Social media is changing how we see war
Palestinians are documenting the war for millions on social media. Their followers have come to see them as family.
Early on Christmas Day in the central Gazan city of Deir al-Balah, Motaz Azaiza shared a terrifying update on X.
A quadcopter was flying low above the door of his house, he said, and he feared he was about to be targeted in an Israeli airstrike. As a highly visible Palestinian online who had received threats before, Azaiza believed he had reason to be afraid.
People flooded the replies with concern for the 24-year-old Palestinian photojournalist, who has been documenting Israel’s military assault on Gaza on social media since Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7.
“I’m so scared for Motaz,” the replies read. “I hope Motaz is okay.”
Noor, a medical student in California, was one of the people worrying. For months, she’s been following Azaiza’s dispatches from Gaza, broadcast to his millions of followers: images of his once vibrant neighbourhood transformed into a gray wasteland, raw glimpses of carnage in the ashes, and reflections on his own feelings of rage and exhaustion. Noor refers to Azaiza with the familiarity of his first name. She gets notifications on her phone each time he posts, and worries when too much time passes.
“For so many of us, it almost feels like he’s a brother. He’s a friend, and we’re seeing him suffer in real time,” she said. Noor isn’t Palestinian and has never been to Gaza. What’s happening there still hits close to home. Her family is Iraqi, and she grew up against the backdrop of the Iraq War. When Azaiza said he feared being killed for his work, Noor found herself feeling scared and anxious for a virtual stranger halfway around the world.
“Their journalism isn’t just journalism. It’s a diary,” Noor said of the Gazans posting on social media. “They’re showing us their lives. They’re telling us, ‘I couldn’t shower for a week.’ ‘I barely had to eat today.’”
After hours with no information following that fear of an airstrike, Azaiza finally posted again. A refugee camp was hit in an Israeli attack. Still, his posts signaled he was alive, and Noor could breathe a sad sigh of relief.
“I feel so much empathy for them”
Like millions around the world, Noor is witnessing the war on Gaza through the eyes of Palestinians sharing their realities on social media. Through their posts, these citizen journalists are putting a face to the conflict. In return, their followers are developing strong emotional connections with them.
Leyla Hamed, a journalist in London, said the first thing she does when she wakes up is open Instagram to visit the profiles of Palestinians she follows and watch their stories. She sees them as colleagues and feels a responsibility to bear witness. “I feel so much empathy for them that I sometimes feel scared to open their profiles, thinking something bad has happened to them,” she said.
Kanwal Ahmed, a filmmaker and storyteller in Toronto, has a similar routine. “They’ve become family to the entire world,” she said. “If creator Bisan Owda hasn’t posted for 12 hours, there are hundreds of tweets: ‘Where’s Bisan?’ ‘Does anybody know where Bisan is?’ ‘Is she okay?’ If Azaiza has posted a picture where you can tell that he’s looking extremely depressed or he’s lost weight, there’s people discussing that.”
These images and accounts from Palestinians offer an instantaneous view that some young people feel like they haven’t gotten from traditional media outlets, Ahmed said. Young Palestinians like Azaiza, content creator Bisan Owda and freelance journalist Hind Khoudary haven’t just been on the ground since the beginning. They are reporting from their homes and their communities, often persisting through extended communications blackouts.
They’ve become family to the entire world. Through raw, selfie-style videos chronicling the ever-present threat of explosions or the everyday indignities of displacement, they’re giving outsiders an intimate look at the human costs of war from the perspective of people who live there. Many of the images they share are so graphic that Instagram obscures them with “sensitive content” warnings.
“Everyone’s getting a chance to tell their own stories,” Ahmed said. “People can tell for themselves … And it’s very hard to look away when you’re seeing somebody sitting in a pile of rubble, or if you’re seeing a five-year-old girl crying next to her father’s dead body.”
Seeing the war directly through these channels changes how people understand it, said Zaina Arafat, a Palestinian American author in Brooklyn who has written about witnessing the assault on Gaza through Instagram. “The constancy of these images and the way that we watch them through our phones very much in private allows for a more direct and forceful impact,” she said. “It’s this very immediate connection between journalist and viewer, which I do think heightens the response.”
Many more people are paying attention
Israel began its relentless bombardment and ground assault in Gaza after October 7.
“This is as close as you can get to factual and minute-by-minute reporting on the atrocities on the ground,” said Marwa Fatafta, an analyst and researcher who leads Middle East and North Africa policy and advocacy work for the digital rights organization Access Now.
Independent journalism out of Gaza is scant. Most news organisations have been unable to cover the war in Gaza with their own correspondents. Israel, along with Egypt, has largely blocked international journalists from the territory on the premise that it cannot guarantee their safety.
Eyewitness accounts on social media are critical in understanding global conflicts, including past flare-ups between Israelis and Palestinians. What’s different this time, according to Fatafta, is how many more people are paying attention.
The work of these photographers, storytellers and citizen journalists is dangerous.
At least 82 journalists and media workers have been killed while covering the war as of January 16, 75 of them Palestinian, according to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists. Protests, demonstrations and public gatherings in support of Palestinians have grown in size since the start of the war. Israel is facing mounting international pressure to agree to a ceasefire. It’s difficult to attribute these events to any one factor, and Fatafta cautions against drawing too straight a line between social media and changing opinions on the war.
“The events on the ground are beyond atrocious, and they do merit a global reaction,” Fatafta said. “If there wasn’t, I would be scared to live in this world.”
Constantly checking Instagram to make sure Azaiza and other Palestinians documenting the war are still alive feels dystopian, Noor said. She’s had to take a break at times because the horrors she was seeing through her phone were affecting her ability to function. But she knows those in Gaza don’t have that luxury, so she never looks away for long.
“The least that I can do, or anybody can do, is to bear witness,” she said.