Bethany Rielly pays tribute to the Palestinian journalist Wafa Aludaini who was killed by an Israeli airstrike on 30 September.
Bethany Rielly / New Internationalist*
In May 2021, I sent Wafa a message checking in on her and her family. Gaza had just endured 11 days of relentless Israeli bombing, killing 232 people. ‘I hope you’re doing OK, and you’ve been able to get some rest after the ceasefire,’ I wrote. She quickly replied: ‘No rest. So many stories have to be told to the world. Every day I interview people and listen to heartbreaking stories.’
I had the privilege of working with Wafa on various stories over the years while covering Israel’s siege and assaults on Gaza. I admired her bravery, and dedication to telling the stories of her people living under Israeli siege and genocide, no matter the personal toll. For Wafa, until Palestine was free, there would be no rest.
She was always determined to get Gaza’s voices out into the world, and cut through what she described as the ‘distortion’ of Palestinians’ reality by the mainstream media. It was frustration at the way Gaza was portrayed in the press that drove Wafa to pursue a career in journalism after studying English at Al Aqsa University. In 2018, she began covering the Great March of Return, reporting from the front lines of the protests which took place every Friday for almost 18 months.
As a female journalist and refugee, she wanted to shine a light particularly on women’s perspectives, sensitively telling the stories of women and girls who’d joined the march week after week despite facing a barrage of bullets.
Wafa went on to write for international publications including Middle East Monitor, The Guardian, New Internationalist and the Palestine Chronicle. Alongside her journalism, she was a committed activist for Palestinian rights and trained young women in media work. Wafa was killed alongside her husband, 5-year-old daughter Balsam and 7-month-old son Tamim when an Israeli airstrike hit their house in the city of Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza on 30 September. She is survived by two sons. She is the 174th journalist Israel has killed during its war on Gaza.
In the weeks before her death, Wafa reported on the murder of Al Jazeera correspondent Ismael Alghoul and cameraman Rami Alrifi, who were hit by an Israeli drone strike that targeted Alghoul’s car just hours after he appeared live on air. They were some of the last journalists reporting from Gaza City.
Wafa noted how her colleagues had been working ‘heroically on empty stomachs, often without electricity’ to cover the ongoing genocide. What she didn’t mention was her own bravery. How she’d been displaced three times since 7 October, including in December 2023 when airstrikes destroyed her home. Wafa was living in an area marked as a ‘humanitarian zone’ by Israel, but that did not stop the bombs from falling. Every journalist in the Strip knows the risks of trying to cut through Israel’s attempts to create a media blackout in Gaza. As Wafa wrote in August: “The record-breaking scale of the killings of journalists in the entire 25-mile Gaza Strip exceeds any imagination and any historical precedent.”
It is heartbreaking to read these words now Wafa is gone. To be writing about her, as she wrote about her fallen colleagues before her.
Her friend, Ahmed Abu Artema, a poet and writer from Gaza, believes she was deliberately targeted. “They targeted her because she tried to convey the voice of victims”, he told me, adding he was still in shock by the news of her death.
With Israel’s ban on international media entering Gaza, the decimation of media infrastructure and the elimination of journalists on the ground, we face a dystopian reality where the Israeli military is the only source of information. As Reporters Without Borders recently warned, ‘At the rate journalists are being killed in Gaza, there will soon be no-one left to keep you informed.’
Wafa’s death is not only a loss to her friends, family and colleagues, but to the international community who have the right to access free and independent information inside Gaza. Israel’s massacre of journalists and the impunity that has allowed the deadliest attacks on media workers in recent history must end, and protections must be granted to Palestinian journalists.
In her last post on social media, Wafa posted a picture of smiling Gazans sending a message in the sand of solidarity to Lebanon. For Wafa, showing the world her peoples’ resilience and ‘relentless, steadfast drive for freedom and a whole and dignified life’, was equally as important as telling stories of their suffering. This is how she’ll be remembered.
*Article and main photo originally published in New Internationalist.
(Photos: Pixabay)
.jpg)
