March 25, 2025
Sharon Zhang
“I ask you now: do not stop speaking about Gaza,” he said. “Keep telling our stories — until Palestine is free.”
Sharon Zhang
“I ask you now: do not stop speaking about Gaza,” he said. “Keep telling our stories — until Palestine is free.”
Israeli forces killed two Palestinian journalists in Gaza on Monday in separate strikes, bringing the total number of Palestinian journalists killed to at least 208 since October 7, 2023, according to a count by Gaza officials.
Mohammad Mansour, a correspondent for Palestine Today, was killed along with his wife and child when Israel struck his home in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza. Al Jazeera reported that Israel deliberately targeted Mansour in the attack.
Shortly after, Israeli forces killed Hossam Shabat with a targeted airstrike while he was driving his car in Beit Lahiya, local sources reported. Shabat, who was 23 years old, had become well-known for his reports from northern Gaza amid Israel’s total siege on the region. He was a contributor to U.S. outlet Drop Site News and a reporter for Al Jazeera Mubasher.
Shabat’s friends posted a message written by the young journalist that he requested to be published on social media in the event of his death.
“If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed — most likely targeted — by the Israeli occupation forces,” he said. “When this all began, I was only 21 years old — a college student with dreams like anyone else. For the past 18 months, I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury.”
“By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to report the truth, and now, I am finally at rest — something I haven’t known in the past 18 months,” he wrote. “I did all this because I believe in the Palestinian cause. I believe this land is ours, and it has been the highest honor of my life to die defending it and serving its people.”
Drop Site condemned the attack in a statement. “Drop Site News holds Israel and the U.S. responsible for killing Hossam,” the outlet said. “More than 200 of our Palestinian media colleagues have been killed by Israel — supplied with weapons and given blanket impunity by most Western governments — over the past seventeen months.”
Fellow journalists in Gaza mourned Shabat’s death. “I no longer have words,” said Gaza journalist Abubaker Abed, who was a colleague of Shabat at Drop Site. “This is just an incalculable loss. This is unbearable.”
Shabat, like Abed and many other young people in Gaza, became a war journalist when the genocide began despite having other aspirations. Last year, he thanked university students across the world for protesting for Gaza, noting that he was in his third year in college when the genocide began on October 7, 2023.
“I’ll never be able to finish my studies because Israeli occupation forces bombed my university and every other university in Gaza,” he wrote.
His life was upended as he went out to report on Israel’s genocide, separating from his family in order to show the world the barbarity of the killings.
In October 2024, Israeli authorities issued a list of journalists it was seemingly targeting for assassination, accusing them, without evidence, as being affiliated with “Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist” groups. Shabat, who was one of the only journalists left in north Gaza at the time, was on that list. He had already survived another targeted attack in November, when Israeli forces injured him in an apparent “double tap” strike on a house in northern Gaza.
Despite the November attack and concerns he was being hunted by Israeli forces for his work, Shabat pledged to continue reporting.
Just a month ago, amid the ceasefire, Shabat posted a video of him and his mother being reunited after 492 days, having been separated due to Israel’s evacuation orders.
Last week, shortly after Israeli authorities resumed their heavy bombing of Gaza despite the ceasefire agreement, Shabat posted a video of him once again putting on his flak jacket and helmet marked “press.”
“I thought it was over and I’d finally get some rest, but the genocide is back in full force, and I’m back on the front lines,” he said.
Shabat had continually pleaded for the world to intervene and end the genocide.
“On October 17th, 2023, Israel bombed Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza,” Shabat wrote in his final Instagram reel. “Israel denied it. Western media believed it. And the bombing continued as ‘Israel investigated itself.’ UN and NGO investigations proved that Israel indeed did it. No government acted. No condemnations.”
“So Israel continued bombing, besieging and targeting EVERY SINGLE HOSPITAL in Gaza,” he continued. “Eighteen months of genocide and impunity meant that they didn’t have to deny bombing hospitals anymore. No one cares… They say the magic H word and war crimes are justified.”
Even posthumously, Shabat pled for Palestinian rights.
“I ask you now: do not stop speaking about Gaza,” the journalist wrote in his final message. “Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting, keep telling our stories — until Palestine is free.”
Mohammad Mansour, a correspondent for Palestine Today, was killed along with his wife and child when Israel struck his home in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza. Al Jazeera reported that Israel deliberately targeted Mansour in the attack.
Shortly after, Israeli forces killed Hossam Shabat with a targeted airstrike while he was driving his car in Beit Lahiya, local sources reported. Shabat, who was 23 years old, had become well-known for his reports from northern Gaza amid Israel’s total siege on the region. He was a contributor to U.S. outlet Drop Site News and a reporter for Al Jazeera Mubasher.
