What led them to him was a trail of blood, and there he was, lifeless and slumping against a wall, still hugging a bag of flour that had turned dark pink. Two bullets had struck him in the back, and he had bled to death, alone, just seventeen years old.

Mutaz was my cousin. He was killed during the flour massacre in February 2024.

That day, thousands of starving Palestinians gathered around humanitarian aid trucks in northern Gaza, desperately seeking food. At least 112 people were killed and hundreds injured amid Israeli gunfire and chaotic scenes around the convoy.

I recently came across an article by pro-Israel advocacy organisation HonestReporting, originally posted in October 2025, disputing accounts of the massacre.

The organisation depicted the massacre as one of 25 alleged media falsehoods about Israel's war in Gaza. It argues that the overwhelming majority of victims were crushed in a stampede or run over by aid trucks, while approximately ten were killed by Israeli gunfire after approaching military positions. It also accuses the media of uncritically repeating Hamas's account and falsely portraying the incident as an Israeli massacre.

I would have let it slide, had it not been for something far more disturbing than the familiar exercise of defending Israel. The article effectively dismissed our lived experience, my family's tragedy, and the grief of Mutaz's mother, who wept over her son's body, cursing all the flour in the world.

One would expect an advocacy group to engage in ideological framing. But behind HonestReporting's account lies a broader mechanism that reduces human catastrophes to isolated technicalities through reframing, omission, and causal attribution. Together, these shape not only which facts enter the account, but also how responsibility for an event is assigned. I call this mechanism "reductive advocacy."

Evading accountability

By claiming that most victims died in a stampede or beneath aid trucks, HonestReporting makes the manner of death the central issue, narrowing the scope of responsibility to the circumstances of their deaths rather than the conditions that brought them there.

The significance of this reduction is heightened when set against the evidence. Alongside field medical reports, there’s been a UN Commission of Inquiry analysis identifying horizontal tracer rounds and gunfire in footage of the incident, and a CNN investigation that examined dozens of videos, 22 eyewitness accounts and forensic evidence.

Nevertheless, for us, the funerals on our street spoke louder than any report or commission. My family's neighbour’s teenage son was also shot dead in the massacre. He was brought home that very day, drenched in fresh blood, unlike Mutaz, whose body lay undiscovered for longer, his blood drying to dark brown.

Israel rejects such findings and has regularly dismissed international criticism as biased or antisemitic.

One need not pull the trigger to cause death. Circumstances can be deliberately engineered to produce it, while obscuring or diluting responsibility for the outcome. The past offers many examples, and Jewish history bears witness.

After sealing the Warsaw Ghetto in November 1940, Nazi authorities confined more than 400,000 Jews to approximately 1.3 square miles, imposing drastically inadequate food rations. Overcrowding, malnutrition and disease became endemic, and approximately 83,000 Jews died between 1940 and 1942.

The Nazis killed those Jews without shooting or gassing them. In Gaza, too, Israel set the stage for the tragedy long before the first truck arrived, turning starvation into the tinder for a deadly scramble for survival.

Deliberate starvation

Two days after 7 October 2023, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant ordered that Gaza be cut off from food, water, electricity and fuel. Aid restrictions and the bombardment of bakeries followed. By November, all five flour mills in Gaza had fallen silent. On 27 February 2024, the UN warned that 576,000 Palestinians — one-quarter of Gaza’s population — stood on the brink of famine.

Around that time, I began hearing a word from my family over the phone that I had never heard from them before: hunger. Desperate, Mutaz set out with two cousins towards Gaza City’s border, hoping to bring food home. He never returned. My uncle would say, "he never told us he was going," only to repeat, "Our hunger sent my son to his death."

Even if gunfire and deliberate starvation were not decisive factors in the massacre, HonestReporting’s reductive advocacy still erases the long-winded structural conditions that made it possible.

Israel occupied Gaza in 1967, extending its control over a population most of whom it had rendered refugees following its establishment in 1948. Although it withdrew its settlements and army from the Strip in 2005 because of unsustainable costs and security concerns, it maintained substantial control over the territory’s crossings, maritime access, population registry, and movement and trade.

Furthermore, the blockade imposed in 2007 placed Gaza under siege within an ongoing occupation, only a year after Tel Aviv effectively put Gaza’s population “on a diet,” by setting the threshold of consumption without triggering a visible humanitarian crisis.

The cumulative effect was a gradual erosion of the productive, economic, and logistical capacity needed to sustain Palestinians and their ability to withstand emergencies.

Such constraints create structural fragility that may remain partly concealed during periods of lower tension, only to escalate catastrophically fast when tensions rise. We have seen it in every major Israeli assault on Gaza since 2008; bombardment rapidly deepened the humanitarian crisis, while Israel’s control over the flow of goods has made basic necessities a parallel weapon against a population it tightly controls.

An unnatural occurrence

Mutaz was born into a besieged Gaza, his life shaped by the cumulative vulnerabilities that decades of occupation and successive Israeli assaults had imposed on his family and society. By the time famine came, those vulnerabilities were already deeply entrenched.

Reductive advocacy obscures this history by treating Gaza’s vulnerability as a natural occurrence. Once that condition is accepted as a given, tragedies appear as isolated crises, and the deaths can be attributed to the immediate conduct of those struggling to survive.

Taken together, the three layers of dismantlement show how fragments of factual truth can assemble into a misleading whole, obscuring the political agency and historical conditions needed to account for suffering.

Yet HonestReporting claims to defend consistent journalistic standards while selectively deciding which criticism of Israel is legitimate and which constitutes delegitimisation.

Like with the flour massacre, it recasts the victims of a system of domination as responsible for their own circumstances. In doing so, it helps normalise the conditions from which it seeks to absolve Israel, making dehumanisation part of the work of exoneration.

