Goodbye, Hassan. You knew they were going to kill you. by Tareq S. Hajjaj

I woke up with news that I had hoped, maybe naively, would never come. At 7 a.m. yesterday, my wife woke me up to tell me that my colleague and renowned Gaza journalist, Hassan Eslayeh, was killed in an Israeli attack on the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. She tried to break the news to me gently; she knew Hassan and I had worked together during the genocide, and that he was one of the people I relied on for testimonies and updates throughout the war. 

… On April 7, Israel bombed a journalists’ tent outside the Nasser Hospital, burning several people alive and killing Palestinian journalist Ahmad Mansour. Hassan was among the survivors, though he was badly injured, with severe burns across his body and the loss of two of his fingers. On that same day, the Israeli army said that Hassan was the target of the attack, claiming he was a Hamas fighter operating “under the guise of a journalist.” It was the same claim that Israel had made, without evidence, of so many journalists it had killed before. 

The impact of the first attempt on Hassan’s life was felt immediately. 

For more than two weeks, as he recovered from his injuries, Hassan’s voice was absent. The round-the-clock news updates and testimonies I and so many other journalists used to receive from him stopped, and the true weight of Hassan’s voice and the role he played in delivering the news of Gaza to the world were felt by every journalist in Gaza.