Since its foundation in 2005, Filastiniyat has been working on promoting and empowering the Palestinian women and youth’s discourse through media. Through various programmes such as our Women Journalists Club and our youth debate club and our online media outlet “NAWA” we have worked with many of Gaza’s journalists.
The main tasks were providing life-saving assistance to Gaza Strip journalists. We’ve offered cash, dignity and hygiene kits and warm clothes, with women journalists as a priority.
We’ve also established women journalists’ workstation tents near hospitals, with sleep-in facilities too. And provided e-sim cards, as well as connecting freelancers with international media outlets.
For Filastiniyat it is a strategic priority to ensure a continued production of stories covering all aspects of life during genocide, ensuring that stories are in line with our editorial policy and code of conduct. We have ensured that our content was translated into English to reach a broader audience.
As the situation deteriorates in the West Bank, we aided journalists in the West Bank through our “Media Protection Fund” in addition to securing helmets and protective jackets for women journalists.
Another priority has been coordinating local efforts of media development organisations supporting Gaza journalists, which eventually resulted in the formation of the Palestinian Media Task Force. Additionally, we have collected data about journalists and their needs inside the Gaza Strip and those who evacuated to Egypt.
We have a responsibility to continue talking about Gaza’s journalists – those who were targeted and killed and those still alive and reporting. The international human rights institutions and global media failed in securing us, so it falls on us to continue and to mobilise international individual journalists to support their peers in Palestine and insist that they support Palestinian journalists – if not through financial means, then through telling their stories.
Finally, and most importantly, transparency with the journalist’s community is the best way to earn legitimacy and trust and ensure solidarity within the community too.
Fundraising! We need funds that are not conditional, thus appealing to journalists and individuals is a priority. Also, having a comprehensive and realistic plan based on facts and priorities to save the Palestinian media scene (in both Gaza Strip and West Bank). This involves a continued flow of relief (cash, tents, clothes), workstations for media outlets with financial support, psychological counselling. Another priority will be to advocate for accountability of Israel.
I am angry, disappointed, yet, I don’t have the luxury to sit still because my family, my team and my friends are in Gaza expecting me to be their voice in my – relatively – comfort zone.
