said they were told their work was vital to allowing Israel to prolong the war.
Between 2010 and 2013, Phoebe Greenwood was reporting on Palestine. She reflects on the atrocities she saw there and the disinterest of news audiences, and says the world’s outrage has come too late.
(The Guardian, approx 8 mins reading time)
I lasted a little under four years in Israel and Palestine. In that time, I reported on forced displacement and punitive bureaucracy (Israel’s occupation is expanded through denied permits, home demolitions and revoked ID cards). I wrote about child killings, war crimes and terrorism (perpetrated by both sides). I tried to explain as best I could the annexation of the West Bank and the collective punishment of two million people in Gaza without using forbidden phrases such as apartheid or war crime. I included the necessary balance of voices and opinions. But still, every report of an atrocity in Palestine was met with highly personal accusations of bias. Editors were often twitchy, readers disengaged. After two years of this, a grim reality became clear: people did not want to hear about it. By year three, I had started giving up trying to make them listen and the self-loathing arrived. Cynicism among reporters is a useful cipher for the fear, desperation and impotence that news industry norms do not allow them, but it has a dangerous side-effect: it dulls outrage. Without outrage, crimes such as apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide can continue uninterrupted – and they have.
A profile of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu from January 2024.
(The New Yorker, approx 50 mins reading time)
It wasn’t just the Tel Aviv left that had come to view Netanyahu as a threat to the state. Even old allies on the right could no longer ignore the spectacle of his narcissism and self-dealing. Michael Oren, a former member of the Knesset and Ambassador to the U.S. under Netanyahu, was one of many who trotted out the apocryphal remark of Louis XIV, “L’état, c’est moi”—the state is me—to characterize the Prime Minister’s attitude. Netanyahu, Oren told me, “seems unable to distinguish between personal and political interests.” Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet, the country’s internal security service, described Netanyahu to me as “a person who will sell out everyone and everything in order to stay in power.” Moshe Ya’alon, the defense minister from 2013 to 2016, told me that Netanyahu’s ideology is now “personal political survival,” adding that his coalition partners “don’t represent the vast majority of the Israeli people” and are “so messianic that they believe in Jewish supremacy—‘Mein Kampf’ in the opposite direction. They’ve taken Netanyahu hostage.”
Note: The Journal generally selects stories that are not paywalled, but some might not be accessible if you have exceeded your free article limit on the site in question.
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