The HonestReporting’s broad claims, therefore, must be tested against what it scrutinises, what it omits, and whose accounts it treats as credible.

To my family, Israelis and their allies can reductively dispute the massacre and many others, but none of these fragments can erase the blood of Mutaz and thousands like him. Nor can any rearrangement of facts absolve those who manufactured the conditions that have dispossessed four generations of Palestinians.

We’re constantly grieving, a feeling deepened by the fact that responsibility can even become a matter of debate when one people occupies and controls the lives of another.

Our fifth generation won’t need to be taught that. They are already seeing this firsthand, at least those who have survived so far.

Dr Emad Moussa is a Palestinian-British researcher and writer specialising in the political psychology of intergroup and conflict dynamics, focusing on MENA with a special interest in Israel/Palestine. He has a background in human rights and journalism, and is currently a frequent contributor to multiple academic and media outlets, in addition to being a consultant for a US-based think tank.

Follow him on Twitter: @emadmoussa

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.

It is that time of year when we Palestinians seem relevant again.

My inbox is flooded with interview requests about 7 October. Media outlets are interested in hearing my thoughts on the anniversary, and journalists want to know whether I condemn Hamas or not.

But what difference does it make?

Growing up, I dreamed of the day I would wear the press vest and helmet and tell the stories of Gaza to the world through my own eyes. I wanted to tell stories about how Palestinians love life, how they try to create something out of nothing, and how they try to bounce back after Israeli aggression and continue. I wanted to tell the stories of the Gaza I know, instead of the Gaza the media focuses on only when there is Israeli aggression or genocide.

But shortly after I graduated, it was 7 October.

In no time, wearing press gear became risky. Instead of protecting journalists and media workers, it made them a target.

Since the genocide began, over 74,000 Palestinians have been killed, including over 21,000 children, and this only accounts for the official numbers. Nearly 2 million people have been displaced, and 80% of the infrastructure in the Gaza Strip has been destroyed. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 247 journalists have been killed, 174 injured, and 118 imprisoned.

Staying alive

For the first 45 days of the genocide, I was on the ground reporting closely with two colleagues, Hatem Rawagh and Mohammed Abu Safia. They were both fathers, carrying the responsibility of staying strong and, most importantly, alive for their children. They held on to the hope of watching them grow up, giving them a future, and seeing them live in a better world than the one they were reporting on.

I still remember how Nour, Mohammed’s youngest daughter, would call him while we were out in the field reporting. She would tell him “bahebak” (I love you) in her soft voice, still learning how to pronounce the word. I could see how those words affected him each time he heard them.

His family has always been his reason for living, but Mohammed’s desire to tell the world the truth in hopes that this carnage could end forced him to stay away from them. Every day, he wondered whether it was safe to visit his family, or whether going would put them at more risk of being targeted.

His biggest fear was that Israel would kill them because of his profession, and that he’d remain alive to bear that agony.

He thought a lot about what Wael Dahdouh endured. After learning that his family had been killed by an Israeli airstrike, the Al Jazeera journalist had to report on the tragedy.

This was not the only loss we shared.

Belal Jadallah, the founder of Press House Palestine, who was a father figure to all journalists in Gaza, was also targeted and killed by Israel. He trained so many of us, including how to stay safe and how to be careful with our language and terminology because of the weight they carried for the wider world.

I was with Hatem when he told us the news: “Belal got targeted with an Israeli tank shell, or an airstrike hit his car.”

If the person who taught us how to protect ourselves could not be protected, then the vest and helmet were certainly never going to be enough.

It always felt like the only certainty in Gaza was uncertainty.

We had watched Israel kill our colleagues one after the other. Many others had also been injured or imprisoned. Each time, we’d wonder who would be next as it became harder to escape.

We were surviving one day at a time, never knowing when our turn might come.

Duty

Hatem and Mohammed are still in Gaza, still reporting. They explain: “It’s our duty.”

Part of them still wants to believe that if the world learned more about what is happening in Gaza, the genocide would stop. But now, three years into it, we know it’s not enough. Knowledge without accountability and justice means nothing.

As journalists, our responsibility is to bear witness and tell the truth, and in Gaza, we risk our lives to do it. But the responsibility cannot rest on our shoulders alone. The rest of the world must also be willing to carry that truth forward, to turn what it knows into action.

I used to dream of telling the world how Palestinians love life, how they build something out of barely anything and keep going. Instead, I have spent the last three years telling the world how they are being killed.

Whenever I see the number of journalists killed on the news, I think of the families they left behind, and of the people who are still waiting for a call that will never come. Whenever I watch the news from far away, I imagine the journalists behind the footage, standing in the same streets in the same vests, wondering if today is their turn.

Now, three years into a genocide, there is less and less coverage coming out of Gaza, and it is because journalism itself has become a target.

Despite our colleagues around the world watching so many being killed in Gaza, which sets a dangerous precedent for the future of their own work, too many are contributing to the injustice through the so-called measured language they choose, the realities they obscure, and the violence they help justify and normalise.

So every year around this time, when those press requests come flooding in, I think about the journalists who are still in Gaza, still on the ground reporting, and who will never get an email asking for their expert opinion, their experiences of tragedy and destruction.

Hatem and Mohammed say it is their duty, but it should not be theirs alone.

Plestia Alaqad is an award-winning journalist and author who has emerged as a powerful voice in digital media. She gained international recognition for her heartfelt, on-the-ground reporting during the genocide on Gaza, where her raw, personal storytelling brought global attention to the human impact of the violence. She recently published her book The Eyes of Gaza, that became an instant New York Times, Indie, San Francisco, and Boston Global Bestseller.

Follow Plestia on Instagram: @plestia.alaqad

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.