Shabat’s friends posted a message written by the young journalist that he requested to be published on social media in the event of his death.
“If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed — most likely targeted — by the Israeli occupation forces,” he said. “When this all began, I was only 21 years old — a college student with dreams like anyone else. For the past 18 months, I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury.”
“By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to report the truth, and now, I am finally at rest — something I haven’t known in the past 18 months,” he wrote. “I did all this because I believe in the Palestinian cause. I believe this land is ours, and it has been the highest honor of my life to die defending it and serving its people.”
Drop Site condemned the attack in a statement. “Drop Site News holds Israel and the U.S. responsible for killing Hossam,” the outlet said. “More than 200 of our Palestinian media colleagues have been killed by Israel — supplied with weapons and given blanket impunity by most Western governments — over the past seventeen months.”
Fellow journalists in Gaza mourned Shabat’s death. “I no longer have words,” said Gaza journalist Abubaker Abed, who was a colleague of Shabat at Drop Site. “This is just an incalculable loss. This is unbearable.”
Shabat, like Abed and many other young people in Gaza, became a war journalist when the genocide began despite having other aspirations. Last year, he thanked university students across the world for protesting for Gaza, noting that he was in his third year in college when the genocide began on October 7, 2023.
“I’ll never be able to finish my studies because Israeli occupation forces bombed my university and every other university in Gaza,” he wrote.
His life was upended as he went out to report on Israel’s genocide, separating from his family in order to show the world the barbarity of the killings.
In October 2024, Israeli authorities issued a list of journalists it was seemingly targeting for assassination, accusing them, without evidence, as being affiliated with “Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist” groups. Shabat, who was one of the only journalists left in north Gaza at the time, was on that list. He had already survived another targeted attack in November, when Israeli forces injured him in an apparent “double tap” strike on a house in northern Gaza.
Despite the November attack and concerns he was being hunted by Israeli forces for his work, Shabat pledged to continue reporting.
Just a month ago, amid the ceasefire, Shabat posted a video of him and his mother being reunited after 492 days, having been separated due to Israel’s evacuation orders.
Last week, shortly after Israeli authorities resumed their heavy bombing of Gaza despite the ceasefire agreement, Shabat posted a video of him once again putting on his flak jacket and helmet marked “press.”
“I thought it was over and I’d finally get some rest, but the genocide is back in full force, and I’m back on the front lines,” he said.
Shabat had continually pleaded for the world to intervene and end the genocide.
“On October 17th, 2023, Israel bombed Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza,” Shabat wrote in his final Instagram reel. “Israel denied it. Western media believed it. And the bombing continued as ‘Israel investigated itself.’ UN and NGO investigations proved that Israel indeed did it. No government acted. No condemnations.”
“So Israel continued bombing, besieging and targeting EVERY SINGLE HOSPITAL in Gaza,” he continued. “Eighteen months of genocide and impunity meant that they didn’t have to deny bombing hospitals anymore. No one cares… They say the magic H word and war crimes are justified.”
Even posthumously, Shabat pled for Palestinian rights.
“I ask you now: do not stop speaking about Gaza,” the journalist wrote in his final message. “Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting, keep telling our stories — until Palestine is free.”
Sleman Altehe
We can't accept the rules of recognition set by the very powers that dispossess us, especially the idea that our success is what makes us worthy of protection.
Last night, armed Israeli settlers descended upon the Palestinian village of Susiya in the Masafer Yatta region of the occupied West Bank and assaulted Hamdan Ballal, a contributor to +972 and co-director of the film “No Other Land” which recently won an Oscar for best documentary. Israeli soldiers were present at the scene and stood by as Ballal was attacked along with other residents and activists, only to then detain him and two other Palestinians overnight in a military base, where they endured further abuse.
When news broke of the settler ambush, the headlines focused almost exclusively on one thing: Ballal’s Oscar win. Across mainstream Western media — from the Associated Press and Reuters, to the Washington Post and the BBC — publications used surprisingly direct language to describe the attack on this “Palestinian Oscar winner.”
Unlike some of their coverage of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, for instance, these outlets clearly named the perpetrators of the assault — Israeli settlers — with one traditionally liberal publication going so far as to describe his brutal arrest by the Israeli army as a “kidnapping.” But still, the emphasis was clear: the assault and detention of a Palestinian is notable because he holds international acclaim.
Of course, what happened to Ballal is not random. As co-director of a film that documents the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the violent expansion of Israeli settlements in the villages of Masafer Yatta, he has used his platform to speak directly and unapologetically about Israeli apartheid and dispossession. Targeting him is part of a broader strategy of silencing Palestinian cultural figures and truth-tellers, especially those who succeed in disrupting dominant narratives on global stages.
