Khaled
Dawoud (1993) is the regional editor for Al-Ahram Weekly. Dawoud
returned from Ramallah, where he was covering the April-March escalation of Palestinian/Israeli
violence.
In interviews at AUC TV
with Lena Ghadban, a second year master's student at the Adham Center, and with
Adham Online's Mayada Wahsh, Dawoud described what he saw. "Israelis destroyed
the city of Ramallah. They destroyed the infrastructure, tore down the buildings,
and massacred hundreds of civilians every day. They also are preventing the ambulances
from reaching the injured people. In addition to their brutality, they do not
let the families bury the dead bodies of their victims. A scene that I cannot
forget is the shooting of an old woman in a wheelchair coming out of a hospital.
They shot her dead. I felt that this innocent woman could have been my mother
or my aunt."
Dawoud says he
was very affected by what he saw. "I want to help with my pen," he said.
"It was a horrifying atmosphere." He and his colleagues were exposed
to Israeli shootings, even though they were wearing vests that identified
them as press, and had to protect themselves from Israeli attacks. Though
he was close to death, as he told Ghadban, he emphasized how glad he
was to be able to do his duty and cover the Palestinian suffering.
"We had to move
in groups. Israeli soldiers might shoot one journalist alone, but not
a group of thirty," Dawoud explained. "However, walking around with
light-skinned journalists was much safer than walking with Arab journalists,"
he added, pointing out the shooting of Carlos Handal, a Palestinian
cameraman working with Egypt's Nile TV, which was captured by Handal's
own camera and broadcast on channels around the world. Dawoud also mentioned
the story of Anthony Shadid, an American journalist for the Boston Globe,
who got a bullet in his shoulder. Dawoud said that in spite of the aggression
of Israeli soldiers, some journalists managed to meet with President
Arafat in his compound. The journalists got in with the peace activists
who surmounted the Israeli siege on Arafat. The peace activists, Dawoud
said, proved to the whole world their condemnation to Israeli aggression
by this heroic step.
In their first
days there, Dawoud said, journalists were afraid of every exploding
gas bomb. But after few days of their mission, they got used to the
shootings and explosions that turned out to be part of daily life in
Palestine. "Journalists were attacked by Israeli soldiers so they wouldn't
be able to shoot the scenes of bloodshed," Dawoud said, adding that
they wanted to conceal the truth to the extent that Israeli forces surrounded
with tanks for two full days the two hotels where journalists, himself
included, were residing and shot at any journalist who tried to leave
the hotel.
Dawoud said that the Israeli
incursion motivated the journalists to cooperate much more than at any time before.
"It was not a competitive atmosphere. Journalists were trying to defend their
lives," said Dawoud. "But however much we suffered as journalists, it was nothing
compared to the real suffering of the Palestinians. The world only sees 10 percent
of what is really happening. If I have the chance to go to Palestine again, I
will go immediately."
Mayada
Wahsh
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