Refusing zionist erasure: Remembering the Palestinian journalists Israel killed on Dec 1

On this date, December 1st, we mark the anniversaries of five of the many Palestinian journalists who were killed while documenting Israel’s genocide of Gaza. Their deaths are part of a deliberate campaign to extinguish the witnesses to zionism’s colonial violence, to ensure that the world cannot see what is being done to the Palestinian people in the name of Western imperialism.

Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed at least 252 journalists and media workers in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS). This figure represents the deadliest assault on press freedom in modern history, occurring within a broader campaign that has now claimed more than 69,799 documented Palestinian lives. The systematic targeting of those who hold cameras and microphones is not incidental to genocide; it is an essential part of it. Colonial powers have always understood that erasure requires darkness, and darkness requires the elimination of those who bear witness, refuse it, and resist it.

On this day two years ago, at the beginning of the heightened genocide in 2023, Israeli forces killed four journalists in Gaza, each one a father, son, brother, colleague. Abdullah Darwish, a 27-year-old cameraman from Jabalia working for Al-Aqsa TV, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza. Through his work, his camera had captured the daily horrors inflicted upon his community. Darwish and his camera were silenced by the same military apparatus he sought to expose.

On the same day, Montaser Al-Sawaf, a 33-year-old press photographer for Anadolu Agency, was struck by an Israeli drone while on a street in Shawa Square in Gaza City’s Al-Daraj neighborhood. After being gravely wounded, he waited approximately thirty minutes for an ambulance that never came. Israeli attacks on healthcare infrastructure had systematically and intentionally degraded emergency services. He was eventually transported to Al-Ahli Hospital in a private vehicle, but it was too late. Montaser’s killing compounded an already unbearable loss. Just two weeks earlier, his father, the renowned journalist Mustafa Al-Sawaf, often called the “Dean of Palestinian Journalists”, had been killed alongside Montaser’s mother and two brothers when Israeli forces bombed their family home. Montaser himself had been wounded in that attack. Upon recovering, he returned to work, refusing to abandon his duty to document. His commitment cost him his life.

Marwan Al-Sawaf, Montaser’s 30-year-old brother and a photographer and sound technician at Alef Multimedia, was killed alongside him in the same drone strike. According to his surviving brother Mohamed, Marwan had stopped wearing his press vest, not because he had abandoned journalism, but because he understood that in Israel’s campaign against Gaza, the word “PRESS” had become a target rather than a shield.

Israeli forces also killed Adham Hassouna, a freelance journalist and media professor at Gaza University and Al-Aqsa University, on December 1, 2023 along with several of his family members, when zionist forces struck their location in Gaza City.

One year later, on December 1, 2024, Israeli forces killed Maysara Salah. Maysara was a journalist in the editing and design department at Quds News Network and succumbed to injuries sustained during an Israeli raid on the Awni Al-Harthani School in Beit Lahia. He suffered severe wounds to his head and abdomen. When medical staff attempted to transfer him from the barely functioning Kamal Adwan Hospital to facilities in Gaza City capable of treating his injuries, Israeli forces held his ambulance at a checkpoint for eight hours. Maysara died inside that ambulance, his life draining away while soldiers enforced the violent bureaucracy of occupation.

Salah’s death encapsulates the multidimensional violence of Israeli colonialism: the initial assault, the destruction of medical infrastructure, the checkpoint system that transforms geography into a weapon, and the slow death that results when a wounded body is prevented from reaching necessary care.

The deliberate targeting of journalists serves a clear colonial and imperialist function. Without witnesses, there can be no accountability. Without documentation, atrocities become rumors, easily dismissed by complicit governments and media institutions that privilege Israeli narratives. Yet Palestinian journalists continue their work. They understand what Frantz Fanon articulated decades ago: that colonialism seeks not merely to dominate the colonized but to convince the world that they do not exist, that their suffering does not matter, that their deaths are not deaths at all but merely the restoration of natural order.

Every frame captured, every story filed, every image transmitted from Gaza is an act of resistance against this erasure. The journalists we remember today, Maysara, Abdullah, Montaser, Marwan, and Adham, gave their lives in the service of this resistance. As we honor their memory, we must recognize that bearing witness carries its own obligation. To see is to know, and to know is to be responsible. The darkness Israel seeks to impose over Gaza must be met with our collective refusal to submit to zionism.