Throughline - From the Frontlines

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

Journalism is under unprecedented threat worldwide. At least 220 journalists have been killed in Gaza alone since the October 7th, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel; the Committee to Protect Journalists says it’s the deadliest conflict for journalists the group has ever documented. In conflicts around the world, it’s war reporters who write the first draft of history. But getting to the front lines, finding the truth, and reporting it is easier said than done. Today on the show: war reporters, and what’s at stake if they can’t do their jobs.To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from 48 hours. The seemingly random murders of a beloved couple left the town of Davis, California, paralyzed in fear. Join correspondent Aaron Moriarty for 15 inside the Daniel Marsh murders, available wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Romteen. This is the first time in over half a century that NPR and its member stations are operating without federal funding. It may feel uncertain, but here's what is certain. Public media endures, independent, resilient, people-powered. Whatever the moment, you'll still find us here, telling stories that matter.

I still remember every single time that's one of my friends who are targeted. We're just getting some breaking news now. that a journalist has been killed in an Israeli army. Some of them, they got targeted their houses with their families. Gaza Bureau Chief Wa'a'u'u lost his wife, two children and the grandchild. Others, they were sleeping in tents inside of the hospitals. News cameras were already trained on the Nassar hospital after an initial Israeli strike killed several people. A short time later, a second Israeli strike hit as first response,

Responders and journalists have already rushed to the scene. Targeting AP, NPC, and international media like Al Jazeera and others. You just feel that you're going to be the next person to be covered with white shrouds and your own colleagues is taking photos of you, taking you to the cemetery, and after that returning to keep reporting and saying, When God year hamous, the truth is going to be buried with them. This is Ennis Baba. Annas Baba, NPR News, Gaza City.

Since 2020, N.S. has been reporting for NPR from Gaza, where he was born and raised. Like the two million other Palestinians in Gaza, NS has lived the past two years facing bombardment, displacement, and starvation when an independent UN inquiry has concluded is genocide. Often I'm reporting with no protective gears because your own protective gears, maybe it's going to make you more on a target for the Israelis. We move quickly, we move in foot. Sometimes we hide our press vest.

We're a press vist. Journalism is under unprecedented threat worldwide, from Mexico to China to Ukraine, Pakistan, Sudan, and Yemen. The Committee to Protect Journalists has said the killing of 31 Yemeni journalists and an Israeli airstrike last week was the second deadliest single attack on the press ever recorded by the committee. Reporters without borders estimates that at least 220 journalists have been killed in Gaza alone, since the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023. That's more than we're killed in the Vietnam War and the war in Afghanistan combined.

And it isn't even close. The Committee to Protect Journalists says it's the deadliest conflict for journalists the group has ever documented. And almost all of them are Palestinian. Although some foreign journalists have embedded with the Israeli military, Israel has barred foreign journalists from independently entering Gaza for the last two years.

The vast majority of reporting you here comes from local journalists like N.S. But even under bombardment, we continue to report. Here in Gaza, after... This is the reality of Gaza, if you can hear it. Was that an explosion that I just heard? A helicopter is opening fire on the houses.

How close are you to that? Are you in a safe place? There is no safe place in Gaza, and there is nothing called where are you exactly safe or not, because bullets do not differentiate and bullets do not know that's me working for an American outlet. I'll be honest, I was pretty concerned for Ennis at this point. But he seemed almost unfazed. Death is a daily reality, a daily possibility for him. Throughout nearly two years of war, Ennis has run toward airstrike after airstrike

to bear witness to the aftermath and report back to you and me and millions of listeners, something that reporters have been doing for over a century now. This is Drafalgar Square. The noise that you hear at the moment is the sound of the air raid siren.

A year of witnessing the ferocious war machine that the Bosnian Serb commander had uncle. Hundreds of Taliban overran Barzmatel a week ago. He did not like my reporting. Our journey begins. in Port Sudan. Russian forces are trying to pressure Gostienternovka from three sides.

We saw Maasab's lifeless body lying on the floor next to the fridge. Is this the press fucking coming here again? The press again, so they can fucking strike here again. Get the fuck out of here. I'm Randab de Fattah. I'm Ramtin Arablui. On this episode of Thuline from NPR, we'll travel from the marshes of Vietnam to the Iraqi desert and back to the rubble-filled streets of Gaza

to explore how journalists navigate the pressure of politics and propaganda to report from the front lines of war. How they go about reporting the truth to people who may not even want to hear it. And what's at stake when they can't tell those stories? This is Cal from Chicago and you're listening to Thurline. You are the history class I always wanted. This message comes from Rince, who knows that mastering the perfect house party table spread takes time. But so does laundry.

So Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door, expertly cleaned. And you can take the time once spent sorting and waiting, folding, and queuing, to finally pursue your real passion. Rolling delicate roses of Capacola alongside meandering ribbons of. Vamon Serrano, transforming a humble plank of weathered barnwood into a show-stopping charcutory spread. Rinse, it's time to be great. In our latest ThruLine Plus episode, our producers take us behind the scenes of our episode on the first Department of Education in the U.S. You can hear about the letters and arguments they found while troving through the archives.

To listen and get access to sponsor-free episodes, sign up for ThruLine Plus at plus.mptu-MPR. In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life. Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, sources and methods. NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people helping you understand why distant events matter here at home. Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. War in South Vietnam. An ugly war in a far-off place to which the United States is deeply committed. Part 1. The Uncensored War

It's 1964. U.S. military advisors have already been in Vietnam for over a decade. By the spring of 1964, the Vietnam, the Vietnam. had reached a strength of an estimated 60,000 troops and controlled nearly 68% of South Vietnam's villages and endless. Successive U.S. administration said they were in Vietnam to prevent communism from spreading throughout Southeast Asia, and things weren't going well.

But most Americans weren't paying much attention to the conflict. This is a war that begins in a very sort of slow way that initially was largely ignored. This is Susan Carruthers, historian at the University of Warwick, and author of the book, The Media at War. Jim Crow, political assassinations, voting rights, those domestic issues were much more top of mind.

But then... On the night of August 4, 1964, President Johnson appeared on national television. Renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas and the duff of Tonkin Following a disputed incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, involving an exchange of fire between U.S. and North Vietnamese ships, Congress, with near-unanimous support in the House and Senate, then passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution,

which authorized President Lyndon Johnson to escalate military involvement in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war. And suddenly, the draft was ramped up. And more and more thousands of American men are sent there. which led more Americans to ask questions about the war, and news outlets responded. This is what the war in Vietnam is all about. American soldiers hiking their way through the sweaty jungles of South Vietnam, searching for an elusive enemy.

And of course, by 1967, 1968 is a staple of the nightly news on television. It first appeared that the Marines had been sniped at and that a few houses were made to pay. Film reels would be flown to Tokyo. for quick editing and developing, and then flown to the U.S. There were three main networks broadcasting news from Vietnam, ABC, NBC, and CBS. And the big publications like The New York Times and Time Magazine also sent their reporters there. Blue didn't want to come to Vietnam, and he'd much rather be a businessman than a soldier.

But right now, he's in charge of the lives of 21 men. Most of the reporting focused on the U.S. perspective, American soldiers. policy, military strategy. We might see Vietnamese peasants in obvious anguish, distressed, grieving, but mostly the Vietnamese who featured in American news broadcasts were silent. A flurry of alternative and international media outlets were also reporting from Vietnam. many staff correspondents were headquartered in Saigon. The full fury of the war has scarcely touched Saigon.

It attracts visitors, GIs on leave, and even American tourists anxious for a feel of the war. I remember the day after I got there, I was asked to a party on top of the roof of the best hotel, the Carabelle. There was roses and champagne and all kinds of, wonderful things you think you were at home, you know. But then, over the edge of the parapet, you could see these flares coming up. And the question was, was it was incoming or outgoing?

You would never know until it happened. This is Francis Fitzgerald. She goes by Frankie. In 1966, Frankie flew to Vietnam sort of on a whim. She was 26 from a wealthy family and Curember. curious about the world. So she decided to take a break from her local reporting job in New York to travel to Southeast Asia, wanting to see the place where her father had deployed during World War II. She went to Thailand, Laos, and eventually landed in Vietnam.

I thought I would just spend a month there to an article or to pay my airfare back. But when I got there, I found I couldn't leave. I mean, I've never seen a war before, of course. And was all too fascinating. Frankie says she never really felt unsafe, even as one of the only women reporting there. Some of the American soldiers and the Vietnamese soldiers were kind of furious I was there because they thought they would have to protect me,

which I could understand. And some just felt that their macho was diminished because a woman was there, so I didn't like that. But journalists were allowed to go, anywhere. They could go out with the troops. Nobody was holding their hands or stopping them. Unlike in previous conflicts, like World War II, the U.S. military made a conscious decision not to formally censor journalists. They saw Vietnam as more of a limited conflict, not a full-scale war.

