Since Friday October 27 in the morning, The world has no further news from Hassan Jaber, its historical “fixer” in the Gaza Strip. Hassan is one of those veterans over 60 years old who accompanied nearly half a dozen of the newspaper’s correspondents through the geography of the Palestinian enclave but also through the political twists and turns of Hamas, the Islamist party that has administered this small territory since 2007. Without him, a good number of reports from World, in recent years, could not have been achieved. For three weeks, he has been stranded with his family under massive Israeli bombardments.
Since October 7 and the Hamas terrorist operations in Israel, no journalist has been able to enter the Gaza Strip. The place is completely cordoned off by the Jewish state which has deployed its army to the north and along the enclave. In the South, Egypt does not let the press pass anymore.
From Jerusalem, our journalist, Clothilde Mraffko spends long hours every day waiting for calls, text messages and rare videos from Palestinian colleagues in Gaza but also from contacts she has made there over the years. “It’s grueling work.she says. Not only have people in Gaza communicate piecemeal, depending on Internet connections and their ability to find a way to recharge their cell phones since the electricity was cut off on October 9, but they have often lost loved ones in the bombings. Beyond the precise information they give me, I am often one of their rare external contacts with whom they can speak a little. »
Outside the enclave, photographers stand a few hundred meters from the barbed wire and the compound that fences off the Gaza Strip. It is only from there, from Israeli territory, that they can see the black smoke from the burned buildings and the ruins of the neighborhoods destroyed by the bombings. Gaza City is only an hour from Tel Aviv, barely more from Jerusalem and yet it is as if there were two worlds. How can we know for sure what’s going on there?
Even before this violent conflict, journalistic coverage of this open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip had constituted a challenge since the early 2000s, between Israeli military incursions, bombings, closures of the enclave, bureaucracy , censorship or the opposing interests of the government of the Hebrew State and the Palestinian Authority, then Hamas since 2007.
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