But the framing of his assault and arrest should alarm us. Why must a Palestinian’s intellectual recognition be the basis for solidarity? Why does the global media insist on highlighting that Ballal is an Oscar-winning filmmaker?
This kind of solidarity, grounded in fame or intellectual achievement, dangerously aligns with colonial patterns of recognition. It reproduces the logic that some lives — those legible to Western audiences — are more grievable, more shocking to violate, and more worthy of defense.
The underlying message is that if even an award-winning filmmaker isn’t immune to state violence, then something is truly wrong. But shouldn’t international media have recognized something was wrong when Palestinians without global awards — students, farmers, mothers, teachers, activists — are arrested by Israeli forces every day? Their stories rarely make headlines. Their names are rarely known.
A decolonial solidarity
The colonial logic reinforced by these headlines — that sees Palestinians as valuable only when they produce something recognizable or useful to Western audiences — has deep roots.
Under colonial regimes, the “good native” was always the one who spoke the colonizer’s language, produced art for foreign consumption, or performed civility in the approved ways. In Mandate Palestine, British authorities often favored dealing with urban, Western-educated elites in the cosmopolitan cities of Jerusalem and Haifa, those who could navigate colonial institutions and posed little threat to imperial control. At the same time, they violently suppressed rural resistance during the 1936–39 revolt, targeting peasants and nationalist organizers with collective punishment and military force. Today, Western recognition of the “good native” takes the form of awards for films, Ivy League fellowships, or inclusion in global humanitarian discourse.
To be clear: the problem isn’t that people are expressing solidarity with Ballal. It is that this solidarity is often conditional, selective, and deeply tied to notions of exceptionalism. It becomes easier to condemn injustice when the victim can be framed as brilliant, eloquent, or successful. It becomes harder, it seems, when the victim is one of the more than 9,000 Palestinians currently held in Israeli prisons — many without charge or trial, and whose names we will never learn.
These arrests are not incidental; rather they are central to Israel’s settler-colonial project. Detention is a daily mechanism of control: of land, bodies, and futures. In Ballal’s case, the Israeli army accused him and others of throwing stones after settlers attacked them — an accusation so common it has become almost formulaic. Human rights organizations have long documented how stone-throwing charges are used to justify mass arrests and criminalize resistance, especially in the South Hebron Hills and across the West Bank.
What’s happening in Susiya is the same thing that’s happening across the entire land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea: a system of apartheid that views any form of Palestinian presence, whether political or artistic, as a threat. It is a system that uses military power not only to displace Palestinians physically but also to disrupt their ability to narrate their own reality. That Ballal used the global stage to tell this truth makes him a target. But the absence of an Oscar does not make the next person’s assault or arrest less violent, less strategic, or less political.
It might seem harmless, and indeed strategic, to point out that if even an Oscar winner is not safe, then no Palestinian is immune from Israeli settler and state violence — not the teenager walking to school, not the activist resisting demolition in Masafer Yatta, and certainly not the artist returning home after winning an international prize.
But when we do so, we inadvertently imply that others are less deserving of safety. We risk reproducing the very logic that justifies state violence: the division between the visible and the invisible, the grievable and the ungrievable, the exceptional and the disposable.
This is not a call to ignore the targeting of artists or intellectuals. On the contrary, it is a call to deepen our understanding of how Israeli violence operates, and to widen our scope of solidarity.
Solidarity with Palestinians must be decolonial. It must refuse to play by the rules of recognition set by the very powers that sustain our dispossession, including the idea that global success is what makes us human or worthy of protection. And it must hold space for all those who will never receive a headline — those whose homes are raided at night, whose children are detained for Facebook posts, whose resistance is quiet and ongoing and just as real.
Hamdan Ballal’s arrest is not shocking because he is famous. It is enraging because he is Palestinian — and because Israel continues, with impunity, to criminalize Palestinian existence.
We can't accept the rules of recognition set by the very powers that dispossess us, especially the idea that our success is what makes us worthy of protection.
Last night, armed Israeli settlers descended upon the Palestinian village of Susiya in the Masafer Yatta region of the occupied West Bank and assaulted Hamdan Ballal, a contributor to +972 and co-director of the film “No Other Land” which recently won an Oscar for best documentary. Israeli soldiers were present at the scene and stood by as Ballal was attacked along with other residents and activists, only to then detain him and two other Palestinians overnight in a military base, where they endured further abuse.
When news broke of the settler ambush, the headlines focused almost exclusively on one thing: Ballal’s Oscar win. Across mainstream Western media — from the Associated Press and Reuters, to the Washington Post and the BBC — publications used surprisingly direct language to describe the attack on this “Palestinian Oscar winner.”
