Archive Event Highlight

by Chad Bouchard

Journalists in Gaza face staggering challenges. The whole area is locked down, cut off from supplies, and reporters are not allowed into the conflict zone. Journalists on the ground not only face nearly impossible conditions for logistics and basic needs, but the constant risk of deadly attacks.

On June 12, the OPC hosted an online discussion to talk about those challenges with the team behind the Al Jazeera English documentary, The Night Won’t End, which won this year’s Peter Jennings Award.

“We lost a lot of people. Each one of the members of the crew lost many beloved people, including me,” said Ashraf Mashharawi, a Palestinian filmmaker and founder of Media Town, which collaborated on the film. “And besides killing, we have hunger. People can’t find anything to eat. Imagine you are filming, and you can’t find something to kill the hunger in your stomach.”

Other panelists included director and producer Kavitha Chekuru, and investigative journalist and Fault Lines executive producer Laila Al-Arian. The conversation was moderated by OPC Governor and filmmaker Singeli Agnew.

Due to fuel shortages and bomb craters in roads, Mashharawi said, his crew had to walk many miles with heavy equipment, risking their lives to film amid constant surveillance from drones with artificial intelligence that he said often mistakes media equipment for weapons.

“We have many sad incidents where people were killed because of this stupid technology.” Despite the conditions, he added, “we know that we are the only voice for the people abroad.”

The film documents the civilian cost of Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, drawing on harrowing firsthand accounts from three Palestinian families, as well as satellite imagery, open-source intelligence, and field reporting in one of the most lethal media environments in modern history.

“This film was released in June 2024 almost a year ago. Now we’re now 20 months into the war,” Agnew said while introducing the panel. “More than 50,000 people have been killed, including more than 17,000 children. More journalists have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7 [2023] than the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the war in Yugoslavia and the post-911 war in Afghanistan combined,” she added, citing a recent study from the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says that 185 journalists have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, and 86 have been imprisoned.

Chekuru said soon after Oct. 7, the team set out to shed light on patterns of harm they had seen against civilians in Gaza.

“Within the first couple of first months or so we were starting to see the attacks on – quote, unquote – safe zones. And by mid-November there were already allegations of arbitrary executions and white-flag killings.”

She recalled during the third week of December 2023, Israeli ground troops had become entrenched, and “over the course of essentially 5 days, civilian witnesses say that the Israeli soldiers were barricading them in a residential building, firing on the building so they couldn’t leave and didn’t have food or water. On December 19, the soldiers entered the building, separated the men and women, and executed at least 11 men. Afterwards, the they shelled the building, which resulted in many injuries but also in a young girl being killed.”

Al-Arian described some of the visual forensics techniques used in the film, which analyzed footage from news crews to reconstruct the scene of a tank attack on civilians at a gas station.

“There ended up being about 335 bullet holes directed at the car. The tank would have been positioned so that the soldiers could likely see who they were shooting at, which is an unarmed family trying to go on their way.” On this investigation, the filmmakers collaborated with Forensic Architecture as well as Earshot, an audio analysis group that used audio from phone calls to determine what kind of weapon was likely used.

“With any kind of allegation against the Israeli military, there are campaigns to try to delegitimize and discredit any reporting that points to them being behind those killings,” she said. “So it was important that everything we did was bulletproof in terms of the journalism – multiple eyewitnesses, survivors, forensic evidence, satellite imagery, WhatsApp messages, phone calls.”

Al-Arian added that they also relied on multiple forensic sources to verify reports and worked to diminish retraumatizing people and “not making them retell the most horrifying experiences of their life again unnecessarily.”