OSINT, Aid Flights and Trusted Contacts: How Journalists are Covering Gaza’s Story from Afar

Foreign correspondents have long served as additional eyes on the ground, assisting local reporters in telling the story of conflicts around the world. Not in Gaza since October 2023.

That month marked the beginning of Israel’s offensive in response to the deadly attacks by Hamas and other armed groups. Over 20 months on, almost 200 Palestinian journalists have been killed by Israeli strikes, some have left, and international reporters are still not allowed inside the Strip. 

As the world’s attention now coalesces around famine in war-torn Gaza, there are fewer journalists than ever able to report from the scene.

Those still on the ground are Gazan journalists who do their jobs while trying to survive amid hunger, displacement, and the threat of being targeted by the Israeli military. In early August, six Al Jazeera journalists were killed in a targeted attack on their tent. Five more were killed on Tuesday in a ‘double-tap’ attack on one of the biggest hospitals in Gaza. 

Against this challenging backdrop, reporters outside the Strip are supplementing the work of Gazan journalists through a diverse range of reporting methods, to allow audiences to understand what’s happening in a territory mostly cut off from the outside world.

Some of these journalists are Gazans who were able to leave the Strip and continue their work from outside by relying on their knowledge and contacts. Others are open-source specialists who analyse footage, images, and social media posts in an attempt to determine whether they show what they purport to, or international journalists making the most of whatever access they are allowed, joining aid drop flyovers and taking a look at the territory from above.

I spoke to four journalists reporting on Gaza from afar on how they do this work and what limitations they face. They praised the courage of Gaza’s journalists who risk their lives every day to get news out of the Strip. All of them voiced urgent concern for their safety, and backed calls for Israel to allow international journalists to enter the territory and report from the ground.

Palestinian voices inside and outside Gaza

Since the start of the war, many journalists have left the Gaza Strip, out of fear for their lives and their families, either evacuated with the support of their news organisations or navigating an expensive exit system through Gaza’s border with Egypt. This border has been repeatedly targeted by Israel and has been under its control since 2024, except for a short period between January and March this year, as part of a temporary ceasefire agreement.

Those who left have often kept reporting on Gaza, relying on trusted contacts and colleagues to find and verify the stories they publish.

Plestia Alaqad, a 23-year-old Palestinian journalist whose war coverage on social media gained her a huge following in the early weeks of fighting, left Gaza in November 2023. 

After her exit, Alaqad has continued to post on Instagram about the conflict, with a focus on the humanitarian conditions and the suffering of Gazans. She has also written articles as a freelancer for international media and recently published a book based on her diary.

Alaqad believes every journalist has a role to play in telling the story of Gaza. She aims to use her connection to the people still there to give them a voice through interviews. 

In her recent work, she has been focusing on starvation. Earlier this month, for example, she published an interview with a nine-year-old girl living in Gaza in the UAE’s The National.

“I chose to interview a child to show the world how well-spoken and heartbroken our kids are, and [to show] that they understand and know terms that are far beyond their age. No nine-year-old, or any human, should know what genocide or quadcopter means,” she said. [Quadcopters are unmanned drones deployed by the Israeli military in Gaza.]

She remains in touch with colleagues in Gaza and works with them to fact-check her stories. Being a journalist in the territory is uniquely challenging, she said: “You report on hunger while you yourself are starving. You tell the stories of families who have lost loved ones while grieving your own. You struggle to survive each day as a Gazan, while also working as a journalist to show the world what is happening and to make sure the truth is seen.”

Nagham Mohanna is a freelance reporter formerly based in Gaza and an alumna of the Reuters Institute’s Journalist Fellowship programme. She fled Gaza in December 2023, but has kept writing news stories about the war for newspapers like The National. Like Alaqad, she relies on colleagues and trusted sources from her time in Gaza, and works with them to verify reports.

Mohanna echoed Alaqad’s determination to keep telling their story. “As long as I can share the voices of the people in Gaza, I will – whether I am with them or abroad,” she said. “I want to speak about every Gazan, both inside and outside Gaza, because even those who have left are still suffering. Being forced away from your home is not something anyone would ever want.” 

For journalists like Alaqad and Mohanna, a sense of duty mixes with grief and survivor’s guilt, making an already tough assignment deeply personal.

