HumAngle has never covered a conflict on the scale of Gaza. None of our reporters has lived through bombardments that erase entire neighbourhoods, killing well over 60,000 people, including women and children. Yet as journalists documenting Africa’s wars — from the insurgency in Nigeria’s northeast to the grinding violence in the Lake Chad Basin — we understand the crushing weight of trauma, the toll of witnessing death and displacement, and the shadow it casts on the well-being of those who dare to report.

But in Gaza, it is no longer only about trauma. It is no longer only about threats. It is about erasure. Journalists are not simply at risk — they are being systematically hunted, exterminated, and buried beneath the rubble along with the people whose suffering they sought to expose.

In May 2022, an Israeli sniper murdered Shireen Abu Akleh. Since October 2023, Israel has killed at least 247 journalists. To put this in perspective: in 33 years of tracking journalist killings globally, the Committee to Protect Journalists recorded 1,708 deaths. In less than two years, Israel has accounted for nearly 15% of that total. The figures are not incidental; they are the result of deliberate policy. The world’s most sophisticated surveillance systems, funded by American taxpayers and protected by European diplomacy, remain effective. Israel knows exactly who it is killing.

To target medics, to bomb children in hospitals and schools, and to strike refugee camps and journalists’ homes is not collateral damage. It is a declaration of contempt for human life and a war on truth itself.

As African journalists, we know the world’s silence when our own people are massacred. We know the indifference when insurgents torch villages in Borno or militias raze communities in the Central African Republic. Yet even by those standards, the West’s complicity in Gaza is staggering. The same governments that lecture Africa on human rights and democracy are funding and shielding the greatest killer of journalists and medics in modern history.

We refuse to be silent.

We condemn Israel’s war not only against Gaza but against the very idea of free journalism. And we condemn the powerful Western countries whose silence, vetoes, and weapons sustain this slaughter. We also condemn Hamas in forceful terms for killing innocent civilians and endangering the lives of hostages.

If the world allows Gaza’s journalists to be murdered without consequence, then every journalist, everywhere, is at risk. And in the aftermath of the Gaza war, powerful Western nations will have eroded the authority and credibility of institutions that can safeguard the rights of journalists and every human being, like the United Nations, to a degree unmatched since its founding in 1945.

The conduct of these Western countries in Gaza has now cast serious doubt on their credibility to lead the world on democratic values, universal human rights, and justice, which they once championed more passionately.

We stand with our colleagues in Gaza. Their courage is our reminder that journalism, at its purest, is not just about reporting events. It is about defying indifference.

~ HumAngle