From the Frontlines

26:11Now, 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 to what the administration was saying. Were there 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.

27:01We would ride through and 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 parks 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?

27:46I can't go into much specifics on this, but sometimes they would say, well, the White House won't like this. So they 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.

28:29The 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.

29:14This set off the first Gulf War. Something is happening outside. The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated. Of course, there had 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 it puts CNN on the map in a big way. Historian Susan Caruthers says this is when the U.S. 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.

30:09She 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.

30:49How 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. And that critique is trotted out again during the much longer conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

31:41The 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.

32:18All 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.

33:11Radical Islamic terrorism. That powerful delegitimizing tag does an awful lot of work, it seems to me, to bring people quickly to heel, 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.

34:07A 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 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.

35:05Iraq 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. Did you film that car bomb? 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.

36:08Coming up. My story here is not only about being a journalist or a survivor. I'm a witness. We return to Gaza with Anas Baba. I'm a witness to where the light turned into darkness.

36:32This is Christopher from St. Louis, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR.

36:40Part 3. A dual burden. A few weeks ago, just before the invasion of Gaza City began, I was trying to get in touch with Enes Bhabha, 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.

37:27Then I got a few rings. One time, my call was passed into a random conversation. A few times, I got this message.

37:40Hello. The subscriber you have dialed is disconnected. And finally, 20 or so attempts later, Enes called me from that phone number. Hello? Samania? Yes. Yes. Samania. Perfect. Perfect. I'm trying to call this number that you called from and it goes directly to call ended. Welcome to Jalavad. It was kind of surreal talking to Enes. 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.

38:20I'm sitting here to see the only 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 daily basis. So if you tried to go in the water, they could open fire on you?

39:02even if you want to just dip your own toes in the water. Even fishing is prohibited here in Gaza. 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 a daily thing. The street I walked yesterday might be bombed today. Maybe the building that my friends 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?

39:56I 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's friends hospital in Gaza City, dozens of mothers cradle their infants. Israel is limiting and controlling the entry of pretty much everything going into Gaza.

40:41Fuel, medical supplies, food, even medical staff. From the hospital going to the morgue. Every day, as part of his reporting, and as counts the dead at the morgue. And from that, 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. Enes 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.

41:22It's that adrenaline rush. It's that duty. It's that job that you dedicated yourself since day one, that you are going to 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, OK, 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.

42:12More 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 why you don'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.

42:53Israel's foreign ministry called the appeal a and said

43:08spreads. Trust me when I say this, what we are reporting here from Gaza is only 10 percent from the reality. There is too many airstrikes, there is too many massacres, there is non-stop a humanitarian crisis that we're 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?

44:04And 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 is different. Most of them are my friends. Most of them, they were journalists, fathers, mothers, sisters. Adil, Marwa, Abdul Kareem, Mohammed, Mahmoud, Tasneem, Sham, another two are next to me. 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 going to be the hardest thing in my life to live.

45:01It's something that... Okay, Rwand, Rwand, Rwand, we need to end the call in 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, Enes called me back. Hello? Can you hear me? I asked him if Israeli surveillance had ever interfered with his reporting. When I was in my own house, a quadcaptor, a quadcaptor is a drone that holds a gun and explosive and at the same time a microphone.

45:43It came, let's say, 50 centimeters away from my own window and they started 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.

46:33Without 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 U.S.-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.

47:18More 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 Ennis' 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. Enes 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.

48:02You were living in one of the biggest open-air prisons ever. They called us animals, and they are treating us less than an 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 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 safa. His father is a longtime photojournalist for AFP, a French news agency. So I was born with a camera on my own lap.

48:47Enes 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?

49:31Okay. This is a hard one, by the way. To be honest, with my own environment 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 got poisoned. But many of other colleagues outside of NPR with other media outlets, they resigned. because they felt pious 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.

50:16And 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 forgot that day? It was the day that truly turned our lives upside down. That no one in Gaza as civilians agreed on. But we are the ones as civilians that are being punished. 1 ,200 Israelis killed 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 it's my life at stake and I have to just get to safety and I have to leave?

51:24When I'm going to leave Gaza, when all of this reached an end, when Israel sees us as humans, when Israel treats us as humans, otherwise, I'm not going to 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.

52:08That was Anas Baba, NPR's reporter in Gaza. That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablui. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and. Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Kadiyama. Irene Noguchi. 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 Marvi Sho Fujiwara Anya Mizani Thank you to Al Jazeera, Daniel Estrin, Enes Baba, Deedee Skanky, James Heider, Tony Cavan, Nadia Lancey, Laura Schwartz, Johannes Durgey, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

53:05And 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. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.