A quadcopter was flying low above the door of his house, he said, and he feared he was about to be targeted in an Israeli airstrike. As a highly visible Palestinian online who had received threats before, Azaiza believed he had reason to be afraid. <\/p>\n
Hundreds of people flooded the replies with concern for the 24-year-old Palestinian photojournalist, who has been documenting Israel\u2019s military assault on Gaza on social media since Hamas\u2019 attack on Israel on October 7. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m so scared for Motaz<\/em>,\u201d the replies read. <\/p>\n \u201cI hope Motaz is okay<\/em>.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cPray for Motaz.<\/em>\u201d <\/p>\n Noor, a\u00a0<\/em>medical student in California who asked to go by her first name for safety reasons, was one of the people worrying. For months, she\u2019s been following\u00a0Azaiza\u2019s dispatches\u00a0from Gaza, broadcast to his millions of followers: images of his once vibrant neighborhood transformed into a gray wasteland, raw glimpses of carnage in the ashes, and reflections on his own feelings of rage and exhaustion. <\/p>\n Noor refers to Azaiza with the familiarity of his first name. She gets notifications on her phone each time he posts, and worries when too much time passes. <\/p>\n Noor isn\u2019t Palestinian and has never been to Gaza. What\u2019s happening there still hits close to home. Her family is Iraqi, and she grew up against the backdrop of the Iraq War. When Azaiza said he feared being killed for his work, Noor found herself feeling scared and anxious for a virtual stranger halfway around the world. <\/p>\n \u201cTheir journalism isn\u2019t just journalism. It\u2019s a diary,\u201d Noor said of the Gazans posting on social media. \u201cThey\u2019re showing us their lives. They\u2019re telling us, \u2018Hey, I couldn\u2019t shower for a week.\u2019 \u2018Hey, I barely had some of this to eat today.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n After hours with no information following that fear of an airstrike, Azaiza finally posted again. A targeted attack on his house hadn\u2019t materialized, but there was bad news elsewhere: a refugee camp was hit in an Israeli attack. <\/p>\n Still, his posts signaled he was alive, and Noor could breathe a sad sigh of relief. <\/p>\n Like millions of others around the world, Noor is witnessing the war in Gaza through the eyes of Palestinians who are sharing their daily realities\u00a0on social media. Through their posts on Instagram, X and other platforms, these citizen journalists are putting a face to the conflict. <\/p>\n In return, their followers are developing strong emotional connections with them. <\/p>\n Leyla Hamed, a sports journalist in London, said the first thing she does when she wakes up is open Instagram to visit the profiles of Palestinians she follows and watch their stories one by one. As a journalist herself, she sees them as colleagues and feels a responsibility to bear witness. <\/p>\n \u201cI feel so much empathy for them that I sometimes feel scared to open their profiles, just thinking something bad has happened to them,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n Kanwal Ahmed, a filmmaker and storyteller in Toronto, has a similar routine. <\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019ve become family to the entire world,\u201d she said. \u201cIf (creator Bisan Owda) hasn\u2019t posted for 12 hours, there are hundreds of tweets: \u2018Where\u2019s Bisan?\u2019 \u2018Does anybody know where Bisan is?\u2019 \u2018Is she okay?\u2019 If (Azaiza) has posted a picture where you can tell that he\u2019s looking extremely depressed or he\u2019s lost weight, there\u2019s people discussing that.\u201d <\/p>\n These images and accounts from Palestinians offer an\u00a0instantaneous view that some young people feel like they haven\u2019t gotten from traditional media outlets, Ahmed said. Young Palestinians like Azaiza, content creator\u00a0Bisan Owda\u00a0and freelance journalist\u00a0Hind Khoudary\u00a0haven\u2019t just been on the ground since the beginning. They are reporting from their homes, their communities. <\/p>\n They\u2019ve become family to the entire world. <\/p>\n Kanwal Ahmed, filmmaker <\/p>\n Through raw, selfie-style videos chronicling the\u00a0ever-present threat of explosions\u00a0or the\u00a0everyday indignities of displacement, they\u2019re giving outsiders an intimate look at the human costs of war from the perspective of people who live there. Many of the images they share are so graphic that Instagram obscures them with \u201csensitive content\u201d warnings. <\/p>\n \u201cEveryone\u2019s getting a chance to tell their own stories,\u201d Ahmed said. \u201cPeople can tell for themselves \u2026 And it\u2019s very hard to look away when you\u2019re seeing somebody sitting in a pile of rubble, or if you\u2019re seeing a five-year-old girl crying next to her father\u2019s dead body.\u201d <\/p>\n Seeing the war directly through these channels changes how people understand it, said Zaina Arafat, a Palestinian American author in Brooklyn who has written about\u00a0witnessing the assault on Gaza through Instagram. <\/p>\n \u201cThe constancy of these images and the way that we watch them through our phones very much in private allows for a more direct and forceful impact,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s this very immediate connection between journalist and viewer, which I do think heightens the response.