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.

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