Speaking on Dahdouh and his resilient reaction to the news of the killing of his wife, son, and daughter, Al Jazeera’s senior analyst Marwan Bishara said he has become “immune” to the suffering.
“He’s become immune … He [Dahdouh] lives in the midst of death and mayhem and destruction, probably all his life,” Bishara said.
Over the last 18 years, Gaza has witnessed “hundreds of waves of bombings,” he said. “These people live in fear and death and destruction and poverty. They become immune and now listening to him, would expect the man so angry to be cursing, but he’s not, his revenge is to tell the truth” about the Israeli occupation.
The killing of the family of Al Jazeera’s Gaza Bureau chief Wael Dahdouh is a grim reminder of the dangers those covering the conflict – particularly from within the besieged enclave – face.
In the current war, Al Jazeera’s Youmna ElSayed was giving a live crossing from Gaza City on October 7 when an Isreali strike hit the building behind her. She was uninjured. Five days later, two Al Jazeera Arabic reporters werewounded amid an exchange of fire on the Lebanon-Israel border, in a strike that killed Reuters journalist Essam Abdullah.
Prior to the most recent escalation, prominent Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh was fatally shot by an Israeli soldier while covering a raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank on May 11, 2022. The network has called for Abu Akleh’s killers to be held accountable after a UN inquiry last week said Israeli forces used “lethal force without justification” and violated her “right to life”.
A year before Abu Akleh’s killing, on May 15, 2021, Israel gave just minutes warning before bombing an office housing Al Jazeera and Associated Press offices – as well as several residential units – in Gaza City.
Al Jazeera correspondent Youmna ElSayed said she and other journalists in Gaza turned to bureau chief Wael Dahdouh for advice on how to keep their families safe.
“He speaks to us like a big brother, not just a bureau chief in Gaza,” she said. “He told me I can’t lie to you and tell you there is a safe place to turn to. There’s no safe place in Gaza. This is the reality we live in every day.”
ElSayed said she had travelled to the south of Gaza with her family, including her children, after Israel called on residents of the north to evacuate.
“I decided to take my family back to the north because the bombardments in the south were every single moment,” she said. “Every day, everywhere we turned to there was a home bombarded with civilians.”
“If there was just one day that was safe for us in the south … one night that we slept and we did not hug our kids very close to us … because we may not wake up again, [we would have not returned to the north]” she said.
Oxfam says starvation is being used as a weapon of war against civilians in Gaza, adding just two percent of usual food has been delivered to the enclave since Israel’s “total siege”.
Dahdouh received the news of his family’s deaths while covering the latest Israeli attack on central Gaza.
He was “shocked”, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said.
Dahdouh, a veteran Al Jazeera journalist, was “delivering the truth to the international community and to everyone in the world about what is happening on the ground” when he received the news, Abu Azzoum said.
His family was “residing in the house in … al-Nuseirat refugee camp. The Israeli aircraft targeted the house,” he said.