From the Frontlines

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I still remember every single time that one of my friends were targeted.

We're just getting some breaking news now that a journalist has been killed in an Israeli army.

Some of them

targeted their houses with their families.

Gaza Bureau Chief Wa'iled Dahdur lost his wife, two children, and a grandchild.

Others,

they were sleeping in tents inside of the hospitals.

News cameras were already trained on the Nasser hospital after an initial Israeli strike killed several people.

A short time later, a second Israeli strike hit as first responders and journalists have already rushed to the scene.

Targeting AP,

NPC,

and international media like Al Jazeera and others,

you just feel that you're gonna be the next person to be covered with white shrouds, and your own colleagues are taking photos of you, taking you to the cemetery, and after that, returning to keep reporting and saying, Allahul Hamu, which means rest in peace.

When journalists are silenced, the truth is gonna be buried with them.

This is NS Baba.

Since 2020, NS has been reporting for NPR from Gaza, where he was born and raised.

Like the 2 million other Palestinians in Gaza, NS has lived the past two years facing bombardment, displacement, and starvation.

What an independent UN inquiry has concluded is genocide.

Often I'm reporting with no protective gears because your own protective gears maybe is going to make you more on a target for the Israelis.

We move quickly, we move in foot, sometimes we hide our press vest.

Journalism is under unprecedented threat worldwide, from Mexico to China to Ukraine, Pakistan, Sudan, and Yemen.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has said the killing of 31 Yemeni journalists in an Israeli airstrike last week was the second deadliest single attack on the press ever recorded by the committee.

Reporters Without Borders estimates that at least 220 journalists have been killed in Gaza alone since the Hamas-led attack on October 7th, 2023.

That's more than were killed in the Vietnam War and the war in Afghanistan combined.

And it isn't even close.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says it's the deadliest conflict for journalists the group has ever documented.

And almost all of them are Palestinian.

Although some foreign journalists have embedded with the Israeli military, Israel has barred foreign journalists from independently entering Gaza for the last two years.

The vast majority of reporting you hear comes from local journalists like NS.

But even under bombardment, we continue to report.

Here in Gaza, after

this is the reality of Gaza, if you can hear it.

Was that an explosion that I just heard?

A helicopter is opening fire on the houses.

How close are you to that?

Are you in a safe place?

There is no safe place in Gaza, and there is nothing called where are you exactly safe or not?

Because bullets do not differentiate, and bullets do not know that's me working for an American outlet.

I'll be honest, I was pretty concerned for Ennis at this point.

But he seemed almost unfazed.

Death is a daily reality, a daily possibility for him.

Throughout nearly two years of war, Ennis has run toward airstrike after airstrike to bear witness to the aftermath and report back to you and me and millions of listeners, something that reporters have been doing for over a century now.

This is Drafalder Square.

The noise that you hear at the moment is the sound of the air raid siren.

A year of witnessing the ferocious war machine that the Bosnian Serb commander had unquestioned.

Hundreds of Taliban overran Barjmatal a week ago.

Did not like my reporting.

Our journey begins in Port Sudan.

Russian forces are trying to pressure Gostyan Donovkov from three sides.

We saw Masab's lifeless body lying on the floor next to the fridge.

Is this the press coming here again?

The press again, so they can strike here again.

Get the f out of here.

I'm Randabed Fattah.

I'm Ramteen Arab Louis.

On this episode of Through Line from NPR, we'll travel from the marshes of Vietnam to the Iraqi desert and back to the rubble-filled streets of Gaza to explore how journalists navigate the pressure of politics and propaganda to report from the front lines of war.

How they go about reporting the truth to people who may not even want to hear it.

And what's at stake when they can't tell those stories.

This is Cal from Chicago, and you're listening to ThruLine.

You are the history class I always wanted.

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War in South Vietnam.

An ugly war in a far-off place to which the United States is deeply committed.

Part 1.

The uncensored war.

It's 1964.

U.S.

military advisors have already been in Vietnam for over a decade.

