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Brett Wilkins: ‘We’ll Come for You Next’: Israel Threatened to Kill Teen Journalist in Gaza—Then Did
“Western journalists and editors should hang their heads in shame for their outrageous silence in the face of these crimes,” said one professor.
Journalists around the world expressed outrage Monday over the Israeli military’s killing of a teenage Palestinian reporter who continued showing the world the destruction of Gaza despite threats to his life—and at the Western media’s silence on the story.
Hassan Hamad, 19, whose work appeared on Al Jazeera and other outlets, was killed Sunday in an Israeli drone strike on his home in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, The Palestine Chronicle reported. The bombing followed multiple text messages warning Hamad to stop recording images of Israel’s assault on Gaza, which has killed or injured nearly 150,000 Palestinians and for which the close U.S. ally is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice.
Palestinian journalist Maha Hussaini posted a photo of one threatening WhatsApp message sent to Hamad. It read, “Listen, if you continue spreading lies about Israel, we’ll come for you next and turn your family into… This is your last warning.”
Hussaini said that Hamad also received “several calls from an Israeli officer ordering him to stop filming in Gaza.”
“He didn’t comply,” she wrote. “He was killed today.”
A colleague of Hamad’s wrote on the slain journalist’s X account:
With great sadness and pain, I mourn the journalist Hassan Hamad… Hamad, the journalist who is not yet 20 years old, resisted for a whole year in his own special way. He resisted when he was away from his family so that they would not be targeted. He resisted when he was suffering to find an internet signal and would sit for an hour or two on the roof of the house to send videos that reach you in seconds. Yesterday, since 10:00, he was moving between the bombed areas and returning to search for an internet signal, then returning to cover the places of the remains, suffering from an injury he sustained in his leg. Nevertheless, he completed filming. At 6:00 am, he called me to send me the last video. After a call that did not exceed a few seconds, he was saying, “Hey, hey, it’s done,” and he hung up. This is a feeling that no human being can bear. Hassan also resisted the occupation and left a mark and left a message that we will complete after him.
Journalists and others posted graphic video footage of pieces of Hamad’s remains being collected and placed in a shoebox.
“I will never forget the silence of the media industry about this,” Al Jazeera executive producer Laila Al-Arian wrote in a social media post containing the video.
Thomson Reuters Foundation deputy editor-in-chief Barry Malone responded to Hassan’s killing by asking, “If you’re a journalist and you’re not speaking out in solidarity… why?”
Anthropology professor Jason Hickel said that “we can never unsee the images of journalist Hassan Hamad’s remains, after he was assassinated by Israeli forces.”
“Western journalists and editors should hang their heads in shame for their outrageous silence in the face of these crimes,” he added.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists says that “at least 128 journalists and media workers, all but five of them Palestinian, have been killed—more journalists than have died in the course of any year since CPJ began documenting journalist killings in 1992.”
“All of the killings, except two Israeli journalists killed in the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel, were carried out by Israeli forces,” the group added. “CPJ has found that at least five journalists were specifically targeted by Israel for their work.”
Gaza’s Government Media Office (GMO) said Sunday that 175 media workers have been killed in the embattled enclave over the past year.
The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has filedmultiple complaints at the International Criminal Court—whose chief prosecutor is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leaders—alleging “war crimes against journalists in Gaza.”
Responding to Hamad’s killing, RSF said that Israel’s “impunity must end.”
Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
First published in Common Dreams. Included in Vox Populi with permission.