Every evening, a girl on spindle heels picks her way over the barrier of rotting fruit and onto the sidewalk. Frankie arrived with a still film camera and a typewriter she'd packed into her suitcase. And as a freelance journalist, she could pretty much report whatever stories she wanted. It just occurred to me that the thing that was missing was that the American high command

knew nothing about the Vietnamese. Behind her, the alleyway carpeted with mud winds back past the facade of new houses, into a maze of thatched huts and tin-roof-shadowed shack. called Bui Fat, one of the oldest of the refugee quarters. She got articles printed in the Village Voice, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Magazine, centering the Vietnamese perspective. So walk me through, like, how did you actually go about getting that perspective? Because I'm assuming you didn't speak Vietnamese.

Well, I found several interpreters along the way. That wasn't hard to do because people wanted to do that. You'd make a lot of money that way. And how would you know if someone was a good interpreter if you don't speak Vietnamese? I could feel it. Frankie would travel around the South Vietnamese countryside with her interpreter, hoping to connect with people. But she wasn't always welcomed with open arms. Americans do not normally walk through the slums, not the real slums, like those in the outlying areas.

She remembers going into a community where refugees were living in makeshift homes built on planks atop a marsh. They were angry at being displaced from their villages and put in this marsh. Gigantic sewers, lakes full of stagnant filth. And suddenly... A pebble sails out and falls gently on the stranger's back. It is followed by a hail of stones. She began getting pelted with stones. I was sort of offended by it in the sense that I thought,

what have I done? But I could very well understand if I had to live in such a place, I perhaps would be throwing stones too. These refugees lose their lands, their families, their ancestral homes, and the structure of their lives. Frankie says the key to finally connecting with people was just continuing to show up. They would realize that you were not going to come and blow up the village. How did you approach fact-checking, either things that the local Vietnamese people were telling you

or the things that the U.S. military or the Vietnamese local police were telling you? Well, sometimes it was absolutely impossible. You just have to do the best you could find other sources that said the same thing. I think we're given certainly away by our editors. There was a rule that you couldn't prove anything in a story by quoting a Vietnamese. Wow. So it was pretty explicit that if your source was a Vietnamese person versus an American commander, let's say, the two statements are not equal. Not equal, not equal.

And there were times when she felt the reality she was witnessing would be too unbelievable to her readers. I went to see the civilian hospital. And then, you know, I see all these Vietnamese on beds outside their rooms with terrible burns, which they had from napalm. You know, to describe it right here is almost impossible for me. I was so awful. I didn't know what to do.

I reported some of it, but just not the really gruesome details. Why did you leave the most gruesome details out, do you think? Well, because I felt there wouldn't be credible, really. I didn't have an organization behind me. Everybody had this internal sensor, which sort of said, you know, how far can I go with this? Is journalism's role to push the conversation if that's where the truth is leading? Or is it to meet people where they are until they're ready to hear the sort of bigger ecstatic truth? Well, it's probably to do the first.

but at the expense of not having it printed at all. To one people, the war would appear each day, compressed between advertisements and confined to a small space in the living room. The explosion of bombs and the cries of the wounded would become the background accompaniment to dinner. In 1972, Frankie published a series of articles in The New Yorker, detailing her years of reporting from Vietnam that were then turned into a book

called Fire in the Lake, which won the Pulitzer Prize. For the other people, the war would come one day out of a clear blue sky. In a few minutes, it would be over. The bombs, released by an invisible pilot with incomprehensible intentions, would leave only the debris and the dead behind. It was the first major book by an American profiling Vietnam, its history, its people, the impact of the war on them. At the time, Frankie described the book as a, quote,

First Draft of History. Frankie's book was part of a chorus of reporting that had been fueling a growing anti-war movement for years. So many Americans are not only opposed to the war, but vehemently, out on the streets. Public opinion had dramatically begun to shift going into 1968. U.S. troop numbers were at an all-time high,

and then came the Tet Offensive. Communist forces swept through more than 100 South Vietnamese cities, towns, and villages. American and South Vietnamese troops fought them back, and the North suffered huge losses. It was militarily a win for the U.S. But optically, it was a resounding defeat. reporters sent back photos that shook the American public. In one, a South Vietnamese soldier stands over a North Vietnamese prisoner, pistol in hand, carrying out an execution.

