The tale of Gaza journalist Motaz Azaiza, who admitted what everyone with any sense knew already: there is no independent journalism in Gaza. But the western press just played along with the pretence anyway. From Amit Segal:
It’s Sunday, September 20, and the most revealing sentence spoken from Gaza’s press corps this year came on a podcast from one of its greatest stars. “If someone says something like this, many journalists lower the camera.”
That is Motaz Azaiza—one of TIME’s 100 most influential people of 2024, GQ Middle East’s man of the year—explaining how, when faced with dissent, the Gaza media complex fixes the narrative on Hamas’s behalf.
Speaking on the Palestinian podcast Taqarob, Azaiza described a WhatsApp group that “all the Gaza journalists are in.” For anyone picturing a professional association: its icon is a Hamas flag, and its administrator, he said, is the media director of the Rafah crossing….
That Gaza is an authoritarian hellscape is hardly worth stopping the presses for. Anyone thinking critically assumed Hamas controlled the narrative from the very beginning. Azaiza’s testimony is less an indictment of Hamas than of the media complex that lapped up its releases.
The story was originally broken by MEMRI, showing a clip from a podcast in Arabic. The journalists’ lowering of the camera that Azaiza speaks of happened if anyone dared to criticise Hamas.
A Palestinian activist from Gaza who was previously known statements such as “a single Palestinian is more important than a thousand Israeli[s]” and posted in the wake of the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar that he “didn’t want a beautiful mourning from you, nor to mention his effects in written poems. He wanted you in the field: were you in the field” has admitted that those working in journalists in Gaza often censored coverage unfavourable to Hamas….
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Gazan anti-Hamas writer and advocate, responded to Azaiza’s podcast interview by saying: “Motaz Azaiza, a Gazan journalist evacuated during the war and someone who has personally attacked me, is finally saying the blunt truth. Gaza‑based ‘journalists,’ whether tied to Al Jazeera, Hamas, foreign outlets, or social media, systematically self‑censored and hid anti‑Hamas sentiments inside the Strip. Their mission was to maintain a narrative centred solely on Israel and to erase any dissent, criticism of Hamas, or diversity in Palestinian views. Azaiza describes how he struggled with supposed ‘journalists’ who shut off their cameras whenever Gazans condemned Hamas or tried to hold it responsible for the catastrophe it brought upon them, from 7 October to the ruinous “resistance” mythology that followed.
“So to anyone repeating the line that Gaza had ‘more journalists killed than WWII and Vietnam combined,’ think carefully about who and what you are calling a journalist in territory fully controlled by a violent extremist organisation responsible for severe harm and repression. This does not deny that Israel’s offensive killed or injured real journalists. But it does expose how tightly Hamas has curated and policed the narrative for three years since 7 October.”
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