Gaza Project

Endless horrors and relocations: In Jabalia, Fadi Al-Wahidi's unfinished reporting

In October 2024, the Israeli army made its third incursion into the Jabalia refugee camp since the start of its war in Gaza—a particularly severe deployment of violence resulting in mass casualties, including the deaths of two Palestinian journalists and injuries to two others. One of them, Fadi Al-Wahidi, is now paralyzed. We continued his reporting, recounting the conditions in which Jabalia’s inhabitants survived and fled.

Jabalia after the third Israeli army incursion, in October 2024 (Credit Khadija Hmaid).

By Cécile Andrzejewski and Samer Shalabi

With Sami Boukhelifa (RFI)

March 27, 2025

Knee-high to a grasshopper, with a baby bottle in hand, the little blonde girl was covered in dust. She had that uncoordinated gait of a young child, walking barefoot across ground that tanks had churned into sand. All around her, adults slumped under the weight of the bags they carried on their backs or dragged behind them.

A little Gazan girl during the escape from Jabalia in the fall of 2024 – Credit Khadija Hmaid

The air was filled with the incessant hum of an Israeli helicopter or drone, while a tank driving at full speed monitored the crowd. All were Palestinians from Jabalia, fleeing Israel’s invasion of the refugee camp—the third in a year—in October 2024. Located in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, the camp has been home to thousands of refugees since 1948, who fled the towns and villages of southern Mandatory Palestine, which became Israeli territory following the massacres, expulsions and forced migrations that Palestinians call Nakba: the “catastrophe.”

“I documented our displacement,” said Khadija Hmaid, the 27-year-old journalist who filmed the little blonde girl. She described for Forbidden Stories “the heavily armed tanks, while we were only women and children, intimidated by their movements and weapons. [The Israeli soldiers] were even kind of mocking our suffering, clearly and explicitly.”

A massive military operation

One year after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, which triggered a cycle of bloody Israeli reprisals in Gaza, this new military deployment in Jabalia cost the lives of over 400 Palestinians, including two journalists. On the morning of October 6, 2024, Hassan Hamad, a 19-year-old freelance journalist and photographer working for Al Jazeera, was standing on the roof of his house inside the camp filming the army advance when an Israeli drone strike “shattered” him, in his father’s words, and ended his life. According to a Reporters Without Borders video, his remains fit in a simple shoebox.

However, the press paid the heaviest price on October 9. Mohammed Al-Tanani, a 26-year-old cameraman for the Al Aqsa TV channel, was also killed by an Israeli drone strike. Al Aqsa TV is financed and run by Hamas, the Islamist group in power in Gaza, and is classified as a “terrorist” organization by Israel, the United States, and the European Union. In the first installment of the Gaza Project, an Israeli army spokesman told our partners at ARIJ and the Guardian that there was “no difference” between working for this media outlet and belonging to the armed wing of Hamas. The Israeli army later contradicted the spokesman’s remarks, saying they “do not reflect official policy on the identification of terrorists and targeting procedures.”

When he was killed, Al-Tanani was covering Israeli operations in the refugee camp with his colleague Tamer Lubbad, who was wounded in the same strike. Another journalist, a cameraman for Al Jazeera named Fadi Al-Wahidi, was also seriously injured that day. Wearing a bulletproof vest marked “Press,” he was shot in the neck—one of the only unprotected areas of his body—leaving him in critical condition. He remains paralyzed to this day.

Fadi al-Wahidi working as a journalist in Gaza, before his injury – Credit: Instagram – Fadi Al-Wahidi

We continued the reporting that Al-Wahidi was unable to finish. Despite his suffering, he found the strength to talk to Forbidden Stories and our partners for the second installment of the Gaza Project from his hospital bed, which was then in Gaza.

“I was photographing and filming my colleague Anas Al-Sharif while reporting on the displacement of civilians. We were warned that there was indiscriminate and sudden shelling of homes, which led people to leave without taking their belongings,” Al-Wahidi described with difficulty.

To continue his unfinished reporting, we contacted Jabalia residents who fled the camp in the autumn of 2024—people whom Al-Wahidi would have met himself, camera on shoulder and microphone in hand, had he not been shot. We asked them to tell us about their departure. Traumatized, most of them chose to describe the brutal living conditions they experienced during the siege and their escape.

“The most violent invasion of Jabalia.”

Famine, filthy water, constant displacement and piles of corpses: just a glimpse into the apocalyptic reality of the camp. Abdul Karim Al-Zwaidi, 23, has been displaced more than 20 times. When he told us about Jabalia, Al-Zwaidi began by describing a massacre “in the middle of the camp” that left several hundred dead in October 2023. “By God, the horrors of the Day of Resurrection would perhaps be kinder to me and those who were present, given the severity of the scene and the targeting,” he said.

Then, Al-Zwaidi told us about “the second invasion” in May 2024, a horrifying ordeal that he remembers for “the abundance of blood that covered the streets.” Finally, he described the attack that began on October 6, 2024, as “the most violent invasion of Jabalia. Due to the intensity of the bombing and the targeting, people did not know where to go.” Like other civilians, the young journalist found refuge at Kamal Adwan Hospital, the last health facility still functioning in northern Gaza.

One day, Al-Zwaidi spotted his family in the wounded crowd. They had previously settled in another neighborhood of the camp, Tal Al-Zaatar. “My feelings were indescribable in those moments, seeing my family hurt. They only had minor injuries, praise be to God,” he said. Al-Zwaidi and his family became “the displaced among the displaced.” But in their wandering, food was in short supply. Al-Zwaidi, along with four other people, decided to return to Tal Al-Zaatar to find more.