Another shows bloodstains, bullet holes, and dead bodies at the U.S. Embassy. Susan Carruthers says, for much of the war in Vietnam, the news media... Was absolutely beholden to this Cold War template that the United States was there to try to profit. apart Baleague at South Vietnam, and that changes only really after the consensus on Capitol Hill itself has started to break down. Editors are more willing to sort of push the boundaries of the sayable, the showable. It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. About a month after the Tet offensive, Walter Cronkite, the anchorman for CBS Evening News, known then

as the most trusted man in America, recorded this broadcast after a trip to Vietnam. It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.

After hearing this broadcast, President Johnson reportedly said, if I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America. And within weeks, he decided to not run for re-election. It was seen by many as a turning point. News coverage became overwhelmingly more negative. Though the war would continue for another seven years until 1975, with the defeated U.S. withdrawing the last of its combat troops two years earlier,

journalists were credited with and blamed for ending the war. They had risked life and limb, often without the safety of a military escort, to report the truth. More than 60 journalists paid the ultimate price for it. And Vietnam came to be known as the uncensored war. The obvious lesson that the U.S. military and the British military looking very carefully at all of this learn, is that they should never leave the media to be uncensored in any future conflict. that they're fighting. Coming up, war reporting gets a makeover fit for TV.

Hello, this is Dominic Pallone from the oil fields of Douglas, Wyoming. You're listening to ThruLine on NPR. Pts, did y'all hear? Code Switch is one of Tom Magazine's top 100 podcast of all time, baby. Mm-hmm. They called our show,

quote, a kind of cultural compass, never preachy, always curious, about the roots of inequality in people's lived experiences. Mm-hmm. I mean, I'm biased,

but we couldn't have put it better ourselves. And we are digging into all this every week. So, make sure you catch the next episode of Code Switch on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Part 2. Embedded

Intibah, Entibah, Entibah, Entibat, La Tabor this hajel. It's April 2003, a year and a half after 9-11. An overturned truck smolders on the side of the road, the bitter scent of diesel filling the air. The metallic growl of armored vehicles turns through the sand. Buildings pockmarked with bullet holes sit empty. Cruise missiles streak across the night sky. Operation Iraqi Freedom is underway. Breaking news yet again, southwest or west of the city of Baghdad.

That is where we find Walt again. Walt, good afternoon there. What do you have? Hello, Bill, serious American casualties in the battle for Baghdad this morning. It's a great sleep deprivation. There's no privacy. You're in an armored vehicle. or a Humvee as I was in a Humvee.

This is Walter Rogers. Army sources have told CNN that the casualties are at least six wounded. He's a retired journalist who spent decades traveling from one conflict zone to the next, much of that time reporting on air for CNN. He flew off Afghanistan during the Soviet war there, Sarajevo during the Bosnian genocide, southern Lebanon, during Israel's occupation. It was Winston Churchill who said, there's nothing so exhilarating as being shot at and missed.

We just heard an inca. What the hell? Can you hear me? Atlanta, we just heard something shooting. While embedded in Iraq, Walter went where the American soldiers went, living with troops reporting under the jurisdiction of the military. And his dispatches often ended with this editor's note, quote, this report was written in accordance with Pentagon ground rules,

allowing so-called embedded reporting in which journalists join deployed troops. Among the rules accepted by all participating news organizations is an agreement not to disclose sensitive operational details. Embedding is, whatever limitations you ascribe to it, embedding is always good because you get to see. I mean, you can tell propaganda stuff when it raises its ugly head. The main reason given by the Bush administration for the invasion was... That Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.

A claim that many media outlets, including NPR, repeated in the lead-up to the invasion, and that would turn out to not be true. Now, 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 the 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. We 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? I 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. The 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. This 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 Peruthers says this is when the U.S. military employed a 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 briefing. trying to make sure everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet as it were. She 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,

how 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 tow 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. The 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. All 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 challenge is our world. Radical Islamic terrorism. That powerful delegitimizing tag does an awful lot of work, it seems to me, to bring people quickly to heal,

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 be writhing on the ground or smelling their rotting corpses. A 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, gain access, stay safe, and find and report stories. Iraq 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. Coming up... My story here is not only about being a journalist or a survivor. I'm a witness. We return to Gaza with Ennis Baba. I'm a witness to where the light turned into darkness. This is Christopher from St. Louis, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR.

