As a journalist who has covered warfare in Africa and the Middle East, I was appalled by the news that a hospital in Gaza had been hit twice by the Israeli military. Among the 20 reported killed, five were Palestinian journalists. Targeting a hospital, no matter the pretext, is sure to leave considerable collateral damage, and no amount of apology is sufficient.
In 1987, I was standing on a balcony in Beirut with Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) watching missiles flying over our building with no understanding where they landed and luckily we were not hit. A year later, I was in Angola where the war between UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) and the People’s Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola (FAPLA) was underway and centered on the battle of Cuito Cuanavale. This conflict was magnified by the involvement of the Cubans and the South African mercenaries, and this made the situation all the more precarious.
The point here is that covering a war, whether traveling as a freelancer, a correspondent or an embedded journalist is a dangerous and risky endeavor. And when you have a combatant with no respect for journalists or hospitals, the possibility of being a casualty is even greater.
I was lucky to survive these encounters but my heart goes out to the Palestinian journalists, particularly to the family of Anas al-Sharif, and the families of the nearly two hundred — according to the Committee to Protect Journalists — who have been killed since the war between Hamas and Israel began.
Beyond the deaths of the journalists, a larger issue is the number of Palestinian civilians who have been killed, including more than 18,000 children. We can debate the cause of this conflict, who started it, and whether it is merely another battle in a “forever war,” but it’s hard to ignore the genocidal elements reported each day, so much so that even Israeli organizations are beginning to speak out against any further devastation.
But even as we voice our distress, the IDF is on the move into the Gaza Strip, so we know the outcome.