Hossam Shabat’s Last Article

Hossam Shabat is dead. I am beyond rage and despair as I write these words. The Israeli military bombed his car this morning as he was traveling in Beit Lahia. Videos fill my screen of his body lying on the street, carried to the hospital, grieved by his colleagues and loved ones. These are the kinds of tragic scenes Hossam himself would so often document for the world. He was an exemplary journalist: brave, tireless, and dedicated to telling the story of Palestinians in Gaza.

Hossam was one of a handful of reporters who remained in northern Gaza through Israel’s genocidal war. His ability to cover one of the most brutal military campaigns in recent history was almost beyond comprehension. He bore witness to untold death and suffering on an almost daily basis for seventeen months. He was displaced over twenty times. He was often hungry. He buried many of his journalist colleagues. In November, he was wounded in an Israeli airstrike. I still can’t believe I am referring to him in the past tense. Israel obliterates the present.

What you are about to read is Hossam’s last article. I translated it through tears.

Report from the Frontline of Israel’s War of Annihilation

The Israeli attack is continuing. The occupation is practicing its brutality with unprecedented bombardment leaving behind horrific scenes of destruction and bloodshed. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the number of martyrs over the past six days has topped 700, reflecting the degree of such immense human suffering. OCHA also reports how Gaza is suffering from a severe shortage of medicines and medical aid, exacerbating an already dire situation.

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Israel’s aggression continues. Massacre after massacre, leaving only the screams of mothers in its wake and the dreams of children that have turned to ash. There is no justification for this. Everything is being crushed: the lives of innocent people, their dignity, and their hopes for a better future.

The Atlantic announced today that its editor was inadvertently added to a group text including the Vice President, CIA Director, Secretary of Defense and National Security Advisor where they discussed Yemen war moves and other matters of national security. The Trump administration’s carelessness would soon be outdone by the squeamishness of the magazine.

Editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg took the scoop of a lifetime and chose to act as gatekeeper, publishing only the most innocuous tidbits like what emojis different officials used and their goofy backslapping instead of the actual news. It is one of the worst cases of media paternalism, what I call highchair journalism — open up for your infotainment, here comes the airplane: Trump officials used emojis, LOL! — but also a disturbing reminder of how much the mainstream media have been co-opted by the national security state.

Goldberg makes clear in his article that his standard for publication isn’t newsworthiness, but the mere possibility that the information “could conceivably” be used by adversaries of the United States. The media isn’t or shouldn’t be in the business of helping the government. Like an attorney, the media are supposed to have a duty to their client, the public.

Consider how Goldberg describes his decision to not publish a text sent by CIA Director John Ratcliffe based merely on the possibility that the information “might be interpreted as related to” ongoing intelligence matters:

Then, at 8:26 a.m., a message landed in my Signal app from the user “John Ratcliffe.” The message contained information that might be interpreted as related to actual and current intelligence operations.”

That’s exactly the kind of news the public needs. Is the Houthi campaign cover for a broader war with Iran? How serious is the Trump administration’s consideration of the effects? Or the potential for escalation? Or the potential for any kind of success?

Passengers heading to China aboard a recent United Airlines flight faced an unexpected travel headache after a pilot’s forgotten passport prompted their return to the United States.

Flight UA198 from Los Angeles to Shanghai was over the Pacific Ocean on Saturday afternoon when it made a U-turn and headed to San Francisco, tracking data showed.

United confirmed on Tuesday to AFP in an email that the plane, a Boeing 787 with 270 people onboard, made a stop in San Francisco “as the pilot did not have their passport onboard”.

Press freedom organisations have condemned the killing of two journalists in Gaza on Monday, who died in separate targeted airstrikes by the Israeli armed forces. Hossam Shabat, a 23-year-old correspondent for the Al Jazeera Mubasher channel, was killed by an airstrike on his car in the eastern part of Beit Lahiya.

In the hours after the deaths, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Palestinian press freedom organisations released statements condemning the attacks. “CPJ is appalled that we are once again seeing Palestinians weeping over the bodies of dead journalists in Gaza,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director.

In October 2024, the IDF had accused Shabat and five other Palestinian journalists working for Al Jazeera in Gaza of being members of the militant arm of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Al Jazeera and Shabat denied Israel’s claims, with Shabat stating in an interview with the CPJ that “we are civilians … Our only crime is that we convey the image and the truth.”

