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The war of extermination created unusual working conditions even for journalists in the Gaza Strip, who have long worked amid security tensions and Israeli escalation. The scale and scope of the assault overwhelmed standard emergency plans. Journalists faced simultaneous challenges, from direct targeting and repeated displacement to communications blackouts, the destruction of media institutions and the loss of basic equipment.
Residents’ forced displacement from their homes and repeated movement between the Strip’s governorates scattered communities, including journalists themselves. This left gaps in coverage across many areas, particularly as ground operations expanded, movement became more difficult and journalists lost contact with sources. Those who remained in the field had to find alternative tools to keep news flowing and enable colleagues forced to flee to follow events in the areas they had left.
Journalistic monitoring groups emerged in response to this need across the Strip’s governorates, including “North Gaza Follow-up,” “Special Gaza Follow-up,” “Khan Younis Coverage,” “Central Follow-up,” and “Rafah Follow-up.” They began as individual initiatives by journalists brought together while covering events, then gradually developed into collaborative networks of correspondents, photographers, paramedics, civil defence personnel and trusted citizens. They became some of the main sources for field reporting and news briefings on the Gaza Strip.
Through these groups, journalists reorganised some of their work, sharing responsibility for monitoring events, verifying reports and relaying information. They drew on colleagues and sources present in different areas. As the war dragged on, the groups’ roles expanded to include helping direct rescue crews, relaying humanitarian appeals and reassuring families who had lost contact with loved ones. This work took shape under pressure in the field and evolved in response to daily needs.
Necessity creates its own tools
Mohammed Ahmed, a TRT Arabi correspondent and one of the managers of the North Gaza monitoring group, says the idea arose from journalists’ urgent need to communicate and know what was happening around them. Ongoing bombardment, incursions, limited communications and difficulty obtaining accurate information from areas under attack made that need particularly pressing.
He tells Noon Post that journalists brought together anyone who could access the internet to provide information about bombing locations, Israeli troop movements and developments on the ground. They used whatever connections were available to relay news to their colleagues. Citizens known to the journalists also took part, performing a role similar to that of field correspondents in their respective areas.
The need for these networks became more urgent whenever communications deteriorated. On 27 October 2023, as Israel expanded its ground invasion, landline, mobile and internet services were cut off across the Strip. Humanitarian and international organisations lost contact with their teams, while the Palestine Red Crescent warned that the blackout would affect its ability to respond to distress calls.
Outages recurred at different stages of the war because of destroyed infrastructure, damaged communications lines, fuel shortages and a lack of maintenance supplies. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) documented five fibre-optic cable outages between 10 and 21 June 2025 alone, causing a complete internet blackout and widespread disruption to mobile phone services.
Obtaining and transmitting information became a task in itself. Journalists had to find a news source, a power supply and a connection through which to send their reports, while displacement and military operations constantly changed the locations of journalists and their sources.
Ahmed explains that the North Gaza group helped provide continuous updates on attacks and incursions. It brought journalists together with paramedics and civil defence, firefighting and rescue personnel, giving them a shared space to exchange information for use in both reporting and operations on the ground.
He stresses that journalists established the group on their own initiative. It then became a collective effort involving colleagues from different media organisations. As the work developed, representatives of official bodies were added so they could use information from the field and provide journalists with data in return. This exchange aimed to facilitate coverage and ensure news reached its audience.
From inside Khan Younis to the news bulletins
In Khan Younis, the monitoring group emerged as Israel expanded its military operation and some journalists left the city after colleagues were injured and moving around and reporting became more dangerous.
Moaz al-Amour, one of the founders of the Khan Younis journalistic monitoring group and also the manager of a monitoring group in Gaza City, says he stayed in Khan Younis with several colleagues. They continued moving around and accompanying ambulance and civil defence crews. The group became their means of relaying developments to journalists who could not stay in the city or reach the area.
He told Noon Post that the group was established with the participation of two of his colleagues, the martyred journalist Hassan Aslih and Abdullah al-Shorbaji. It gradually became a main source of news from the governorate. Correspondents relied on its details about air strikes, developments on the ground and casualty figures to prepare briefings and news bulletins.
Al-Amour made a point of sending regular summaries in the morning, at midday and in the evening, timed to coincide with the main bulletins. The aim was to give colleagues a complete picture of events to help them report from a distance. Working alongside rescue crews enabled him to follow events, document the details and share them with other journalists.
The group also monitored residents’ attempts to reach their relatives to recover the bodies of the dead and evacuate the wounded towards western Khan Younis, particularly al-Mawasi. Al-Amour says journalists helped document these attempts and identify locations that had been struck, making them easier to reach.
Journalists and civil defence crews developed a complementary working relationship through their shared presence at attack sites and their exchange of information about victims and recovery and rescue operations. The group reflected that relationship, gathering details from the field and making them available to journalists from different organisations.
Al-Amour stresses that the work was entirely voluntary, with no direction or support from any official body. Participants shared news and contributed their documentation and monitoring efforts to help colleagues and ease their work, particularly during the first year of the extermination.
By connecting journalists inside the area of operations with colleagues outside it, the group helped reduce the impact of the gaps in coverage caused by displacement. Information gathered on the ground became available to organisations and audiences that journalists could not reach through their usual working methods.
Rules that evolved with experience
As participation widened and more information flowed through the groups, accuracy and verification became another challenge. Sites and sources were difficult to reach, while unconfirmed reports and rumours proliferated, potentially causing panic among residents and confusion for rescue crews.
