Wael Dahdouh stood in front of the camera for once, leaning against the wall to hide his tears.
He was at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital to say his last goodbyes to his wife, son, daughter and grandson who had just been killed in an Israeli airstrike that hit the house in which they were taking refuge in.
When he turned to his audience, it was to be interviewed by a colleague, in the same way he had interviewed so many others before.
He pulled himself together and began to speak, but when it came to counting the people he had lost, his voice gradually lost its confidence. Then it broke. Tears filled his eyes as he spoke of his seven-year-old daughter Sham, the second youngest of the victims.
The youngest was Wael’s grandson Adam, aged one and a half years.
“My siblings and cousins were there too, and my daughters are all injured,” he said. “But I guess I should thank God that at least some of my family survived.”
“The reality of life in Gaza”
The house where Wael’s family was attacked was not theirs: their house was in Tel el-Hawa, Gaza City, but they had to leave it because it was too dangerous.
Wael, 52, worked night and day to cover the news of what was happening in Gaza City. He was worried about his family in the face of the incessant bombings taking place in the northern Gaza Strip.
So his wife Amna and their children, some with their spouses and their own children, moved from place to place until they ended up in the Nuseirat refugee camp, south of Wadi Gaza, with other family members.
Wael believed they would be safe there because it was in the area to which Israel had asked Palestinians in Gaza to move.
It’s a difficult moment in the life of a Palestinian journalist, when he goes to cover an incident for the news and discovers that the news concerns his own family.
Wael and Amna had eight children: Hamza, 27, Bissan, 25, Sundus, 23, Khuloud, 21, Batoul, 18, Mahmoud, 15, Yehia, 12, and Sham, 7.
Hamza and Bissan were not in the house, but they rushed to the scene. Their mother, Mahmoud and Sham were gone, Yehia was seriously injured and the rest of their siblings were injured to varying degrees. Their sister Sundus’ son Adam had also died.
Two years ago, during the 11 days of Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip, Wael’s family survived an attack on a nearby house, and he told AJ+ Arabic at the time that the family had divided between the homes of several family members “in the hope that some of them would remain alive; This is the reality of life in Gaza.”
“I knew the extent of the anguish”
Wael loved being a father. He followed his children’s performance at school and rushed between live reports to run errands for them.
“I know that he loves his family very much and that they hold a huge place in his heart, it is different from any other paternal relationship that I have observed between my colleagues,” explained Abdisalam Farah, Arab presenter of Al Jazeera in Doha.
Farah could not hold back his tears as he read the latest news of Wael’s loss on his teleprompter, because, he said, “I knew the extent of the anguish that gripped my colleague’s heart at that time “.
Wael had already expressed his concern: “For our families, this moment, this moment when they need you the most, when they need the strength and firmness of their father – this moment is lost for us, Palestinian journalists . It’s when they need you the most that they miss you the most,” he told AJ+ Arabic in 2021.
And, on the evening of October 25, his worst fears came true.
He heard the news live: while he was reporting, his surviving family members tried to contact him. Eventually, his daughter, Khuloud, managed to reach cameraman Hamdan al-Dahdouh, who passed the phone to Wael on air.
His colleague, Hisham Zaqout, worked at the hospital and had heard the news, but when Wael called to tell him he was coming straight, Hisham told him to go home instead.
“I mean, I guess I wanted it to be less painful for him. And civil defense teams sometimes cannot get everywhere at night in Gaza, so it may have been necessary to help dig through the rubble,” Hisham said.
When Wael and Hamdan arrived at the scene, they immediately began digging through the rubble with their bare hands. They managed to rescue Yehia, Wael’s son, who was seriously injured, as well as his daughter Batoul. He was also able to get his grandson Adam out. But it was too late to save him.
“She was everything in this house”
Wael did not see his wife in the rubble, her body having already been taken to the hospital, where he and his eldest son Hamza were able to see her.
Hamza was very attached to his mother, and as soon as he received the call that the house had been hit, he shouted his concern for her, according to his colleague Bilal Khaled who was with him that night.
“Uh, Hamza, God rest his soul, was everything in this house for Hamza, for Hamza’s father, for the whole family. Their attachment to her, the way they talked about her. She was not just a mother, she was everything to them in that house,” Bilal told Al Jazeera.
“Earlier in the day, Hamza had spoken to her, asked how she was and checked to see if they had managed to find bread that day. He watched over his wife and his nephew, little Adam,” Bilal continued.
In the hospital, Wael was unable to grieve in private and chose to present his pain and his family’s loss to viewers as part of the pain felt every day by the people of Gaza.
Cameras followed him as he entered an overflow area where bodies that could not fit into the hospital morgue were lined up on the floor.
They hovered as he removed the makeshift shroud covering his son Mahmoud and touched his face and chest, stunned that his child was gone.
Mahmoud was “a boy who was just beginning to become manly. He used to hang out with us a lot, always with a joke or a teasing remark for someone on the news team,” Hisham said.
“And his daughter, little Sham, aged seven, who has committed no crime other than being the daughter of Wael Dahdouh,” he continued, adding that Wael had described this as “a attempt to take revenge on us by targeting our children.”
“A family of giants”
The tributes that poured in reflected the love and respect everyone around Wael felt for him – and the shock they all shared at the news of his loss.
Ahmed Ashour, one of Wael’s colleagues in Doha, described how, at the end of the “long and traumatic day” where “our hearts were torn apart by the news about his family”, he returned home and ” curiously, he realized that I was hungry.” “. As he opened his kitchen cupboard looking for something to eat, he saw the bottle of Palestinian olive oil that Wael had sent him. “It was such a heartbreaking moment,” he recalls.
For Hamdan, who was with Wael when he heard the news and who helped him dig out the rubble, “it’s a huge loss.” But, he explains, Wael “is also a giant and comes from a family of giants.” Describing him as an elder brother and a source of strength and patience, he added: “May God give you patience and strength as great as the love for you which he has implanted in the hearts of people all over the world . »
Asef Hamidi, director of Al Jazeera’s Arabic television, described how “Wael has covered and continues to cover life in Gaza to show the world. In doing so, he showed us all how strong and capable this man is to overcome his pain. He will not forget this pain, it will remain within him, because he lost his wife, his son, his daughter and his grandson.
But, he added, Wael “looked beyond the catastrophe that befell him, as if telling us that it is the tragedy of the Palestinian people that must be covered.”
