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What the crisis for press freedom in Gaza portends.

Samar Abu Elouf, a forty-one-year-old Palestinian photojournalist, has documented Israel’s military campaign against Gaza for Reuters and the New York Times. One of her best-known shots, taken on October 7, 2023, shows children looking skyward in the early hours of Israel’s bombing; her portrait of Mahmoud Ajjour, a young boy whose arms were severed in an attack, won the 2025 World Press Photo of the Year. But her Instagram page, filled with pictures from her work and life—rubble, bread, nieces—captures a devastating view of journalism under strain. “My friends at the office in Gaza hang a picture of a chicken on the office board so they don’t forget what it looks and tastes like,” a caption reads.  

Abu Elouf is not one of the more than two hundred media workers who have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war. She left for Qatar, regretfully, for fear of her children being harmed—as more of the region was flattened, hospitals were torn to pieces, and food became increasingly scarce. (She could not be reached, but as she told CNN, “being a journalist in Gaza feels like you’re dying on the inside over and over.”) Israel and Egypt blocked members of the international press from covering the damage, save for some tightly controlled embeds, and the scene became, as Amnesty International put it, a “live-streamed genocide”: many local reporters posted what they saw directly online, while Israel invited content creators for managed junkets. “Weapons change over time,” Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said during a meeting this fall with influencers in the United States, and “the most important ones are on social media.”