\u201d <\/p>\n Israel began its relentless bombardment and ground assault in Gaza after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, killing more than 1,200 and taking more than 200 hostages, according to Israeli authorities. <\/p>\n Israel says its offensive is aimed at wiping out Hamas, a militant group that the US, European Union and others consider a terrorist organization. But the conflict has also created a humanitarian crisis \u2014 one that people around the world are able to see up close. <\/p>\n Direct accounts from Palestinians are one of the most reliable ways for people to understand the devastation in Gaza, where about one in every 100 people has been killed and more than one in 40 have been wounded since the war began, according to the\u00a0Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah, which draws its statistics from hospitals in Hamas-controlled Gaza. <\/strong>Israel\u2019s military denies accusations that it deliberately targets civilians. <\/p>\n \u201cThis is as close as you can get to factual and minute-by-minute reporting on the atrocities on the ground,\u201d said Marwa Fatafta, an analyst and researcher who leads Middle East and North Africa policy and advocacy work for the digital rights organization\u00a0Access Now. <\/p>\n Independent journalism out of Gaza is scant. With notable exceptions, among them\u00a0international news agencies such as Reuters and Agence France-Presse, most news organizations have been unable to cover the war in Gaza with their own correspondents. Israel, along with Egypt, has largely blocked international journalists from the territory on the\u00a0premise\u00a0that it cannot guarantee their safety. The few foreign journalists who have been allowed to enter have primarily\u00a0embedded with the Israel Defense Forces\u00a0and may have had to submit their footage to the military for security review. <\/p>\n Eyewitness accounts on social media are critical in understanding\u00a0<\/em>global conflicts, including past\u00a0flare-ups between Israelis and Palestinians. In 2021, Palestinian poet and writer Mohammed el-Kurd rose to\u00a0social media prominence\u00a0for his activism around a series of forced eviction cases in his Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. <\/p>\n What\u2019s different this time, according to Fatafta, is how many more people are paying attention. <\/p>\n \u201cWhat we see now is a continuation of what happened in 2021, but of course, on a massive scale, because also what\u2019s happening in Gaza is unprecedented,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n Before\u00a0October 2023, Azaiza had about 25,000 Instagram followers, according to the social media analytics firm Social Blade. That number has since grown to more than 18 million. Bisan Owda has 3.8 million followers, and Hind Khoudary recently surpassed one million. <\/p>\n Plestia Alaqad\u00a0said she wanted to tell stories about the beauty of Gaza before the events of October 7 turned her into a de facto war reporter. <\/p>\n After one of her videos capturing a\u00a0blast going off near her building\u00a0went viral, she said she felt a duty to continue. Like many Gazans on social media, she posted in fluent English, allowing her photos and videos on Instagram to reach a global audience that now numbers 4.7 million people. <\/p>\n Alaqad has been on both sides of this dynamic, first as a citizen journalist and now as a viewer. Through October and much of November of 2023, she was reporting daily on what was happening on the ground in Gaza, with her followers hanging on to every update. <\/p>\n As a Palestinian living in Gaza, you don\u2019t have a choice but to be a war journalist. <\/p>\n Plestia Alaqad, Palestinian content creator <\/p>\n As overwhelming as it felt at times to have so many people relying on her for updates, Alaqad said she wanted viewers to feel connected.<\/em>\u00a0She didn\u2019t want people to learn from TV about some new tragedy in Gaza and just move on with their day. <\/p>\n She wanted viewers to see Palestinians as someone\u2019s child, friend or neighbor, with lives and dreams of their own. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not about me as Plestia,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s about me as a Palestinian. I\u2019d like people to know about Palestine, to see Gaza through my eyes.\u201d <\/p>\n In November, she made the difficult decision to leave Gaza with her family after her uncle in Australia secured emergency visas for them. Now watching from afar in Melbourne, she\u2019s the one refreshing her social media feeds and anxiously texting relatives, friends and colleagues to make sure they\u2019re safe. <\/p>\n Viewers who scroll back far enough through these Gazans\u2019 social media posts are hit with sobering reminders of a life before the war. Motaz Azaiza was still documenting flare-ups in the ongoing conflict before the events of October, but he also spent time near the sea photographing children playing and shared a selfie celebrating his graduation from university. Plestia Alaqad filmed a tour of Gaza\u2019s Old City, did a photoshoot in a motorcycle helmet and posed for pictures with dogs. <\/p>\n \u201cThey would go to restaurants. They would go to the beach. They would watch their favorite films. They would take care of the gardens. They have a life just like me and you,\u201d said Leyla Hamed, the sports journalist. <\/p>\n Others can still see themselves in parts of these people\u2019s lives, even as they are under siege. Last