By the spring of 1964, the Viet Cong had reached a strength of an estimated 60,000 troops and controlled nearly 68% of South Vietnam's villages and temples.

Successive U.S.

administrations said they were in Vietnam to prevent communism from spreading throughout Southeast Asia, and things weren't going well.

But most Americans weren't paying much attention to the conflict.

This is a war that begins in a very sort of slow way, that initially was largely ignored.

This is Susan Carruthers, historian at the University of Warwick and author of the book, The Media at War.

Jim Crow, political assassinations, voting rights, those domestic issues were much more top of mind.

But then...

On the night of August 4th, 1964, President Johnson appeared on national television.

Renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today.

Following a disputed incident in the Gulf of Tonkin involving an exchange of fire between U.S.

and North Vietnamese ships, Congress, with near-unanimous support in the House and Senate, then passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized President Lyndon Johnson to escalate military involvement in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war.

And suddenly, the draft was ramped up.

And more and more thousands of American men sent there.

Which led more Americans to ask questions about the war.

And news outlets responded.

This is what the war in Vietnam is all about.

American soldiers hiking their way through the sweaty jungles of South Vietnam, searching for an elusive enemy.

And of course, by 1967, 1968 is a staple of the nightly news on television.

It first appeared that the Marines had been sniped at and that a few houses were made to pay.

Film reels would be flown to Tokyo for quick editing and developing and then flown to the U.S.

There were three main networks broadcasting news from Vietnam: ABC, NBC, and CBS.

And the big publications like the New York Times and Time magazine also also sent their reporters there.

Blue didn't want to come to Vietnam, and he'd much rather be a businessman than a soldier.

But right now, he's in charge of the lives of 21 men.

Most of the reporting focused on the U.S.

perspective, American soldiers, policy, military strategy.

We might see Vietnamese peasants in obvious anguish, distressed, grieving.

But mostly the Vietnamese who featured an American news broadcast were silent.

A flurry of alternative and international media outlets were also reporting from Vietnam.

Many staff correspondents were headquartered in Saigon.

The full fury of the war has scarcely touched Saigon.

It attracts visitors.

GI is on leave and even American tourists anxious for a feel of the war.

I remember the day after I got there, I was asked to a party on top of the roof of Beth's hotel, the Carabelle.

There were roses and champagne and all kinds of wonderful things.

You'd think you were at home, you know.

But then over the edge of the parapet, you could see these flares coming up.

And the question was: whether it was incoming or outgoing,

You would never know until it happened.

This is Frances Fitzgerald.

She goes by Frankie.

In 1966, Frankie flew to Vietnam sort of on a whim.

She was 26 from a wealthy family and curious about the world.

So she decided to take a break from her local reporting job in New York to travel to Southeast Asia, wanting to see the place where her father had deployed during World War II.

She went to Thailand, Laos, and eventually landed in Vietnam.

I thought I would just spend a month there, do an article or two, pay my airfare back.

But when I got there, I found I couldn't leave.

I mean, I had never seen a war before, of course, and it was all too fascinating.

Frankie says she never really felt unsafe, even as one of the only women reporting there.

Some of the American soldiers and the Vietnamese soldiers were kind of furious I was there because they thought they would have to protect me, which I could understand.

And some just felt that their macho was diminished because a woman was there, so they didn't like that.

But journalists were allowed to go anywhere.

They could go out with the troops.

Nobody was holding their hands or stopping them.

Unlike in previous conflicts, like World War II, the U.S.

military made a conscious decision not to formally censor journalists.

They saw Vietnam as more of a limited conflict, not a full-scale war.

Every evening, a girl on spindle heels picks her way over the barrier of rotting fruit and onto the sidewalk.

Frankie arrived with a still film camera and a typewriter she'd packed into her suitcase.

And as a freelance journalist, she could pretty much report whatever stories she wanted.

It's just occurred to me that the thing that was missing was that the American high command

knew nothing about the Vietnamese.

Behind her, the alleyway carpeted with mud winds back past the facade of new houses into a maze of thatched huts and tin-roofed shacks called Bui Phat,

one of the oldest of the refugee quarters.

