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Israel’s Explicit Blackout Policy Conceals Gaza’s Realities

Funeral procession of an Israeli soldier who was killed in the northern Gaza Strip during the army’s ground operation against Hamas on Tuesday (Reuters)
Funeral procession of an Israeli soldier who was killed in the northern Gaza Strip during the army’s ground operation against Hamas on Tuesday (Reuters)
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Israel’s Explicit Blackout Policy Conceals Gaza’s Realities

Funeral procession of an Israeli soldier who was killed in the northern Gaza Strip during the army’s ground operation against Hamas on Tuesday (Reuters)
Funeral procession of an Israeli soldier who was killed in the northern Gaza Strip during the army’s ground operation against Hamas on Tuesday (Reuters)

Israeli political, military, and media institutions are following a policy of concealing any information related to the repercussions of airstrikes on civilians in Gaza.

These establishments are also obscuring all data concerning Hamas and withholding footage regarding the abducted individuals, alongside a vague stance on the course of Israeli operations in Gaza, considering it part of their military tactics.

Due to this policy, Israelis remain uninformed about the details of thousands of children and women who fall victim to airstrikes conducted from a distance by Israel’s air force, navy, and ground forces.

Hebrew media explicitly declares that it does not publish statements issued by Hamas and does not broadcast appearances of the official spokesperson for the movement, Abu Obeida.

Additionally, it refrains from disseminating Hamas announcements about the number of prisoners killed in the airstrikes, asserting that the figure has risen to 60.

On Monday night, when Hamas announced the death of soldier Noa Marciano due to Israeli shelling, the military informed her family that she was killed in Gaza.

The army affirmed that its information was derived from intelligence sources, not from the tape broadcast by Hamas on this matter, and her words were not aired before her death.

Media outlets justify this decision by stating that they do not wish to be tools in the propaganda campaign of Hamas.

Israelis are compelled to resort to social networks to learn about the fate of their children.

Even on social media, cyber units of the Israeli intelligence occasionally intervene, obstructing their view.

Consequently, they resort to watching Hamas statements on YouTube.

This policy is generating mass discontent among the families of those abducted by Hamas.

These families increasingly feel that the issue of prisoners is not a top priority of the Israeli government, prompting them to escalate their protest activities.

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Palestinians in Syria Flock to Cemetery Off-Limits under Assad

People pray by the grave of a relative in a damaged cemetery at the Yarmuk camp for Palestinian refugees in the south of Damascus on December 14, 2024. (AFP)
People pray by the grave of a relative in a damaged cemetery at the Yarmuk camp for Palestinian refugees in the south of Damascus on December 14, 2024. (AFP)
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Palestinians in Syria Flock to Cemetery Off-Limits under Assad

People pray by the grave of a relative in a damaged cemetery at the Yarmuk camp for Palestinian refugees in the south of Damascus on December 14, 2024. (AFP)
People pray by the grave of a relative in a damaged cemetery at the Yarmuk camp for Palestinian refugees in the south of Damascus on December 14, 2024. (AFP)

In a war-ravaged Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, Radwan Adwan was stacking stones to rebuild his father's grave, finally able to return to Yarmuk cemetery after Bashar al-Assad's fall.

"Without the fall of the regime, it would have been impossible to see my father's grave again," said 45-year-old Adwan.

"When we arrived, there was no trace of the grave."

It was his first visit there since 2018, when access to the cemetery south of Damascus was officially banned.

Assad's fall on December 8, after a lightning offensive led by opposition factions, put an end to decades of iron-fisted rule and years of bloody civil war that began with repression of peaceful anti-government protests in 2011.

Yarmuk camp fell to the opposition early in the war before becoming an extremist stronghold. It was bombed and besieged by Assad's forces, emptied of most of its residents and reduced to ruins before its recapture in 2018.

Assad's ouster has allowed former residents to return for the first time in years.

Back at the cemetery, Adwan's mother Zeina sat on a small metal chair in front of her husband's gravesite.

She was "finally" able to weep for him, she said. "Before, my tears were dry."

"It's the first time that I have returned to his grave for years. Everything has changed, but I still recognize where his grave is," said the 70-year-old woman.

Yarmuk camp, established in the 1950s to house Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their land after Israel's creation, had become a key residential and commercial district over the decades.

Some 160,000 Palestinians lived there alongside thousands of Syrians before the country's conflict erupted in 2011.

Thousands fled in 2012, and few have found their homes still standing in the eerie wasteland that used to be Yarmuk.

Along the road to the cemetery, barefoot children dressed in threadbare clothes play with what is left of a swing set in a rubble-strewn area that was once a park.

- 'Spared no one' -

A steady stream of people headed to the cemetery, looking for their loved ones' gravesites after years.

"Somewhere here is my father's grave, my uncle's, and another uncle's," said Mahmud Badwan, 60, gesturing to massive piles of grey rubble that bear little signs of what may lie beneath them.

Most tombstones are broken.

Near them lay breeze blocks from adjacent homes which stand empty and open to the elements.

"The Assad regime spared neither the living nor the dead. Look at how the ruins have covered the cemetery. They spared no one," Badwan said.

There is speculation that the cemetery may also hold the remains of famed Israeli spy Eli Cohen and an Israeli solider.

Cohen was tried and hanged for espionage by the Syrians in 1965 after he infiltrated the top levels of the government.

Camp resident Amina Mounawar leaned against the wall of her ruined home, watching the flow of people arriving at the cemetery.

Some wandered the site, comparing locations to photos on their phones taken before the war in an attempt to locate graves in the transformed site.

"I have a lot of hope for the reconstruction of the camp, for a better future," said Mounawar, 48, as she offered water to those arriving at the cemetery.