month, Owda\u00a0shared\u00a0that she had to chop off her signature brown curls because she no longer had clean water or products to care for her hair properly. <\/p>\n It might seem trivial to mourn the loss of hair in such a situation, but it was an intimate detail people could identify with, said Syed Faizan Raza, a design researcher in Islamabad. <\/p>\n \u201cIt goes back to those moments of relatability and how you are familiar with these people. Everyone knows these people by name and they\u2019re following them quite diligently,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n The work of these photographers, storytellers and citizen journalists is dangerous. <\/p>\n At least 82\u00a0journalists and media workers have been killed while covering the war as of January 16, 75 of them Palestinian, according to data from the\u00a0Committee to Protect Journalists. Reporters in the region also face\u00a0assaults, arrests and threats, in addition to communications blackouts. <\/p>\n The landscape is so dire that some have decided to cease their efforts. On January 10, blogger Ismail al Dahdouh\u00a0announced\u00a0to his 1.2 million Instagram followers that he would no longer be documenting the war in order to seek safety with his family. <\/p>\n Other Palestinian creators continue to record with relentless dedication. Sometimes, they express despair over whether anyone is listening, or whether their reporting makes a difference. <\/p>\n One day in early December, their exhaustion was especially apparent. <\/p>\n \u201cI no longer have any hope of survival like I had at the beginning of this genocide, and I am certain that I will die in the next few weeks or maybe days,\u201d Owda wrote in a\u00a0December 2 Instagram post. (Israel has denied allegations of genocide in Gaza, claiming its actions in the region are in \u201cself-defense\u201d and that it is targeting Hamas rather than civilians.) <\/p>\n \u201cThe phase of risking my life to show the world what\u2019s happening is now over. A new phase has begun \u2014 the phase to survive,\u201d Motaz Azaiza\u00a0wrote in Arabic\u00a0in an\u00a0Instagram post\u00a0that same day. <\/p>\n Even as people flock to learn from and support these Palestinians on social media, Noor says the exchange is overshadowed by feelings of powerlessness. <\/p>\n \u201cFor (Azaiza, the photojournalist), it\u2019s almost like he\u2019s a representative of his people,\u201d Noor said. \u201cBy extension, your care isn\u2019t just for him. Your care is for everyone because he is showcasing what his people are suffering.\u201d <\/p>\n Still, Noor and other followers hope that their advocacy for Palestinian stories can keep public attention on the crisis in Gaza and put pressure on elected officials to bring about an end to the fighting. <\/p>\n In the US, people are encouraging each other to contact their representatives in Congress and demand they support a lasting ceasefire. Protests, demonstrations and public gatherings in support of Palestinians have grown in size since the start of the war, according to data from scholars and researchers with the\u00a0Crowd Counting Consortium. A December 2023 Quinnipiac University poll found that US voter support for sending military aid to Israel had dropped.\u00a0Israel is facing mounting international pressure to agree to a ceasefire, or at least moderate its offensive in Gaza. And in what it describes as a new phase of the conflict, the Israeli military said it has started to withdraw some troops. <\/p>\n It\u2019s difficult to attribute these events to any one factor, and Fatafta cautions against drawing too straight a line between social media and changing opinions on the war. There is a rich history of solidarity with Palestine in the Arab world and beyond, and Fatafta said the massive social media followings of Palestinians like Azaiza partly reflect that. <\/p>\n \u201cAnd it\u2019s only growing, because also the events on the ground are beyond atrocious, and they do merit a global reaction,\u201d Fatafta said. <\/p>\n \u201cIf there wasn\u2019t, I would be scared to live in this world.\u201d <\/p>\n Constantly checking Instagram to make sure Azaiza and other Palestinians documenting the war are still alive feels dystopian, Noor said. She\u2019s had to take a break at times because the horrors she was seeing through her phone were affecting her ability to function. But she knows those in Gaza don\u2019t have that luxury, so she never looks away for long. <\/p>\n \u201cThe least that I can do, or anybody can do, is to bear witness,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n\n A quadcopter was flying low above the door of his house, he said, and he feared he was about to be targeted in an Israeli airstrike. As a highly visible Palestinian online who had received threats before, Azaiza believed he had reason to be afraid. Hundreds of people flooded the replies with concern for the <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":14287,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-14286","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14286\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} Palestinians on social media are a window into the war<\/h2>\n
They are changing the way the world sees war<\/h2>\n
The reports show how much violence has affected their lives<\/h2>\n
The everyday details are just as moving as the violence<\/h2>\n
The connections are virtual, but the danger is very real<\/h2>\n
Despite the pain, people watch to learn and bear witness<\/h2>\n