She got articles printed in the Village Voice, The Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Magazine, centering the Vietnamese perspective.

So walk me through, like, how did you actually go about

getting that perspective?

Because I'm assuming you didn't speak Vietnamese.

Well,

I found, I mean, I found several interpreters along the way.

That wasn't hard to do because people wanted to do that.

You make a lot of money that way.

And how would you know if someone was a good interpreter if you don't speak Vietnamese?

I could feel it.

Frankie would travel around the South Vietnamese countryside with her interpreter, hoping to connect with people.

But she wasn't always welcomed with open arms.

Americans do not normally walk through the slums.

Not the real slums, like those in the outlying areas.

She remembers going into a community where refugees were living in makeshift homes built on planks atop a marsh.

They were angry at being displaced from their villages and put in this marsh.

Gigantic sewers, lakes full of stagnant filth.

And suddenly, a pebble sails out and falls gently on the stranger's back.

It is followed by a hail of stones.

She began getting pelted with stones.

I was sort of offended by the sense that I thought, what have I done?

But I could very well understand.

If I had to live in such a place, I perhaps would be throwing stones too.

These refugees lose their lands, their families, their ancestral homes, and the structure of their lives.

Frankie says the key to finally connecting with people was just continuing to show up.

They would realize that you are not going to come and blow up the village.

How did you approach fact-checking?

Either things that the local Vietnamese people were telling you or the things that the u.s military or the vietnamese local police were telling you oh sometimes it was absolutely impossible you just have to do the best you could find other sources that said the same thing i think we're given certain leeway by our editors

there was a rule that you couldn't um prove anything in a story by quoting a vietnamese Wow.

So it was pretty explicit that if your source was a Vietnamese person versus an American commander, let's say,

the two statements are not equal.

Not equal.

Not equal.

And there were times when she felt the reality she was witnessing would be too unbelievable to her readers.

I went to see the civilian hospital.

And

then,

you know, I see all these

Vietnamese on beds outside their rooms with terrible burns, which they had from

napalm.

You know, to describe it right here is almost impossible for me.

It was so awful.

I didn't know what to do.

I reported some of it, but just not the really gruesome details.

Why did you leave the most gruesome details out, do you think?

Well, because I felt there wouldn't be credible, really,

I didn't have an organization behind me.

Everybody had this internal sensor, which sort of said, you know, how far can I go with this?

Is journalism's role to push the conversation if that's where the truth is leading?

Or is it to meet people where they are until they're ready to hear the sort of bigger ecstatic truth?

Well,

it's probably to do the first,

but at the expense of not having it printed at all.

To one people, the war would appear each day, compressed between advertisements and confined to a small space in the living room.

The explosion of bombs and the cries of the wounded would become the background accompaniment to dinner.

In 1972, Frankie published a series of articles in The New Yorker detailing her years of reporting from Vietnam that were then turned into a book called Fire in the Lake, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

For the other people, the war would come one day out of a clear blue sky.

In a few minutes, it would be over.

The bombs, released by an invisible pilot with incomprehensible intentions, would leave only the debris and the dead behind.

It was the first major book by an American profiling Vietnam, its history, its people, the impact of the war on them.

At the time, Frankie described the book as a quote, first draft of history.

Frankie's book was part of a chorus of reporting that had been fueling a growing anti-war movement for years.

So many Americans are not only opposed to the war, but vehemently out on the streets.

Public opinion had dramatically begun to shift going into 1968.

U.S.

troop numbers were at an all-time high.

And then came the Tet Offensive.

Communist forces swept through more than 100 South Vietnamese cities, towns, and villages.

American and South Vietnamese troops fought them back, and the North suffered huge losses.

It was militarily a win for the U.S., but optically, it was a resounding resounding defeat.

Reporters sent back photos that shook the American public.

In one, a South Vietnamese soldier stands over a North Vietnamese prisoner, pistol in hand, carrying out an execution.

Another shows bloodstains, bullet holes, and dead bodies at the U.S.

Embassy.

