Reporting From the Rubble: The Life of a Journalist in Gaza

Since October 2023, Mohamed Abu Shahma has lost his home and 24 relatives, including his brother, sister, and aunt. 

“After burying the bodies,” he said, “I went straight back to searching for food and water.” 

Two of his daughters were injured when rubble from their makeshift home collapsed around them. The youngest, two-year-old Massa, was struck by debris and needed stitches across her face. She will need cosmetic surgery — if she ever makes it out of Gaza.

Still, he keeps typing.

A journalist for the Lebanese news platform Daraj and contributor to OCCRP, Abu Shahma reports between funerals, while dodging bullets and bombs, searching for food, and moving his family up and down the Gaza Strip. He works on a borrowed computer under a tent in a refugee camp, his eyes often drifting upward to scan the sky for drones or missiles.

Journalists aren’t just observers of the war in Gaza: They are targets. Nearly 200 journalists and media workers have been killed there since October 2023, according to the press freedom group The Committee to Protect Journalists — among them close friends, people Abu Shahma had spoken with moments before they were struck down.

After Israel ordered evacuations in the southern Gazan city of Khan Younis in December 2023, Abu Shahma’s mother, wife, and five children — Sarah, 12; Lana, 11; Suleiman, 8; Sora, 7; and Massa, 2 — fled their home with a few belongings crammed into his battered Fiat Panda.

“It will only be for a few days,” he told himself. He was wrong.

“Three months later, airstrikes by an Israeli warplane destroyed my home in Khan Younis, including my journalistic equipment, my work files, my family’s possessions and all our memories,” he recalled.

Since then, he said, “I have lived in ruins and flimsy tents, sometimes near hospitals, sometimes on bare farmland. Repeatedly, seeking to keep them safe, I have dragged my family between Israel-designated evacuation zones. But nowhere was safe, really.”

Still, he never stopped typing.

In Rafah, another city in the south where they first sought refuge, hundreds of thousands of others crowded into the same small area. Nights were spent on the ground, haunted by barking dogs, shelling and the cries of frightened children. Each morning began with a wait in line before water trucks.

“With a bit of luck, I would leave with a 20-liter container, barely enough to drink and cook. Finding food was also a daunting task,” he said.

Markets offered little beyond expensive canned beans and chickpeas. Meat, eggs, and fruit had vanished. When Massa asked for apples, her father could only offer words.

And that was before the hunger got worse. In August, the U.N. declared a famine in Gaza.The strain on Abu Shahma’s family in recent weeks has been relentless. His wife, once his staunchest supporter, now pleads with him to give up reporting. “Every day a journalist dies in Gaza,” she told him. “I feel as if you’ve been spared, given another chance. I don’t want our children to grow up without a father.”

But he keeps going.

“Because leaving journalism would mean abandoning my people, and their stories would be lost,” he said.

Ramallah-based NGO The Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms has described the killing of journalists as “a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law and all international conventions that guarantee their protection during armed conflicts” — an effort, it said, to silence the truth.

For Abu Shahma, the work is both a calling and a sentence. Each morning, the 37-year-old puts on his battered press jacket and scribbles down a note for his family telling them his destination, so they will know where to find his body if he does not return.

While in Rafah, he walked miles each day to a makeshift office near a hospital, where electricity and internet still flickered. “On good days, a car or an animal-drawn cart would take me part of the way,” he said.

His stories chronicled famine, collapsing health care, soaring food prices and the ordinary lives shattered by war. “Every time I run to a bombing site,” he said, “I wonder if I will come back.”

Last year, Abu Shahma, who collaborated with OCCRP on two stories on Gaza, won the Samir Kassir award’s Student’s Prize for this story on how middleman merchants had hugely inflated food prices amid shortages.  

Hazem Al-Amin, a founding partner and editor of Daraj, who worked with Abu Shahma on several stories, said the reporter is remarkable for his ability to persevere in the face of immense personal suffering.

“Despite having gravely suffered from the repeated displacement, the stress of his daughters’ injuries, and other challenges, Mohamed manages to produce balanced, non-emotional, solid reporting,” he said 

“We consider our relationship with him one of the success factors in our reporting about Gaza,” Al-Amin added. 

After Israeli bombardment of Rafah intensified in April 2024, Abu Shahma’s family moved again, first to Al Mawasi, in western Khan Younis, then back to Khan Younis when the Israeli army withdrew. He tried to rebuild.

“I used the rubble material to build us a room. It was the worst decision I have ever made,” he said, as two of his daughters were injured when the makeshift house collapsed around them

Massa needed 20 stitches across her face; her sister Suwar suffered bleeding in her spleen. The family fled again.

“In March 2025, I rented a small house southeast of Khan Younis. But less than a month after moving in, upcoming Israeli attacks forced us to evacuate again,” he said.

Now they live once more in a tent, this time in a refugee camp in Al Mawasi.

“Throughout the last year and half, I have tried to document the most important impacts of the war on my people,” he said. He has written about the collapse of Gaza’s health care system, the destruction of water and electricity networks, the spread of disease and hunger. 

“I tried to give a voice to the numerous victims of the war, the prisoners used as human shields, the doctors killed because of their work, the babies who died in their mother’s womb, the missing whose bodies were never found, buried in the ruins of what used to be bustling cities,” he said.

And still, he types.