The Reporting Graveyard
Gaza, Genocide, and the War Against Witnesses
Note: This article is grounded in and responds to findings from Nick Turse’s March 2025 report, “The Reporting Graveyard,” published by the Costs of War Project at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University. The report meticulously documents the targeting and killing of over 232 journalists in Gaza, exposing the systemic silencing of Palestinian media workers amid the ongoing genocide.
The genocide in Gaza isn’t just targeting bodies—it’s targeting the record of those bodies. Since October 2023, more than 232 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed. Gaza has become, in Nick Turse’s words, a “reporting graveyard.” But let’s be clear: that phrase, while accurate, understates the scale and intention of the violence. Gaza is not just a graveyard. It is a crime scene—under siege and under erasure.
This isn’t merely censorship. It is a campaign of extermination against narrative sovereignty.
And it has a name: Alethocide.
As defined by scholar Marc Owen Jones in Third World Quarterly (2025), Alethocide is the deliberate targeting and annihilation of truth—through censorship, propaganda, and the destruction of evidentiary record. It isn’t a byproduct of genocide. It’s the infrastructure of it. The killings of journalists in Gaza aren’t collateral damage—they’re core strategy. Kill the witnesses. Burn the archives. Rewrite the crime as “self-defense.”
This is not a war. It is not a battlefield. It is an extermination zone for witnesses. The Israeli occupation regime—fully armed and shielded by U.S. funding, surveillance, and diplomatic impunity—isn’t just massacring civilians. It is methodically targeting those who document the massacre.
What we are witnessing is the violent fusion of military annihilation and epistemic erasure.
This is alethocide: the genocidal destruction of truth, memory, and the right to narrate one’s own survival.
Journalists in Gaza aren’t caught in crossfire—they are the targets. Israel has banned all foreign journalists from entering Gaza. It has deliberately assassinated local reporters, labeled them “terrorists” or “combatants,” and flattened every major media building in the Strip. These are not “accidents.” They are strategic eliminations of the archive.
And in that strategy, alethocide operates hand in hand with Genocide Voyeurism Propaganda—the system of showcasing atrocity as a spectacle, while simultaneously erasing the voice of the oppressed. Western media will replay the bombings, zoom in on bodies, and harvest Palestinian grief for headlines—while sidelining, doubting, or outright defaming the reporters who live and die to document it.
Hossam Shabat was one of those witnesses.
Only 23 years old, Hossam was murdered on March 24, 2025, in an Israeli airstrike. He wasn’t just a journalist—he was a resistance fighter with a lens. A truth-teller. A child who grew up under blockade, under surveillance drones, under endless bombing campaigns.
At 7: he watched tanks roll in—1,400 slaughtered.
At 10: the skies rained fire.
At 11: another invasion—2,200 gone.
At 19: bombs again.
At 21: the start of this holocaust.
At 23: they murdered him.
Hossam lived through genocide. And he died in it. Not because of a “tragic miscalculation,” but because he dared to document the crime. His name was never in Western headlines. His face wasn’t honored by press freedom awards. But he mattered. He matters. Hossam is one martyr among hundreds—but his voice echoes beyond death. He was silenced so the state could speak louder.
This is the logic of alethocide: kill the body, burn the record, erase the witness.
And yet, Hossam posted through hell. He bore witness with nothing but a pen and a phone and a will to survive. And in that refusal to be silenced, he became a threat to empire.
Hossam was one name. But he was also all of them. Every Palestinian journalist killed in Gaza bore two unbearable roles: survivor and historian. Some were live on air as their homes were bombed. Some lost their children, siblings, spouses—and kept reporting. Some were assassinated after Israel labeled them “affiliates” of Hamas, often based on nothing more than social media posts or pixelated propaganda.
This isn’t just censorship. It’s a campaign of extermination against narrative sovereignty.
While this genocide unfolded, 70+ Western media outlets signed a polite letter asking the Israeli regime to consider allowing them into Gaza—while continuing to parrot its propaganda, ignore the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and regurgitate falsehoods about resistance being “terrorism.” They dare to lament the death of “truth” while refusing to name the killers of journalists.
These same outlets that lionize Ukrainian reporters question the humanity of Palestinian ones. They run op-eds justifying genocide. They silence Palestinian voices. And when they do feature “both sides,” they platform settler-colonial voices who call for ethnic cleansing while Palestinians bleed off-screen.
This is Genocide Voyeurism Propaganda: the global gaze is fixated, but misinformed—manipulated into apathy by a deluge of disinformation, sanitized language, and narrative inversion. Alethocide is its engine. GVP is its lens.
Together, they do what bombs alone cannot: erase the record of the crime while the crime is ongoing.
This isn’t new. The Zionist regime has a long history of silencing journalists. From the assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh, shot in the head while reporting in body armor, to the airstrike that destroyed Al Jazeera’s Gaza headquarters, the message has always been: kill the witness and no one will be held accountable.
So the question remains: will you let them?
Will you treat Hossam and the others as hashtags and body counts—or will you remember that journalism is resistance? That every murdered Palestinian journalist was part of a truth-telling tradition that Western media abandoned long ago?
Because if we let this stand, we’re not just watching the death of journalism in Gaza.
We’re watching the death of journalism, period.
Hossam deserved to grow old. So did Wael Dahdouh’s family. So did Samer Abu Daqqa. So did the children standing beside the journalists when the bombs fell. They weren’t “media workers.” They were archivists of atrocity, memory-keepers of genocide.
Their murder is a message: silence or die.
But here’s our message in return:
We will not forget. We will not be silent. And we will not forgive.
Alethocide thrives in erasure. So we name the dead.
Genocide voyeurism thrives on spectacle. So we demand substance.
And journalism—real journalism—thrives on truth. So we keep writing.
Gaza is not just where journalism dies.
It is where journalism is reborn—in blood, in bravery, and in radical truth.
References
Jones, M. O. (2025). Evidencing Alethocide: Israel’s War on Truth in Gaza. Third World Quarterly, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2025.2462791
Turse, N. (2025). The Reporting Graveyard: Israel's War on Journalists in Gaza. Costs of War Project, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2025/reporting-graveyard
leGaïe, S. (2025). Genocide Voyeurism Propaganda: How Genocidal Regimes Use Public Brutality as a Weapon. Marginalia Subversiva. https://marginaliasubversiva.substack.com/p/genocide-voyeurism-propaganda-how