It was the morning of 8 October 2023, and the building was the home of Press House, a Palestinian non-profit organisation training and supporting journalists.
Less than 24 hours earlier, Hekmat Yossuf, one of the group's founders, phoned a colleague. "Get ready, we have to go to the office," he said. Within hours they would put the word out to Gaza's journalists that Press House was opening its supply of flak jackets -light-blue body armour and helmets, emblazoned with "PRESS" and a cartoon logo of a house with the nib of a pen on its chimney.
Hatem Rawagh, 30, signed the flak jackets out one by one, just over 80 in total, checking the recipients knew how to put them on properly. Yossuf turned the office's meeting room into a space for freelancers. Dozens of journalists crowded around a snarl of cables and laptops thrown together on the table.
In the centre of the activity was Bilal Jadallah. Tall and thin with a severe expression that masked a dry sense of humour, Press House's founder had for 10 years nurtured his vision of a politically independent incubator for Palestinian journalism.
It had survived conflict before. In the garden were 17 olive trees, planted in memory of reporters killed during an escalation in 2014. This time Jadallah felt it would get worse. "We are headed towards war," he told Rawagh. "A major war."
Atef Abu Saif, 50, a Palestinian culture minister usually based in the West Bank, had been in Gaza on a short trip. When Hamas launched its assault, he turned up to Press House. He watched as Gaza's journalists prepared to cover the war. "The only thing we can agree on is that we have no idea where this is going," he wrote (Abu Saif declined to be interviewed, but provided journalists with a copy of his diary and permission to quote from it).
This story is from the June 26, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the June 26, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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