Susan Carruthers says, for much of the war in Vietnam, the news media was absolutely beholden to this Cold War template that the United States was there to try to prop up beleaguered South Vietnam.

And that changes only really after the consensus on Capitol Hill itself has started to break down.

Editors are more willing to sort of push the boundaries of the sayable, the showable.

It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.

About a month after the Tet Offensive, Walter Cronkite, the anchorman for CBS Evening News, known then as the most trusted man in America, recorded this broadcast after a trip to Vietnam.

It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.

After hearing this broadcast, President Johnson reportedly said, if I've lost Cronkite, Cronkite, I've lost Middle America.

And within weeks, he decided to not run for re-election.

It was seen by many as a turning point.

News coverage became overwhelmingly more negative.

Though the war would continue for another seven years until 1975, with the defeated U.S.

withdrawing the last of its combat troops two years earlier, journalists were credited with and blamed for ending the war.

They had risked life and limb, often without the the safety of a military escort, to report the truth.

More than 60 journalists paid the ultimate price for it.

And Vietnam came to be known as the uncensored war.

The obvious lesson that the U.S.

military and the British military, looking very carefully at all of this, learn,

is that they should never leave the media to be uncensored in any future conflict that they're fighting.

Coming up, War Reporting gets a makeover fit for TV.

Hello, this is Dominic Ballone from the oil fields of Douglas, Wyoming.

You're listening to True Line on NPR.

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Part 2.

Embedded.

It's April 2003, a year and a half after 9-11.

An overturned truck smolders on the side of the road, the bitter scent of diesel filling the air.

The metallic growl of armored vehicles churns through the sand.

Buildings pockmarked with bullet holes sit empty.

Cruise missiles streak across the night sky.

Operation Iraqi Freedom is underway.

Breaking news yet again, southwest or west of the city of Baghdad.

That is where we find Wald again.

Walt, good afternoon there.

What do you have?

Hello, Bill.

Serious American casualties in the battle for Baghdad this morning.

Great sleep deprivation.

There's no privacy.

You're in an armored vehicle or a Humvee, as I was in a Humvee.

This is Walter Rogers.

Army sources have told CNN that the casualties are at least six wounded.

He's a retired journalist who spent decades traveling from one conflict zone to the next, much of that time reporting on air for CNN.

He flew to Afghanistan during the Soviet war there, Sarajevo during the Bosnian genocide, southern Lebanon during Israel's occupation.

It was Winston Churchill who said there's nothing so exhilarating as being shot at and missed.

While embedded in Iraq, Walter went where the American soldiers went, living with troops, reporting under the jurisdiction of the military.

And his dispatches often ended with this editor's note, quote, this report was written in accordance with Pentagon ground rules, allowing so-called embedded reporting, in which journalists join deployed troops.

Among the rules accepted by all participating news organizations is an agreement not to disclose sensitive operational details.

Embedding is with whatever limitations you ascribe to it, embedding is always good because you get to see.

I mean, you can tell propaganda the stuff when it raises its ugly head.

The main reason given by the Bush administration for the invasion was that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.

A claim that many media outlets, including NPR, repeated in the lead up to the invasion, and that would turn out to not be true.

Now looking back, some people will say the media war correspondents who were reporting very much from the perspective of the U.S.

military and giving weight weight to what the administration was saying were their reasons for going to Iraq.

Some people now say, well, those journalists, they all helped sell the war.

As someone who was in Iraq at that time reporting,

what do you think of that?

Well, I'm reminded of an incident in Iraq at the end of this second or third week.

And one of the things that I recall was that

there were people who were trumpeting that first wave as a great invasion, that the Iraqis would welcome Americans with open arms.

We would ride through in convoys in those Iraqi villages and there was no celebration.

There was no welcoming the Americans there and the public didn't want to hear that.

So you can't tell people things they don't want to hear.

But did you ever feel like if the truth is something they don't want to hear, it still needs to be said because

it's the truth.

Yes, and it pox on management of the company you work for and tell you they don't want to hear what you're reporting because it didn't comply with the White House version of events.

Wow.

What did that actually mean in terms of the reporting?

