Israelis soldiers have started to take international news crews into Gaza, and UK journalists have now reported on the “hell” they’ve discovered in the active war zone.
While reporters inside the Palestinian territory have been covering the war since it began a month ago, foreign journalists are only now being allowed into the Gaza Strip under the surveillance of the Israel Defence Force (IDF).
Hamas killed around 1,400 people on Israel soil on October 7, and took more than 200 people hostage.
Israel then declared war, launched a series of air strikes and a ground invasion in the north, while putting the whole of Gaza under siege. The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza say more than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed so far.
Each broadcaster has made it very clear that they had maintained editorial independence over their own reports, but various parts of the footage had to have IDF approval before it could be released.
The Israeli forces would only take journalists if their reports did not reveal anything about their position.
Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, released his report into Gaza on Wednesday night.
He explained: “We got out of the back of an armoured vehicle and walked into a wasteland.
“After a month of air strikes and more than a week of tanks and troops, every building I saw was damaged or destroyed.”
The IDF showed each journalist what it described as a weapons factory in a building where a family clearly lived upstairs.
The army told reporters that was an example of Hamas using civilians as human shields.
Channel 4′s Secunder Kermani also went into Gaza with IDF, and explained: ″Coming here with them is the only way for foreign journalists to get a first hand glimpse of this deadly conflict.”
His report, also released on Wednesday, focused on the Gaza civilians trying to move to the south of the territory, as on Israel’s instructions.
He showed how two Palestinian men were detained for “acting suspiciously”, and filmed how Israeli soldiers called out in Hebrew to the stream of evacuees just in case any Israeli hostages were among the crowds.
Kermani then went to the areas of Gaza which have already been “reduced to rubble in an Israeli strike”, and explained “this is the hell they are running from” in the north.