“I am from Gaza, and I am one of them. Their stories are my story, and their pain is my pain,” said Alaqad, who attempts to channel her pain into her reporting, feeling like she doesn’t have the privilege of stopping.

“I suffer from depression all the time,” said Mohanna, who developed insomnia and considered taking medication. “I try to be strong in front of my children. But inside, I cannot stop worrying and crying. My family is still trapped in Gaza – my parents, my siblings and their families. I can’t stop thinking about them.” 

“Those of us who left Gaza are not okay,” she explained. “Our souls are still stuck there – in its streets, in its cafés that are already destroyed. The thought of returning to Gaza surrounds me every day, and as soon as I can, I will.”

I suffer from depression all the time. My family is still trapped in Gaza. I can’t stop thinking about them. Those of us who left are not okay. Our souls are still stuck there. The thought of returning to Gaza surrounds me every day, and as soon as I can, I will.

Nagham Mohanna
Gazan journalist

Both Alaqad and Mohanna wish for international coverage of Gaza to highlight the voices of people there, and to be fearless in calling out wrongs, such as famine and war crimes.

“I want them to talk about Palestine and Palestinians without speaking over them, to give them a platform and space,” said Alaqad, who would like to see international journalists seek guidance from Palestinian colleagues when covering Gaza, avoid stereotypes and oversimplification, and respect the dignity of Palestinians.

“Cultural sensitivity and a willingness to listen make coverage more accurate and impactful. When done right, this kind of journalism can help the world better understand the situation,” she said.

Using OSINT to report on Gaza

In a war where contradictory narratives proliferate on social media and where international journalists are not allowed to report from the ground, some reporters are focusing on what they can determine from the information they find online.

Open-source intelligence investigation techniques, often shortened to OSINT, refer to methods used by investigative journalists which rely on openly available information to corroborate claims. This information comes from sources such as social media, satellite imagery or Freedom of Information requests.

These techniques have been employed to cover the war in Gaza since it first broke out, with specialised outlets like Bellingcat, as well as legacy newsrooms like the Washington Post, analysing open-source data to document the conflict. 

A recent Guardian investigation into the shootings of Palestinians at aid sites in Gaza combined OSINT methods with more traditional journalistic sources like witness accounts. Its author, Manisha Ganguly, describes the piece as the product of an “all-sources” approach. 

Ganguly has a PhD from the University of Westminster, with a thesis on open-source intelligence and its impact on investigative journalism more broadly. She now leads the Guardian’s use of visual forensics methods. 

Ganguly started her work on this investigation by reviewing videos posted to social media by Palestinians showing their attempts to collect food from the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution spots, and speaking to a weapons expert to identify the machine gun fire heard in the clips.

She then spoke to doctors in Gaza and other medical sources, who gave her their accounts of the injuries they’d seen, hospital admissions data and photographs of bullets removed from patients, which can be matched via their measurements to ammunition used by the Israeli army.

This combination of reporting methods allowed Ganguly to confirm the evidence found online with sources on the ground. 

“When I was starting out in this kind of open-source investigation, it was almost a decade ago, during the Syrian civil war, when ground access was difficult due to the Assad regime and ISIS. We now have a situation with ground access being completely blocked by Israel,” Ganguly said. “If you are not using visual evidence to verify ground truths, then you are left missing key facts, and you are forced to report contradictory official statements without any ability to establish what is true.”

Ganguly has a network of contacts on the ground in Gaza, which she’s built up over 21 months of reporting on the conflict remotely. This network allowed her to access additional evidence, like eyewitness testimonies from doctors and the bullet measurements.

While working with local journalists is a well-established practice when reporting on conflicts abroad, the inability of journalists like Ganguly to actually go to Gaza makes access to people physically there even more important.

“Israel has continued to block access to foreign journalists, which means that I have had to rely on visual evidence uploaded by civilians or Israeli soldiers, satellite imagery, and remotely work with journalists in Gaza who face constant mortal peril,” Ganguly said.

Looking on from above

Airdrop flights, which resumed at the end of last month as an attempt to attenuate a worsening hunger crisis, are a controversial measure. They have been described as a distraction due to the very small quantities of food they can deliver in comparison to trucks on traditional land routes. They can also be dangerous: some airdropped packages have crushed people, in some cases, to death.