I can't go into much specifics on this, but

sometimes they would say, well the white house won't like this so they've tempered your reporting so they would say take this out take that out no we don't want this shot yes don't say that

wow i mean would you use the word censorship

yes yes i would there was a definite effort in those days to skew the reporting of the reporter in the field and make it conform to what they felt the administration wanted.

We reached out to CNN about this and they had no comment.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq wasn't the first time the news media was accused by media watch groups and some journalists themselves of selling a war on behalf of the U.S.

government.

It wasn't the first time journalists were restricted in their coverage either.

In fact, Embedding was actually set up as a way to offer more access to the front lines because the Pentagon had received such strong criticism for restricting access to journalists during the first invasion of Iraq, a little over a decade earlier.

And an explosive development near the Persian Gulf.

In 1991, the U.S.

led a multinational invasion of Iraq after Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed its oil-rich neighbor, Kuwait.

This set off the first Gulf War.

Something is happening outside.

The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated.

We're seeing because there'd been a whole revolution in communications technology, the so-called CNN effect.

During the initial strikes on Baghdad, CNN was the only network reporting live.

Beamed into your living room in real time on camera 24-7.

To tens of millions of viewers in the U.S.

and around the world.

There's a lot of fire going up and in the middle.

And it puts CNN on the map in a big way.

Historian Susan Carruthers says this is when the US military employ the sort of full panoply of measures that will be wheeled out again in Afghanistan and Iraq of sort of forming the press into pools and having briefings, trying to make sure everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet, as it were.

She says the irony is this was the early days of the internet, and new technologies like email and satellite phones were making it logistically more possible than ever for a journalist to do what Frankie Fitzgerald had done in Vietnam, independently report from the battlefield.

Still, most journalists chose to follow the military's rules, and the few who didn't, they were liable to be accused of treachery, often by fellow journalists.

The BBC, for example, was branded the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation by some British journalistic critics.

And I think that's another very powerful disciplinary force, how other journalists often are so keen to whip their colleagues into line if they think that they are reporting too far from the other side.

So those sort of pressures to toe the line to report from within a very tightly bounded patriotic nationalist framework I think are remarkably persistent.

When the first Gulf War came to an end in 1991 and journalists were reflecting on the restrictions the U.S.

military had imposed during the war.

Many journalists and news organizations say this was a devastating defeat for the First Amendment.

We let ourselves be suckered into these arrangements.

Then that critique is trotted out again during the much longer conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The pressure that war reporters contend with is really complex.

They might embed with troops because it's safer.

It might give them access to places that could otherwise be out of reach.

They often have to weigh whether their reporting could put troops in danger, the same troops they're often traveling with, living with.

And if you're a foreign correspondent, then you might be in a place where your country is the one dropping the bombs or funding the weapons.

On September the 11th,

enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country.

Susan says, there's another big factor in all of this.

All of this was brought upon us in a single day.

The incredible power

of the word, the label, terrorism.

The war on terror extends beyond just a shadowy terrorist network.

The war on terror

involves Saddam Hussein.

If everyone sort of shares this idea that there are illegitimate forms of violence.

In today's world, even a handful of terrorists who place no value on human life, including their own, can do a lot of damage.

And there are legitimate ones that we in our uniforms exercise and have a monopoly over, and then there are opponents who are terrorists.

Now a different threat challenges our world.

Radical Islamic terrorism.

That powerful delegitimizing tag does an awful lot of work, it seems to me, to bring people quickly to heal, to silence voices, to cause people to think very hard about whether they really want to show or say certain things.

Where does allegiance lie?

I think that's what it all boils down to, isn't it?

Questions of how one appraises responsibility to whom exactly, and perhaps another

even more diffuse layer of responsibility, which is what do humans owe to fellow humans in the face of catastrophic human suffering.

You don't want anybody to die.

There's no joy in seeing people writhing on the ground or smelling their rotting corpses.

A lot of war reporters suffer from substance abuse, PTSD, and a sense of powerlessness.

So how did you cope with that reality?

You don't forget everything you learned in Sunday school.

