The war in Gaza began in October 2023 after Hamas launched a deadly attack on Israel, prompting an Israeli military response that has since caused widespread destruction, displacement and humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. But the war in Gaza has not only been a humanitarian catastrophe—it has also become a turning point for the future of conflict journalism. Because foreign journalists were largely prohibited from entering, many Palestinian reporters were left to document the war firsthand.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) finds that “for more than 20 months, Israeli authorities have barred foreign journalists from entering the Gaza Strip.” A Columbia Journalism Review article adds that foreign reporters have not been allowed into Gaza without Israeli military escort since October 2023. Due to these failures in traditional methods of reporting, journalism of the Gaza conflict has increasingly turned to local journalists and social media to document the event, changing the future of conflict reporting forever.
As a result of these heavy restrictions on international journalism, social media and local journalism became one of the primary ways the world witnessed the conflict. Platforms like Instagram, X, TikTok and Telegram have seen billions of views on related topics, allowing local content creators to show their lives amid the war and how the conflict has personally impacted them. Because of this more direct and unfiltered nature of social media, audiences saw a more emotional aspect of the war, with videos of people digging through rubble for loved ones and emaciated children begging for food spreading widely online. Motaz Azaiza, for example, is a particularly prominent Palestinian photojournalist who famously shot a photo showing a girl trapped in rubble after an Israeli airstrike. Before the war, Azaiza’s Instagram account had around 25,000 followers, but it has since grown to more than 17 million.
At the same time, journalism through social media has highlighted the dangers of conflict reporting. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) finds that as of Oct. 8, at least 239 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza, making it the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began collecting data in 1992. For Azaiza, he lost 15 family members in an attack and operated under constant threat for more than 100 days. But with the rise of social media, there is now growing concern about misinformation and bias. Because pro-Palestinian posts have vastly outnumbered pro-Israeli posts, the growing reliance on social media as a news source has led to a sharp decline in support for the war among Democratic voters. According to polls from The New York Times, this shift has led Americans to side with Palestinians over Israelis for the first time since 1998.
On the other hand, the Israeli government has used social media to portray Hamas negatively and justify its military actions. The government has also been found to use fake AI-generated videos and bots to mimic human support for Israel’s political actions and dehumanize Palestinians. Beyond official campaigns, Israeli content creators and soldiers have mocked the hardships Palestinians have faced, leading to international condemnation and investigations by the Israel Defense Forces. This new landscape has revealed both the benefits and downsides of reporting through social media.
On one hand, it shows the perspectives of those who directly face these hardships, while on the other, it opens the door to misinformation and bias.