“It was the most dangerous area, with tanks, drones… Almost anyone who moved was targeted or shot down,” he said. One of these drones opened fire on the group. Al-Zwaidi thought he would be killed, but it was one of his companions who was hit. “We were unable to treat him or do anything for him because of the intensity of the fire,” he recalled. He retrieved some flour and canned goods that had been stored away previously.

Jabalia camp after the Israeli army incursion in October 2024 – Credit Khadija Hmaid

Shahida Al-Aloul, 70, also comes “from the depths of Tal Al-Zaatar.” He remembers that food “started to disappear completely. We could not find anything that had been preserved. Our suffering began because of the food shortage.” Al-Aloul remembers paying a large sum for one or two bags of flour near Kamal Adwan Hospital. In Gaza, the price of a kilo of flour doubled after October 7, 2023, and increased tenfold during severe shortages. “Sometimes we would send one of our children, one of our young people, because the elderly cannot run when there is shooting from a drone or artillery shelling,” said Al-Aloul.

Drinking undrinkable water

But the worst thing, according to Al-Aloul, was the lack of water. “The situation was very difficult, honestly, with food supplies dwindling, but the most important need was water,” he said. “Without water, it’s impossible to live.”

For a time, Al-Aloul and his family were able to get water from a well, “but when [the Israeli soldiers] saw us using it, they hit the power… [so] the water was cut off.” The young men in his family then went to fetch water from Kamal Adwan Hospital, but “whether it was pure or not was another story. As long as there was water we could drink, we drank it, no matter what,” said Al-Aloul.

Journalist Al-Zwaidi remembers Kamal Adwan Hospital’s water, too. “It came from a hose, the only one that covered the hospital and the surrounding area,” he said. “We were absolutely sure that this water was not fit for drinking.”

It was the lack of water that prompted Al-Aloul to leave. “At dawn, we decided to pack our bags,” he said. “We had a white flag. We went outside, and some neighbors saw us and came with us. We looked at the street directly behind us, which was [once] very nice. But when we went out, we found the whole area destroyed.”

An Israeli soldier from a tank instructed them to sit on the ground and separated the men from the women. Al-Aloul and the other men walked forward, one tank at the front of their line and another at the back. The soldiers told them to get “completely naked, of course,” before inspecting them and finally letting them go.

Jabalia residents fleeing the camp after the third Israeli army incursion in October 2024 – Credit Khadija Hmaid

Hmaid, the journalist who filmed the little blonde girl’s departure from Jabalia, remained in the camp for a month after Israel began its third incursion, “living the siege, living the famine, living everything in detail.” She too “was drinking water that was completely undrinkable” during her last days there and experienced the disappearance of bread, fruit and vegetables. She recalls a 10-year-old child who was killed in front of her house. “He was in pieces. His mother screamed that she wanted to get his body because there were dogs and animals eating it right in front of her eyes. But every time the neighbors tried to retrieve the child’s body, they were targeted by drones and tanks.”

Even today, Hmaid wonders how she dared to film her departure “in the face of an arsenal of soldiers and tanks.” According to her, it was because she saw Jabalia transformed into a field of ruins: its houses reduced to rubble. “I was forcibly removed from the camp where I was born and had lived all my life,” Hmaid said. “I had nothing to lose.”

“I didn't even recognize where my house used to be.”

While Al-Wahidi was never able to document the violence of the siege and the scale of Israel’s military operation, RFI’s Jerusalem correspondent Sami Boukhelifa, a partner in the second installment of the Gaza Project, got a brief glimpse. Although Israel has prohibited all free and independent access to foreign press in Gaza since October 7, 2023, Boukhelifa was able to spend a few hours in Jabalia on January 13, 2025, under close surveillance by the Israeli army.

“My last visit was in May 2023,” he said. “When I returned in January 2025, what struck me, beyond the destruction, was that I no longer recognized anything. I no longer have any reference points. It’s unrecognizable.”

Boukhelifa describes the devastation as “everything’s frozen, there’s no life—only stray dogs.” He remembers seeing civilians’ clothes hung out to dry, covered in dust, and wondering, “How long have they been there?”

The destruction of the Jabalia camp, filmed in January 2025 by our partner RFI – Credit: Sami Boukhelifa / RFI

Since our interviews with the residents of Jabalia and the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, which came into effect on January 19, 2025, Gazans have been able to return to the rubble of what were once their homes. They are still stunned by the scale of the destruction. “When I arrived in my neighborhood, I didn’t even recognize where my house used to be,” 22-year-old Hamza Othman, who also fled after the October siege, told our partners at +972 Magazine.

Hmaid and Al-Aloul have also made their way back to Jabalia. Hmaid has pitched a tent on the ruins of her house, and Al-Aloul lives with his son. Some of his family members sleep inside what’s still standing of their home, terrified at the thought of everything collapsing, while others sleep in a tent. Above all, Al-Aloul and his neighbors are busy rebuilding the well destroyed by the Israeli army.

There is no doubt that Al-Wahidi, currently in intensive care in a Qatari hospital, would have been there to film its restoration—a symbol of the resilience of Jabalia’s residents to start over despite being displaced from generation to generation. The Israeli army asked the inhabitants to evacuate their home once again on March 24, one week after the end of the ceasefire and a new major Israeli offensive on Gaza.

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