You look for the humanity which shines through.

You cover Palestinians, you cover Iraqi refugees, Balkan refugees, Serbs, Croatians.

You know,

you always see the humanity, even in the person you call the enemy.

That's why you have locals working with you and for you

and keeping you honest.

And you're you're ever in their debt.

Foreign reporters often work with local people to translate, explain the culture, drive, gain access, stay safe, and find and report stories.

Iraq and Afghanistan are good cases in point.

With microphone and camera in hand, they are there for every skirmish.

Ever more of that work was offloaded onto local reporters as those places became more dangerous and as American coalition forces tended to retreat

to the relative safety of their fortified bases.

More than 200 media and media support staff, most of them Iraqis, have been killed since 2003.

Dozens more have been kidnapped or arrested.

The people who are really doing the hard work of reporting on the wars, people who are much more poorly paid than a British or American journalist who are taking on different kinds of dangers with incredible bravery and commitment in their own countries for whom the stakes are exponentially higher.

Coming up.

My story here is not only about being a journalist or a survivor.

I'm a witness.

We returned to Gaza with Anas Baba.

I'm a witness to

This is Christopher from St.

Louis, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR.

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part three

a dual burden

A few weeks ago, just before the invasion of Gaza City began, I was trying to get in touch with Anis Baba, NPR's reporter on the ground there.

He's one of the only remaining Palestinian journalists working full-time for an American outlet.

As you can imagine, nothing is easy in Gaza, and even patching a call-through wasn't as simple as dialing a number.

Israeli strikes on infrastructure have made internet connections spotty in Gaza, so we couldn't use apps like Signal or WhatsApp to make the call.

And regular calls in Gaza are monitored by Israel.

The first few times, the call would just drop.

Then I got a few rings.

One time, my call was patched into a random conversation.

Hello?

A few times I got this message.

And finally, 20 or so attempts later, NS called me from that phone number.

Hello?

Tamani?

Yes.

Yes.

Samati.

Perfect.

Perfect.

I'm trying to call this number that you called from, and it goes directly to call ended.

Welcome to Galaxy.

It was kind of surreal talking to Ennis.

I was sitting in my closet where I record because it's quiet.

And it occurred to me that it was kind of amazing that I suddenly felt like I was there with him.

I'm sitting here to see the only place place that we can see that we are still alive, to see that there is hope, there is life, which is the beach, the sea.

Oh, is that what I'm hearing in the background?

Is the waves?

Yes, this is the waves, and at the same time, the wind of the sea.

So, in front of you, you're looking out at water, at the waves, and behind you,

what does the scene look like?

In front of me, yes, there is the sea, the water, but also we do have the Israeli navy craft.

It's so close to us, it opens fire on us on a daily basis.

So if you tried to go in the water, they could open fire on you.

Even if you want to just dip your own toes in the water, even fishing is prohibited here in Gazel.

This is what I see in front of me, but behind me, there is a newly bombed towers that's been bombed today.

by the Israelis.

The destruction, it's daily thing.

The street I walked yesterday might be bombed today.

Maybe the building that my friend is living in can be bombed.

It creates inside of you a dual burden.

Being both a journalist and a survivor that's living in Gaza itself, you are documenting suffering and at the same time you are experiencing it in yourself.

What does that look like for you to both live in these conditions under constant bombardment, struggling to find food, and also reporting, you know, for NPR.

I woke at around 5 to 6 a.m.

every single day to try to collect my own water.

It's the only thing to find clean, drinkable water.

I need to find internet in order to understand exactly what happened overnight.

If there is an airstrikes and if there is a death toll that's being at one of the hospitals, which by the way, we don't have a real hospital.

Most of the hospitals in Gaza City is totally destructed or partially destructed and partially functioning.

In the waiting hall of the Patient Spring Hospital in Gaza City, dozens of mothers cradle their infants.

Israel is limiting and controlling the entry of pretty much everything going into Gaza.

Fuel, medical supplies, food, even medical staff.

From the hospital going to the morgue.

Every day as part of his reporting, NS counts the dead at the morgue.

