Lebanon: Media’s 'Retreat' from Covering the Movement Angers Activists https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/2082381/lebanon-media%E2%80%99s-retreat-covering-movement-angers-activists%C2%A0
Lebanon: Media’s 'Retreat' from Covering the Movement Angers Activists
Demonstrators carry national flags during an anti-government protest in Tripoli, Lebanon October 21, 2019. REUTERS/Omar Ibrahim
Many of the Lebanese popular movement activists expressed their displeasure with the media’s “retreat” over the past few weeks after they had played a critical role in the first period after the revolt erupted on the 17th of October.
While some link this retreat to the loss of some of the movement’s momentum because of the holidays and the bad weather, others believe that the power retained their grip over media.
Lucian Bourjeili, an activist, believes: "With the beginning of the new year, TV stations started hosting the rulers who bankrupted the country again, in an attempt to whitewash their image. This reminds me of what happened in the last parliamentary elections when politicians used their money to monopolize screen time and make false promises."
Walid Abboud, the editor in chief of MTV, refuses the accusation that media coverage retreated, emphasizing that, at least not in the media institutions which he works for which, according to Abboud “is still covering the events that lost their momentum due to several factors, including the weather, the holidays and other reasons."
"We are not in the position of creating or igniting events but in the position of covering them when they happen,” he added.
Abboud goes on to tell Asharq Al-Awsat: “Live coverage compels, to a certain extent, more people to join the revolutions by showing them the revolution’s beautiful and expressive scenes”.
Abboud believes that it is likely that the momentum will return in the next few days, emphasizing that the TV channel which he works for will: "Cover the events with the same enthusiasm as before, despite deductions to our long-overdue salaries because of the economic and financial crisis that is hurting institutions across the country."
A study issued by the Maharat (Talents) Foundation on “freedom of expression and the media during the October 17 revolution” said that freedom of expression “reached a degree that Lebanon had not previously known during the revolution and broke the limits that had prevailed.
Some of the criticism leveled at the political class could be considered defamation, with public accusations of corruption and theft. This criticism has become part of revolutionaries’ daily discourse, expressed publicly through various media outlets and social media platforms without fear or ambiguity.
Palestinians Return to Homes and Lives Turned Inside Out by Gaza’s Destructionhttps://english.aawsat.com/features/5112081-palestinians-return-homes-and-lives-turned-inside-out-gaza%E2%80%99s-destruction
Destruction outside is seen from a damaged bedroom of the Nassar family home in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, Sunday, Feb. 9, 2025. (AP)
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Palestinians Return to Homes and Lives Turned Inside Out by Gaza’s Destruction
Destruction outside is seen from a damaged bedroom of the Nassar family home in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, Sunday, Feb. 9, 2025. (AP)
The Nassar family managed to assemble a semblance of their home’s old living room. A sofa and some chairs survived, along with a small table they can gather around to eat. The room’s wall had been almost entirely blown away, so they hung sheets over the gaping hole, hiding the mound of wreckage outside.
Buried somewhere under that rubble, Khalid Nassar knows, is the body of his son Mahmoud. It has lain there unretrievable for the past four months since he was killed in an Israeli airstrike.
This has been the struggle for displaced Palestinians returning to their homes in Gaza under the nearly month-old ceasefire: To re-create some bit of normal lives amid the death and destruction left by 16 months of Israeli bombardment and ground offensives against Hamas fighters.
Finding ways to settle in
Coming home after months — or more than a year — of living in tents or other shelters, families have no means to do any serious rebuilding. So they find little ways to settle in.
Apartment buildings that were reduced to hollowed-out skeletons have been draped with colorful bed linens serving as walls — as if the houses have been turned inside-out. Families dig chunks of concrete and mangled metal out of the interior to make them semi-habitable. Rooms look like fragmented movie sets, with furniture arranged in any intact corner, while the remaining walls are shattered.
The Nassars fled their home in Jabaliya refugee camp early last year, moving around northern Gaza. Khalid Nassar's son Mahmoud was killed in October when he tried to go back home to retrieve some clothes in the neighboring building, which they also owned, and a strike hit it, Nassar said. His daughter was also killed in a separate airstrike on her home in Jabaliya, where her body too remains buried under rubble.
Clothes hang to dry outside a destroyed room belonging to the Nassar family in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, Sunday, Feb. 9, 2025. (AP)
The family returned in January, as soon as Israeli troops withdrew from Jabaliya, which had been the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the war in the previous four months.
They found the top floor of their three-story building was wiped away. One of Nassar’s sons settled with his wife and kids on the second floor. The 61-year-old Nassar, his wife Khadra Abu Libda, 59, and the five children of another son, who was imprisoned by Israel, moved into what remains of the ground floor.
Miraculously, their living room furniture remained. Other rooms were trashed, littered with debris. In one room, someone had spray painted “Hamas” on the wall – Nassar said he didn’t know who did it or whether the house was used by fighters during the battles.
For water, they have to walk 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) to wait in line for hours at a well – when the pump there is working. For food, they have collected some humanitarian aid supplies, some bread, and a green called “khobeiza” in Arabic that grows in empty lots.
But the wreckage next door where his son is buried haunts Nassar. “Every minute I think about how to get my son out from under the rubble,” he said. “I can’t describe the torment so long as my son is not properly buried.”
He said he digs every day, but the only tool he has is a shovel, so he can’t lift the large slabs of concrete. “This morning, I was digging and searching, but I found nothing but some papers and clothes,” he said.
After the ceasefire in January, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flooded back to homes across Gaza that they had fled. Not everyone has been able to return. Hanan Okal said her family’s building in Jabaliya was flattened. So they are staying in the nearby school-turned-shelter where they have been taking refuge.
Khalid Nassar, 61, sits with his wife, Khadra Abu Libda, 59, and his grandchildren for lunch, with fabric covering the hole in a wall of their destroyed house in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, Sunday, Feb. 9, 2025. (AP)
Nearby in Jabaliya, the Odeh family returned to find their building's ground floor gutted. They had to set up a ladder to climb in and out of the second floor, where Yousef and his brother Mohammed Oudeh settled in with their families.
Their parents, Ahmed and Mariam, stay in a tent of wood and plastic sheets outside. The shell of their building does no better than the tent to protect from the cold, they said.
With the surrounding neighborhood flattened, there’s nothing to shield them from the cold February wind. At one point, the wind blew away and tore the sheets they had set up in the holes in the walls. So they scrounged for new sheets and blankets among the rubble of other houses.
Ready for the family's return
Youssef Issa returned to his family home in Jabaliya to prepare it ahead of his parents and siblings, who remain in their shelter in central Gaza.
He found it in relatively good shape. It was partially damaged by nearby collapsed buildings, but apparently, it was used by Israeli troops as a position at some point in the fighting, so it wasn’t bombarded. Issa said he, his cousin and his friends swept out the debris and spent ammunition casings.
Like many houses, his had been scavenged and looted for anything of value. Clothes, blankets and any food left behind was taken. But his flat-screen TV was not touched: Without electricity, it was useless to steal it.
But Issa was able to reassemble an almost cozy-looking sitting room. The family’s plush purple sofa was still intact. He draped thick red fabric over the hole in the wall behind it. And he arranged the cushions on the sofa just right – ready for his family’s return.