The flights, however, have also become an alternative way for journalists to get as close as possible to Gaza and see what’s happening in the territory, if only from above.

In the first weeks of the war, some international journalists entered Gaza while embedded with the Israeli army. To do so, they had to agree to restrictions, including limitations on what they could film and with whom they could speak. This practice seems to have ceased as the war intensified.

On the first occasions that journalists were allowed to board airdrop flights, in the last days of July, they were told that Israel did not want them to film outside the plane’s windows.

Journalists like the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen could only describe what they were seeing as they flew over Gaza.

In the following days, this restriction was relaxed, and journalists began publishing aerial views of Gaza in photographs and videos for a range of international media outlets. 

One of those journalists was Clothilde Goujard, a freelance reporter based in Jordan. Goujard shared her experience of an aid flight from Jordan for the Canadian French-language newspaper Le Devoir. She vividly described the views of Tel Aviv, of the Mediterranean Sea, followed by Gaza, ‘striking for its destruction’. Her report is accompanied by photographs she took inside the aircraft and views of scorched rubble framed by the plane’s windows.

Goujard photographed and filmed without restrictions, except for safety reasons. For example, she was told not to get too close to the parcels for fear she might trip and fall out of the open back of the aircraft.

This was not Goujard’s first time accompanying a Jordanian aid mission. In January, she published a report for French newspaper Le Monde describing a helicopter flight she took into Gaza with an aid delivery operation. That experience was very different, she said: the helicopter was heading to a small, designated helipad inside Gaza. Despite actually landing in the territory, she and the humanitarian team were fenced into a small space, alone except for circling Israeli military Jeeps, and with only minutes to offload the packages and leave.

“We weren’t in contact, whether visual or speaking, with anyone in Gaza, either Palestinian or international aid workers,” she said. 

Her latest experience with the airdrop was very different. Despite not landing in Gaza, the plane flew over most of the Strip, allowing Goujard to get a sense of the scale of the devastation.

“Knowing it is very different from seeing it,” she said. “In that sense, it was extremely shocking and moving to see [the destruction] from above, because it becomes even more real.”

The plane flew at a height of 2,000 feet (around 600 metres) above Gaza. Goujard was close enough to see tents, but not people. She described feeling a sense of disconnect from what she was seeing, flying above “in a sort of bubble”. She observed the airdrop for a few minutes, taking pictures and documenting, followed by the half-hour flight back to Amman. 

The possibilities available to international journalists wanting to report on Gaza are so limited that even Goujard’s reporting trips, which brought her closer than most others, ended up being largely symbolic.

“Saying that you reported from Gaza like this, it was just a geographical coordinate, it meant nothing more than we put a foot on the ground, but that’s about it,” Goujard said about her helicopter trip in January.

Could foreign journalists be of assistance?

Meanwhile, calls are growing from news organisations, press freedom groups and even foreign governments to allow international journalists to enter Gaza. At the same time, some voices are critical of the way these calls have been framed. They think global news organisations are focusing on getting their own journalists in while not pushing in the same way to protect and uplift Palestinian colleagues. 

“One of the main problems with this conception of Western journalists as the ultimate mediators of unbiased reporting is that it belittles the professionalism and courage of hundreds of Palestinian journalists, many of whom have given their lives covering Israel’s assault on Gaza,” said journalism professor Mohamad Bazzi in a recent column for the Guardian. 

Even if international journalists were allowed inside Gaza, they would still be working with local journalists as ‘fixers’ and translators, he wrote.

For now, most international correspondents are forced to report from Jerusalem without any access to the Strip.

They are all heavily reliant on the work of exhausted and imperilled Palestinian colleagues, Goujard stressed. “I don’t know what any single media outlet would do without [Palestinian journalists in Gaza], some of whom are starving right now, and are literally being targeted and killed,” she said.

With greater access, international journalists could take on more of the burden of groundwork reporting.

“They must understand that Israel prevents them from entering Gaza because it does not want the world to see what it has done to my beautiful city,” Mohanna said. “Foreign journalists can give Palestinian journalists some relief and continue the mission by showing the whole world what is really happening.