And from that, going maybe to do a story about the humans and how the Gazans is being living.

Shihada says, we haven't seen bread for ages.

We wait for charity meals.

If they come, we eat.

She has not eaten in a week, she says.

Ennis told me on many days he does all of this with almost no food in his system.

Maybe a bowl of lentil soup or a few pieces of falafel.

Now you're consuming your own life with each step.

But when you are a journalist, you cannot stop.

It's that adrenaline rush, it's that duty, it's that job that you dedicated yourself since day one, that you are gonna document every single thing that's happening in Gaza in a neutral way.

And I'm repeating that in a neutral way.

You cannot even be as a journalist here in Gaza, you cannot be one-sided.

Always you need to tell the truth.

I'm passionate about the truth.

If there is a strike and people that are being killed, okay, from a local rocket, from the Palestinians, I say that the Palestinians being killed by a local rocket.

I mean, that's such an incredible burden in so many ways, but also responsibility that you and other journalists in Gaza have carried, especially since October 7th when foreign journalists were barred from entering Gaza.

More than 200 media outlets all over the world.

and even the Foreign Press Association and the Committee to Protect the Journalists, they issued a statement asking Israel Israel why you didn't allow the foreign journalists to enter.

The headline of the statement reads, quote, at the rate journalists are being killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, there will soon be no one left to keep you informed, and then demands three things, quote, the protection of Palestinian journalists, the foreign press be granted independent access to the Gaza Strip, and that governments across the world host Palestinian journalists seeking evacuation from Gaza.

Israel's foreign ministry called the appeal a quote political manifesto against Israel and said quote the reports we see in the global media regarding Gaza do not tell the real story there.

They tell the campaign of lies that Hamas spreads.

Trust me when I say this what we are reporting here from Gaza is only 10%

from the reality.

There is too many airstrikes, there is too many massacres, there is non-stop a humanitarian crisis that we are going through.

And we as journalists in Gaza, after two years of reporting non-stop, we need our own brothers, our own colleagues to enter Gaza to help us.

How do you make sense of,

you know, when you hear about another journalist has been killed?

Maybe I'm sorry to say this.

But I hate

to show my own emotions.

especially when I'm talking about a colleague.

Not because I'm now I'm heartless.

No, we still practice our own humanity every single day.

And believe it or not, sometimes, and maybe most of the times, we show sympathy with the hostages in Gaza because they are living the same bombardments, the same famine with us in Gaza here.

But

just imagine that you are going to the funerals every single day.

Entire families killed in Israeli attacks are being buried here on the grounds of the hospital.

But this time it's different.

Most of them are my friends.

Most of them, they were journalists, fathers, mothers, sisters.

I'm thanking Allah that I'm not married.

I'm thanking Allah that I didn't have children.

Because having that responsibility on my own shoulders is truly gonna be the hardest thing in my life to live.

It's something that.

Okay, Rwand, Rund, Rwand, we need to end the call at the meantime because it's being monitored and at the same time it's being tracked.

Okay.

So I need to end the call and call you back, okay?

He was hearing beeps on the line.

There are various theories on why things like that happen, including weakened infrastructure.

Anyway, a few minutes later, NS called me back.

Hello?

Can you hear me?

I asked him if Israeli surveillance had ever interfered with his reporting.

When I was al-Rafah in my own house, a quad capture, a quad capture is a drone that holds a gun and explosive and at the same time a microphone.

It came, let's say, 50 centimeters.

away from my own window and decided to speak to me and demanded me to evacuate the area.

Before that, an Israeli official called me and he told me that you are in a military zone and you keep reporting and they want you to go out of here.

Otherwise, you're going to put yourself at risk.

Risk has always been part of the job for war reporters and it's never been higher than for journalists in Gaza who are being killed at record levels.

Israel also accuses some Gazan journalists of being, quote, terrorists.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has said, quote, the IDF has a long-standing pattern of making unsubstantiated claims that many of the journalists they have deliberately killed in Gaza were terrorists.

Without social media,

no one will ever know anything

about what is happening in Gaza.