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We should be beyond asking ourselves “what should we do” and/or “what can we do”. Yet the questions persist as millions of people, including some who will read this, I’m sure, are morally paralyzed by the ongoing atrocity and the savagery of the assaults on civilians in Palestine, Lebanon, and likely Iran soon. For many of us, even those of us familiar with the war crimes of this nation, the war crimes of nations we support, and in particular the war crimes of Israel, we still remain astounded at the sheer impunity of both the US and Israeli governments as they jointly carry out a genocide. I’ve lived through some tumultuous times at 79 and witnessed awful acts carried out by powerful imperial war machines as they attempted to subdue a population by military means. The napalming of civilian villages in Viet Nam, the full military backing of the Shah of Iran as he murdered hundreds using his US trained torturers of opposition figures, the US military’s training of death squads in El Salvador which dropped oppositionists from helicopters suppled by the US, and that only names a few. But….and it’s a but I say to myself many times a day….I never expected to see a silent nation while our tax dollars and military expertise are used to carry out wholesale murder of Palestinians chased from their homes, only to find 2000 lb bombs and missiles landing on their makeshift tents where they attempt to shelter in Israeli designated “safe areas”. We, and I use the collective we as a nation, seem to be more engrossed in an election where the candidates both fully support the continuing genocide and offer no peace plan except to rather endlessly say “it remains one of our highest priorities”. Yet all the while shipping vast amounts of arms to Israel that it may continue the slaughter. For me, and for many (but too few) I know, the struggle for peace and an end to the carnage must carry on and we must stand and speak truth to power, no matter the silence that all too often responds. Our morality calls us to do this. Your morality must do the same. It is not enough to share something on Facebook or sign a petition. We must speak loudly, act loudly, not be afraid of offending someone as the greater offense of genocide in real time must be opposed. I live in a neighborhood of fine people, good parents and neighbors, liberal to progressive thinkers, academics who talk of morality and ethics, yet somehow my simple suggestion of a yard sign protesting the genocide is met with a hemming and hawing, “Well, I don’t want to offend anyone” or just “I’ll think about it.” What happens to us that we can do this? What happens to us that we can avoid our moral responsibility to oppose what the mass media and our “leaders” continue to wrongly characterize as a war? War implies some sort of equality of forces, some sort of moral and military equivalence. This is no more a war than the genocide inflicted on America’s indigenous population by the colonizers of old who, like Israel, sought someone else’s land and took it by the forces of mayhem, carnage, and murder. We should not be asking “what can we do or say” but what MUST we do and say and realize that our children, or perhaps our children’s children, along with those who survive the genocide and continue their resistance, ask of us as some German children did, “What did you do during the genocide?” We must all find the strength and moral clarity to answer, “Everything I could to oppose it, even when it seemed fruitless to do so as I had no choice”.
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Thank you, Mel, for being an eloquent voice for peace and justice.
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The ultimate censorship: killing. And the irony of calling the photographing of atrocities as spreading lies… And the so called chilling effect on journalism from the murder of reporters to suppress their words or imagery. What can we do? Somebody must fund the groups who report this carnage. More direct action? Not sure either at this time. We can pay attention and let people know what we learn. And separate anti-semitism from this ongoing holocaust. Every holocaust is evil.
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As American citizens, we have a duty to demand that our government stop funding this carnage, as well as ending the diplomatic cover the US provides for Israel.
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This is thoroughly infuriating, as is the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians, with the Lebanese also now the target of Netanyahu’s murderous venom. The Biden administration is complicit, for it refuses to take substantive action against the genocide. Netanyahu is as pernicious as his enemies, and in terms of the sheer numbers of his victims, even more so.
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I completely agree with your argument and I share your anger, Charles.
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You say it. I am wiping away some tears.
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Surreal. As I read this I kept thinking ‘this can’t be happening.’ Where is the world of simply ‘right/wrong’ I so innocently grew up with? i agree with the first comment – ‘but what can we do?’.
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What can we do? What should we do? These are the questions we have to ask ourselves.
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How terribly, terribly sad. I want to do something effective to bring an end to this genocide but what? My government is brain-dead or purchased by the enemy. So many good souls have been slaughtered including brave journalists while too much silence surrounds the world. Thanks for this sad, powerful article about a remarkable young man.
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Thank you, Mandy. I share your feelings of anger and frustration.
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