The CPJ has previously denounced the Israeli authorities for the “smearing of killed Palestinian journalists with unsubstantiated ‘terrorist’ labels”.

Democratic senators demanded answers from leaders of the US intelligence community on Tuesday on how the top editor of the Atlantic was added to a group chat discussing airstrikes in Yemen, arguing that the “sloppy, careless” leak put national security at risk.

The unusual story broke on Monday, when the Atlantic published a piece by its editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who said he had been added to the group on the messaging app Signal, and watched as accounts that appeared to match top Trump administration officials, including Vice-President JD Vance and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, debated and then coordinated a wave of bombings targeting the Houthis in Yemen.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, both of whom were also in the group, appeared on Tuesday before the Senate intelligence committee for an annual hearing on threats facing the United States, which Democrats used to accuse them of failing to protect sensitive details of US military operations.

Oxford City Council has passed a motion supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, citing International Court of Justice (ICJ) rulings.

On Monday, Oxford councillor Hosnieh Djafari-Marbini said councillors had "unanimously passed a boycott and divestment motion citing the ICJ rulings on Palestine".

The council currently banks with Barclays, which has been targeted by BDS campaigners over investment and loans to arms companies selling weapons and military technology to Israel.

"This is a first step in divesting from settler colonial genocide, occupation and apartheid in pensions, investments and procurement inc in banking with Barclays," Djafari-Marbini wrote on X.

Fred Hampton Jr was days away from taking his first breath when his father was assassinated. Still in his mother’s womb, he would have sensed the shots fired by police into his parents’ bedroom at the back of 2337 Monroe Street, Chicago.

He would have absorbed the muffled screams, felt the adrenaline rushing through his mother’s veins, been jolted by her violent arrest. Could he also have somehow sensed the moment of his father’s death?

His dad was “Chairman” Fred Hampton, leader of the Illinois chapter and deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party, who was sleeping beside his pregnant fiancee when 14 Chicago police officers burst into the apartment. They shot him in bed, striking him twice in the head. Hampton, who was 21, was killed on the spot.

The attack – up to 99 incoming gunshots and only one fired by the Panthers from inside – also claimed the life of Panther Mark Clark in what later emerged was a meticulously planned, FBI-backed operation.

Twenty-five days later, on 29 December 1969, Akua Njeri (then Deborah Johnson), gave birth to a baby boy. From that moment on, the child’s life was to be defined by the father whom he never met.

Israel’s military has drawn up plans to reconquer Gaza in a bid to finally defeat Hamas, paving the way for a long-running occupation of the besieged enclave.

According to the plan, the IDF would call up several combat divisions to reinvade and subdue Hamas, take control of wide swaths of the enclave and force the territory’s 2.2mn population into a small, so-called humanitarian zone along the Mediterranean coast.

One of the people familiar with the deliberations said Israel could take over the distribution of all humanitarian aid and had recently assessed how many calories each Palestinian would require. Another said the military was considering options including distributing aid directly, or through private contractors, to ensure Hamas could not benefit.

The UN said on Monday that it would withdraw a third of its international staff from Gaza after determining that an Israeli tank had fired a shell into a UN compound last week, killing a European aid worker and injuring five others, according to spokesman Stéphane Dujarric. The IDF has denied attacking the compound.

Both female and male Israeli soldiers raped Palestinian women from Gaza and the occupied West Bank – and Israeli citizens were allowed to watch and film the humiliation of stripped prisoners as a ‘zoo’-like form of entertainment – according to testimonies presented during the UN Commission of Inquiry’s public hearing on earlier this month.

Kifaya Khraim, International Advocacy Officer at the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling, and ‘Witness 3’, a Palestinian woman human rights activist, gave the UN detailed accounts of sexual, reproductive, and other forms of gender-based violence committed by Israeli security forces and settlers. The testimony was part of the Commission’s third round of hearings documenting violations against Palestinians, particularly crimes targeting women’s bodies:

Israel has claimed that Israeli women have suffered sexual violence at the hands of Palestinians on 7 October 2023 and since, but these claims have been shown to be either without foundation or proven untrue, both by independent examination of evidence and by United Nations investigators. As the saying goes, it seems that Israeli accusations are a form of confession, exposing the dark mind of settler-colonialism, Zionism and occupation.