Part 3. A dual burden. A few weeks ago, just before the invasion of Gaza City began, I was trying to get in touch with N.S. Baba, NPR's reporter on the ground there. He's one of the only remaining palest 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 connection 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. Then I got a few rings. One time, my call was passed into a random conversation. Hello? A few times I got this message. Hello. The subscriber you have dialed is disconnected. And finally, 20 or so attempts later, Enos called me from that phone number.

Hello? Amalia? Yes. Yes. Sound like. I'm trying to call this number that you call. called from, and it goes directly to call ended. Welcome to Galahad.

It was kind of surreal talking to Ennis. 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. I'm sitting here to see the only place that we can see that we are still alive, to see that there is hope. is life, which is the beach, the sea. Oh, is that what I'm hearing in the background is the, 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 is the, what is the scene look like?

In front of me, yes, there is the sea, the water, but also we do have the Israeli Navy crafts. 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. Even 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's my friends is living and 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 into 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. I 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 a nurse strikes 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 destructive or partially distracted 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, fuel, medical supplies, food, even medical staff.

From the hospital going to the morgue. Every day, as part of his reporting, Enos counts the dead at the morgue. And from that, maybe to do a story about the humans and how the Garzan is being living. Shehada 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. Enos 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 thing. But when you are a journalist, you cannot stop. It'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, okay, 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. More 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. Quote, the protection of Palestinian journalists, the foreign press be granted independent access to the Gaza Strip,

and that governments across the government's across the government, across the world hosts Palestinian journalists seeking evacuation from Gaza. Israel's foreign ministry called the appeal a, quote, political manifesto against Israel,

and said, quote, the reports we see in the global media regarding Gaza do not tell the real story there. They tell the campaign of lies that Hamas spreads. Trust me, when I say this,

what we are reporting here from Gaza is only 10% from the reality. There is too many airstrikes, there is too many massacres, there is nonstop a humanitarian crisis that we are going through. And we, as journalist in Gaza, after two years of reporting nonstop, 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? Maybe I'm sorry to say this. But I hate to show my own emotions, especially when I'm talking about a colleague.

Not because now I'm heartless, no, we still practice our own humanity every single day. And believe it or not, sometimes, and 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.

sisters. Aidel, Marwa, Abdul, Mhamud, Tasneem, Sham, another two, and 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. It's something

that... Okay, Rwand, Rwand, we need to end the call at 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, Ennis called me back. Hello? Can you hear me? I asked him if Israeli surveillance had ever interfered with his reporting.

When I was in Raffa in my own house, a Kuat Kaptah. is a drone that holds a gun and explosive, and at the same time a microphone, it 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 buy yourself a 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 Gaza and 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. Without 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. More 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's 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 innocence who are often reduced to numbers or headlines. Ennis 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. You were living in one of the biggest open-air prisons ever. They called us animals, and they are treating us less than 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 few few from the Israelis in my own neighborhood for five days. We lived without water, we lived without

food, we lived without anything. So our church. Childhood was always filled with blood, filled with suffer. His father is a longtime photojournalist for AFP, a French news agency. So I was born with a camera on my own lap. Ennis 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 resilience the galsons are, because this is not something. 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 weren't on the same level as a foreign journalist coming in? Okay. This is a hard one, by the way. To be honest, with my own environment and 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. Living in the U.S., consuming American media, you know, October 7th is invoked any time that discussion about the destruction of Ghazza comes up. And 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 7, 23. 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 downs. That's no one in Gaza as civilians agreed on. But we are the ones as civilians that being punished, 1,200 Israelis killed at 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? When I'm going to leave Gaza, when all of this reached, when Israel sees us as a human, when Israel treats us as a human, 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

That was Ennis Baba, NPR's reporter in Gaza. That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablui. I'm Randa Abdul-Fattah, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and... Lawrence Wu. Julie Kaine.

Stimberg, Casey Minor, Christina Kim, Devin Katayama, 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 Romteen and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... Navid Marvi, Shoe Fujiwara,

Anya Mizani. Thank you to Al Jazeera, Daniel Estrin, Enas Baba, Didi Skanki, James Heider, Tony Kavan, Nadia Lanzani, Nancy, Laura Schwartz, Johannes Durge, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine 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.