Social media has given the world a more unfiltered stream of images and videos from Gaza, pushing the conversation.

We were seeing the word genocide being used in social media reels well before the UN Commission issued its conclusion.

Many US-based media outlets, including NPR, do not call what's happening in Gaza a genocide.

Israel has rejected the findings of the UN Commission, accusing Commission members of being, quote, Hamas proxies with openly anti-Semitic positions.

It took 60,000 people to be killed.

More than 100,000 people injured.

Most of the Gaza infrastructure and houses is totally destroyed, turned into rubble and ashes.

Social media, like the internet, is often unreliable in Gaza.

And in those moments, reporting like Ennes's is one of the few ways the outside world learns what's happening in Gaza.

It's why he got into journalism in the first place.

I wanted to give the voices of the people here, the innocents who are often reduced to numbers or headlines.

Ennas told me growing up in Gaza he often felt like so much was beyond his control.

Because being a Gazan means that you are a cursed person.

You were living in one of the biggest open air prisons ever.

They called us animals and they are treating us less than animal.

He has vivid memories of occupation and then a series of wars between Hamas and Israel.

I saw the first tank in my life when I was six years years old and there was a curfew from the Israelis in my own neighborhood for five days.

We lived without water, we lived without food, we lived without anything.

So our childhood was always filled with blood, filled with suffer.

His father is a long-time photojournalist for AFP, a French news agency.

So I was born with a camera on my own lap.

Ennis joined NPR because he wanted to bring the things he was witnessing to the outside world.

There is nothing that drives me to keep going more and more, more than the people themselves, more than how resilient the Gazans are, because this is not something new for them.

This is something that they lived from 1948 when the Israelis took control over Palestine and they killed our own ancestors and grandfathers.

And after that, we just displaced to Gaza here.

Have you ever felt at any point while you've been reporting like

you, as someone who is a Palestinian journalist in Gaza, you were on the same level as a foreign journalist coming in?

Okay.

This is a hard one, by the way.

To be honest, with my own environment and at NPR, they are totally supportive.

We are a tribe of journalists.

We are Jews, we are Palestinians, we are Muslims, we are Christians.

We are from Gaza, we are from Tel Aviv.

So we cannot make our work environment get poisoned.

But many of other colleagues outside of NPR with other media outlets, they resigned because they felt biased from colleagues inside of the media outlet.

Living in the U.S., consuming American media, you know, October 7th is invoked any time that discussion about the destruction of Gaza comes up.

And so I want to take a moment to actually talk about October 7th.

And I'm curious to know

what you remember about that day, October 7th, 2023.

The question is not, what do you remember?

The question is, have you ever forgotten that day?

It was the day that's truly turned our lives upside down.

That's no one in Gaza as civilians agreed on.

But We are the ones as civilians that are being punished.

1,200 Israelis killed at that day,

and Israel killed 60,000 people.

Is there a point where you think you would say

I can't report on this anymore because

because

it's my life at stake and I I have to just get to safety and I have to I have to leave.

When I'm gonna leave Gaza,

when all of this reaches an end,

when Israel sees us as humans,

when Israel treats us as a humans,

otherwise, I'm not gonna leave Gaza.

I was born in Gaza, I was raised in Gaza, I grew up in Gaza, I graduated in Gaza, I worked in Gaza.

The history is being written.

And now it's the time to stand with the right side of the history.

That was Enes Baba, NPR's reporter in Gaza.

That's it for this week's show.

I'm Ramteen Arabloui.

I'm Randabdir Fattah, and you've been listening to Through Line from NPR.

This episode was produced by me and me and Lawrence Wu, Julie Kane, Anya Steinberg, Casey Minor, Christina Kim, Devin Katayama, Irene Naguchi.

Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.

The episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez.

Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes Naveed Marvy, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani.

Thank you to Al Jazeera, Daniel Estron, Ennis Baba, Didi Skanki, James Hyder, Tony Cavan, Nadia Lancey, Laura Schwartz, Johannes Durgee, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at npr.org.

And make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app.

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