Palestinians inspect the site hit by an Israeli strike in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip on April 2.Abdel Kareem Hana/The Associated Press
Walid Batrawi is a Palestinian journalist and media consultant.
As I sit in my Toronto apartment overlooking the peaceful view of Lake Ontario behind the CN Tower, I can’t help but follow the news coming in from Gaza. When I arrived here last April from the West Bank city of Ramallah, on the Canadian government’s special-measures program for Palestinians and Israelis, I thought I would be detached from the story. But it is still haunting me.
I wake up every day with the fear that someone I know has been killed or injured. At the beginning of the war, I held every single person in the Gaza Strip in my mind, yearning for them all to be safe. But as the conflict went on, I couldn’t hold everyone in my heart anymore – it hurt too much. To survive, I had to limit the circle of those I can remain anxious about to just my immediate family.
Recently, I woke up and scrolled through my WhatsApp messages to find one from my colleague and friend Sami Abu Salem, expressing condolences for five members of my extended family (third cousins) who were killed by an Israeli tank shell that hit their house in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza.
For someone who has always believed that life must go on despite the sorrow, I still cannot absorb what has been going on in Gaza. Every time I eat, drink, shower or even use the washroom, I think of the millions of displaced people, some of whom had a much better life in Gaza than mine here in Toronto, or even when I lived in Ramallah.
My visits to Gaza were frequent, as I was conducting training for journalists in a number of fields, but specifically health, safety and hostile environments. With over 170 journalists killed in Gaza since the beginning of the war, some of whom I trained, I actually feel ridiculous now thinking about the safety instructions I used to give, like wearing a helmet and a flak jacket, or hiding behind the wheel of a car. Such measures cannot be applied in an environment where the UN says there is evidence of war crimes. Simply nothing I advised journalists to do back then would work now, as there is no safe place in the Gaza Strip.
I last visited Gaza on Aug. 17, 2023, with my European Press Agency photojournalist colleague Alaa Badarneh. Shortly after crossing the Erez checkpoint into Gaza, we arrived at the Al Deira Hotel on the beach, which was considered one of the safe and vetted hotels where journalists and diplomatic missions stayed. In the hotel lobby sat freelance photojournalist Sulaiman Hejji, ready to accompany Alaa on an assignment to south Gaza. As we were checking in, the hotel generously offered all of us a freshly squeezed Gazan strawberry welcome drink.
Off to work, they both went. I had little to do in Gaza, so I decided to relax at the luxurious Bianco Resort. For only 20 Israeli Shekels (or $8), I spent the entire day enjoying the scenery and watching crabs dig holes in the sand. The money I paid included the admission fee and a fresh lemonade. In the evening, my two colleagues returned and joined me with others at the al-Baqa Café, where most Gaza-based journalists gather. Around the table also sat Nidal al-Waheidi, who went missing on Oct. 7 while covering news at the Erez checkpoint, and Atia Darwish, who lost his eye when an Israeli tear gas canister was shot directly at him on Dec. 14, 2018. All the places I visited during that 24-hour trip have been totally destroyed.
When I arrived in Canada, I worked for the Paris-based Forbidden Stories on Gaza Project, investigating the targeting of journalists (yet another story to haunt me). By the time it was published, I was physically and emotionally exhausted, as I had to speak to family members of colleagues who had lost their lives, and to colleagues who were injured. When Forbidden Stories asked me to work on a second phase of the Gaza Project, I declined. I did not want to go through the trauma again.
Two more journalists were killed in Gaza last week. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Israeli airstrikes hit the car of Al Jazeera journalist Hossam Shabat near northern Gaza’s Beit Lahia, and the Khan Younis home of Mohammed Mansour, who worked for the Beirut-based television channel Palestine Today.
For me, waking up in Toronto is just another day. I move on with my life in an effort to escape the trauma. But for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, waking up each morning can be a comfort in and of itself – to a point. They are alive for now – but for how long?