A Palestinian correspondent with ample first-hand experience of reporting from the Gaza Strip, which is enduring a genocidal Israeli war, explains how relaying the truth about Israeli atrocities there causes unease for the occupying regime.
Israa El-Buhaisi, Gaza correspondent for Iran's Al-Alam Arabic-language television news network, made the remarks in an televised interview with Press TV on Monday.
News coverage of Gaza "disturbs the Israeli enemy ... by only telling the truth and showing the real images of what is happening," she said, adding, “Honestly, the issue, which I feel the occupation is mostly afraid of are the journalists.”
“What we have…the cameras and all our equipment are actually weapons,” the reporter said. “The occupation has made us even more determined… These are our weapons. These are our arms, and we will not let go of them,” she noted.
The regime has been waging the war against Gaza since October 7 in response to Al-Aqsa Storm, a retaliatory operation by the Palestinian territory’s resistance groups.
More than 35,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have died as a result of the brutal military onslaught so far.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent body that promotes press freedom, the death toll includes at least 97 journalists and media workers.
‘Israel resorting to fake news to justify crimes’
Elsewhere in her remarks, el-Buhaisi said the Israeli regime resorts to fake news to create a pretext for its crimes.
She cited allegations that has been leveled by the regime against Palestinian resistance groups of the latter’s running tunnels underneath hospitals inside Gaza.
The regime has been using such allegations extensively to try to justify hugely deadly raids against the healthcare facilities.
"They come and they tell us there are tunnels for the resistance, or bases for the resistance. Where are they? Show them to us. We don't see them. We did not see anything related to the resistance in those hospitals," she insisted.
El-Buhaisi went on to further recount the extent of the suffering that has been imposed on the Gazans as a result of the war.
“I witnessed and documented the Palestinians trapped in the besieged Gaza Strip suffering every minute at the hands of the Israeli regime forces,” she said.
“You are looking for safety and you do not find it. When children ask you for a safe haven..., parents cannot find safety for their children and provide them with protection," stated the correspondent.
"The occupation is persistently torturing people through famine, hunger, making them drink from the sea water, giving them all this difficulty, torturing them by staying hours without finding medicine, not allowing medicine to enter the Gaza Strip,” el-Buhaisi said.
She was referring to a crippling siege that the Israeli regime has been imposing simultaneously against Gaza, as part of which Tel Aviv recently seized the Rafah crossing in the southern part of the coastal sliver. The crossing borders Egypt and serves as the main point of entry for aid supplies, including fuel, into the territory.