Mohammed Ahmed says participants were initially selected through personal relationships and journalists’ knowledge of their sources, particularly citizens relaying news from their areas. Over time, the groups introduced rules, safeguards and repeated reminders to verify information, follow publishing ethics and avoid causing confusion.
Ahmed considers accurate information about the location of an attack a top priority. Ambulance and civil defence crews may use reports posted in the group to decide where to go, so any error has direct consequences beyond the news coverage itself.
In Khan Younis, al-Amour explains, the rules gradually evolved in response to what participants observed during their work. Some became explicit, written rules, including a ban on circulating harrowing images of martyrs’ bodies, respect for their dignity and reliance on Health Ministry confirmation of their names to avoid errors and the harm they cause families.
The rules also prohibited false news and included tracking and debunking rumours and intervening to stop their circulation, while continuing to relay confirmed information quickly. As the work developed, journalists based inside hospitals joined. They monitored victims arriving at the hospitals and news updates reaching them, strengthening the groups’ ability to verify reports from the field.
Al-Amour stresses that trust and accuracy are essential requirements for joining. Anyone whose reporting is shown to be inaccurate is barred from relaying news so that the group does not become a channel for rumours. He describes citizens’ participation under these rules as a form of organised citizen journalism, providing field sources able to reach places and events that journalists cannot cover themselves.
Even so, internet outages remained one of the groups’ biggest obstacles, Ahmed says, because they restricted the sending and receiving of information. Professional communication itself also carried risks. Ahmed says some of his colleagues arrested by the occupation were questioned during interrogation about their involvement in the monitoring groups.
Journalists connecting families
Alongside their news role, the monitoring groups took on a humanitarian function in response to the breakdown in communication between residents and their relatives. This was particularly acute in the northern Strip, where families were cut off from their children and other relatives outside Gaza.
Ahmed says journalists made a point of identifying locations that had been targeted, affected families and the names of the dead to help followers understand what was happening around their loved ones. As the blackout continued, people living abroad began asking journalists to visit their families’ homes and check on them.
Journalists responded when conditions allowed them to move around. In some cases, they carried voice messages from residents to relatives abroad. They then created a dedicated communication group connecting people abroad with their families in northern Gaza. Journalists became a link between them, partly compensating for the loss of communications.
Ahmed notes that those seeking help included fellow journalists outside the Strip whose families remained in the north. He says almost daily visits were organised to check on some families and relay news to their children.
In Gaza City, al-Amour recounts other instances in which the group helped address urgent humanitarian needs. During the wave of displacement linked to the “Gideon’s Chariots” operations in 2025, several doctors left al-Shifa Hospital, worsening its staffing shortage. An appeal was posted in the monitoring group to recruit doctors and specialist personnel. Three female doctors, along with a number of female medical students, responded, helping ease the shortage, according to his account.
In another case, food could not be provided to ambulance and civil defence personnel during the extensive military campaign in the city. Those running the group issued an appeal for meals. More than one charity responded with food supplies.
Al-Amour also recalls a young man from Nuseirat who was killed and whose body was at al-Shifa Hospital. His family could neither arrange transport to take his body to the central governorate nor cover the cost. An appeal circulated through the group reached organisations and individuals who offered to volunteer to help the family.
These incidents show how extensively the war brought journalistic work into contact with society’s humanitarian needs. A network of relationships and sources established for reporting became a means of relaying needs and connecting people with those able to help, at a time when many communications channels and services had broken down.
Coverage continues despite the targeting of journalists
These efforts took place as the journalistic community lost large numbers of its members. Survivors experienced injury, arrest, displacement and the loss of family members, homes and equipment.
According to an update from Gaza’s Government Media Office, based on the latest statistics issued on 30 September 2026, the office had documented the killing of 263 Palestinian journalists and media workers by fire from Israeli occupation forces in Gaza since the start of the war. In its report on the war’s first year, Reporters Without Borders had noted that nearly all journalists in the Strip had been repeatedly displaced, alongside the destruction of press offices, communications and electricity cuts, and the prevention of foreign journalists from entering the Strip independently.
Rami al-Sharafi, a member of the General Secretariat of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, says Gaza’s journalists showed an exceptional ability to devise practical solutions in the field despite enduring the same conditions they were covering. These included displacement, injury, the loss of family members and deprivation of life’s basic necessities.
He told Noon Post that the syndicate worked to support journalists by following up with crews in hospitals and at reporting locations. It provided supplies including first-aid kits, portable chargers and tents for coverage at some hospitals. It also offered first-aid training in cooperation with the Palestine Red Crescent and followed procedures for transferring the wounded and sick for treatment outside the Strip.
To address communications outages, al-Sharafi points to efforts with international organisations to press for the protection of infrastructure and support journalists’ use of eSIMs connected to external networks. He also points to attempts to provide reporting locations equipped with at least a basic alternative power supply.
He stresses that the syndicate emphasised verifying information, relying on trusted sources and distinguishing confirmed reports from rumours. It also warned against sacrificing journalists’ safety for a scoop. These standards aligned with the rules that group managers developed in response to the conditions they encountered.
The monitoring groups show how Gaza’s journalists reorganised their work on the ground during the extermination. Faced with displacement, communications blackouts and difficulties reaching locations, they pooled their remaining resources in voluntary networks. Through them, they kept news flowing from areas Israel tried to isolate, connecting events in neighbourhoods, hospitals and rescue locations with the coverage reaching the world.
These networks depended on journalists who lived through the events they reported and continued working amid the loss of colleagues, the displacement of families and the breakdown of communications. The professional and humanitarian work that emerged from these harsh conditions helped keep Gaza in view — its news, its people and the details of their lives — despite the targeting of journalists and the destruction of the tools they use to tell its story.