Unlike some of their coverage of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, for instance, these outlets clearly named the perpetrators of the assault — Israeli settlers — with one traditionally liberal publication going so far as to describe his brutal arrest by the Israeli army as a “kidnapping.” But still, the emphasis was clear: the assault and detention of a Palestinian is notable because he holds international acclaim.
Of course, what happened to Ballal is not random. As co-director of a film that documents the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the violent expansion of Israeli settlements in the villages of Masafer Yatta, he has used his platform to speak directly and unapologetically about Israeli apartheid and dispossession. Targeting him is part of a broader strategy of silencing Palestinian cultural figures and truth-tellers, especially those who succeed in disrupting dominant narratives on global stages.
But the framing of his assault and arrest should alarm us. Why must a Palestinian’s intellectual recognition be the basis for solidarity? Why does the global media insist on highlighting that Ballal is an Oscar-winning filmmaker?
This kind of solidarity, grounded in fame or intellectual achievement, dangerously aligns with colonial patterns of recognition. It reproduces the logic that some lives — those legible to Western audiences — are more grievable, more shocking to violate, and more worthy of defense.
The underlying message is that if even an award-winning filmmaker isn’t immune to state violence, then something is truly wrong. But shouldn’t international media have recognized something was wrong when Palestinians without global awards — students, farmers, mothers, teachers, activists — are arrested by Israeli forces every day? Their stories rarely make headlines. Their names are rarely known.
A decolonial solidarity
The colonial logic reinforced by these headlines — that sees Palestinians as valuable only when they produce something recognizable or useful to Western audiences — has deep roots.
Under colonial regimes, the “good native” was always the one who spoke the colonizer’s language, produced art for foreign consumption, or performed civility in the approved ways. In Mandate Palestine, British authorities often favored dealing with urban, Western-educated elites in the cosmopolitan cities of Jerusalem and Haifa, those who could navigate colonial institutions and posed little threat to imperial control. At the same time, they violently suppressed rural resistance during the 1936–39 revolt, targeting peasants and nationalist organizers with collective punishment and military force. Today, Western recognition of the “good native” takes the form of awards for films, Ivy League fellowships, or inclusion in global humanitarian discourse.
To be clear: the problem isn’t that people are expressing solidarity with Ballal. It is that this solidarity is often conditional, selective, and deeply tied to notions of exceptionalism. It becomes easier to condemn injustice when the victim can be framed as brilliant, eloquent, or successful. It becomes harder, it seems, when the victim is one of the more than 9,000 Palestinians currently held in Israeli prisons — many without charge or trial, and whose names we will never learn.
These arrests are not incidental; rather they are central to Israel’s settler-colonial project. Detention is a daily mechanism of control: of land, bodies, and futures. In Ballal’s case, the Israeli army accused him and others of throwing stones after settlers attacked them — an accusation so common it has become almost formulaic. Human rights organizations have long documented how stone-throwing charges are used to justify mass arrests and criminalize resistance, especially in the South Hebron Hills and across the West Bank.
What’s happening in Susiya is the same thing that’s happening across the entire land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea: a system of apartheid that views any form of Palestinian presence, whether political or artistic, as a threat. It is a system that uses military power not only to displace Palestinians physically but also to disrupt their ability to narrate their own reality. That Ballal used the global stage to tell this truth makes him a target. But the absence of an Oscar does not make the next person’s assault or arrest less violent, less strategic, or less political.
It might seem harmless, and indeed strategic, to point out that if even an Oscar winner is not safe, then no Palestinian is immune from Israeli settler and state violence — not the teenager walking to school, not the activist resisting demolition in Masafer Yatta, and certainly not the artist returning home after winning an international prize.
But when we do so, we inadvertently imply that others are less deserving of safety. We risk reproducing the very logic that justifies state violence: the division between the visible and the invisible, the grievable and the ungrievable, the exceptional and the disposable.
This is not a call to ignore the targeting of artists or intellectuals. On the contrary, it is a call to deepen our understanding of how Israeli violence operates, and to widen our scope of solidarity.
Solidarity with Palestinians must be decolonial. It must refuse to play by the rules of recognition set by the very powers that sustain our dispossession, including the idea that global success is what makes us human or worthy of protection. And it must hold space for all those who will never receive a headline — those whose homes are raided at night, whose children are detained for Facebook posts, whose resistance is quiet and ongoing and just as real.
Hamdan Ballal’s arrest is not shocking because he is famous. It is enraging because he is Palestinian — and because Israel continues, with impunity, to criminalize Palestinian existence.
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