‘If You’re Reading This, It Means I Have Been Killed’

“If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed — most likely targeted — by the Israeli occupation forces.”

These words, written by 23-year-old Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat, who worked for Al Jazeera and Drop Site News, were posted online by friends after he was killed in an Israeli airstrike on March 24.

That same day, Shabat posted on Instagram that Mohammed Mansour, a reporter for Palestine Today TV, was killed by an Israeli airstrike. An hour later, Shabat himself was killed. He and Mansour are the latest of over 200 journalists and media workers killed in the Gaza Strip since Israel began its assault on Oct. 7, 2023.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous, a journalist with Drop Site News who has reported from Gaza, now edits and translates Drop Site’s correspondents there, as Israel has blocked foreign reporters from entering. Kouddous recently returned from London, where his latest Gaza documentary for Al Jazeera English, “The Night Won’t End,” won the Royal Television Society Award. The documentary, which relied on Gaza-based Palestinian videographers, also won the coveted Overseas Press Club Award in the United States.

Kouddous was editing a piece from Shabat when he learned of his death.

“We have to be very clear: Hossam was deliberately killed,” Kouddous said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “He was assassinated by the Israeli military. The Israeli military has openly admitted to this. They called him a terrorist, and they said, ‘Don’t let the press vest fool you.’”

Kouddous shared the 2022 George Polk Award for the documentary “The Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh,” about Israel’s killing of the renowned Palestinian American Al Jazeera journalist in the occupied West Bank, on May 11, 2022. The Polk award is named after a U.S. journalist summarily executed while reporting on the Greek civil war in 1948. Violence against journalists is not new. In the case of Polk and Abu Akleh, as with so many others, journalists are killed by U.S.-backed and armed regimes. Israel’s targeting of journalists in Gaza, however, has taken this violence to a new, unprecedented scale.

“Israel has a long history of killing journalists, especially Palestinian journalists, with impunity,” Kouddous continued. “Hossam and five other journalists in October were placed on, essentially, a hit list by the Israeli military.”

Shabat received numerous death threats via phone and text. A reporter asked him if he would continue reporting. Shabat replied:

“There are massacres and bombings, so we must continue covering and spreading the truth. The Israeli occupation is determined to chase down journalists to prevent the exposure of their crimes.”

Shabat’s final article, posted posthumously at Drop Site News, provided a graphic depiction of Israel’s renewed bombardment of Gaza after abandoning the short-lived ceasefire. He wrote:

“As the bombs rained down, the wails of neighbors announced the first moments of the resumption of Israel’s military campaign. Beit Hanoun was plunged into panic and terror. Cries of distress rose amid the screech of the shells in a scene that reflected the magnitude of the disaster engulfing the city. This was only the beginning. The massacre of entire families quickly followed.”

In his self-written epitaph, Shabat wrote, “For [the] past 18 months, I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury. I slept on pavement, in schools, in tents — anywhere I could. Each day was a battle for survival. I endured hunger for months, yet I never left my people’s side.”

Now he has joined Gaza’s dead, more than 50,000 killed by the Israeli military since October 2023. That number is widely believed to be a vast undercount, as many bodies remain beneath rubble.

Most of what we know of the ongoing suffering in Gaza comes from Palestinian journalists who remain alive. Among them is 22-year-old Abubaker Abed. After Shabat’s death, he spoke on Democracy Now! from Deir al Balah, in Gaza, where he has been diagnosed with malnutrition, his whole body aching:

“We are facing death in every single direction, from starvation, from the relentless bombardments and from the conditions that we are living under. It’s a very horrific situation … as long as the world allows Israel to do so, this will not stop. We need more people to come out in the streets, to close the roads and to go on global strikes to make sure that this can be lifted, that this blockade and this aggression can be stopped.”

Expressions of solidarity with Palestinians in the U.S., under President Donald Trump’s administration, are being met with intimidation, arrests and, for foreign students, threats of deportation.

The targeting of dissenters, like the targeting of journalists, as well as the U.S.-backed Israeli occupation of Palestine, must end.