In a home partially destroyed by Israeli shelling in northern Gaza, Hussam’s mother (49) sits surrounded by piles of papers and certificates belonging to her son, Hussam Basel Shabat (23).
Once a media student at the University College of Applied Sciences, Hussam became a field correspondent documenting war crimes—until he himself fell victim to one.
“He used to say, ‘If we don’t document, our history will be erased’… But I never imagined that telling that history would cost him his life,” she says, clutching his personal notebook filled with handwritten notes on victims of the bombings.
“My son is not just a number,” she adds.
Through her tears, Hussam’s mother refuses to accept the media’s portrayal of her son as merely a “victim.”
“Hussam wasn’t killed—he was martyred because he refused to silence the truth. I will never forgive the world for its silence.”
When Israel launched its genocidal war on the Gaza Strip in October 2023, Hussam began reporting as an independent journalist. He later collaborated with Al Jazeera Mubasher, focusing his coverage on Israeli airstrikes targeting civilians in northern and central Gaza, exposing the destruction of infrastructure and hospitals, and recording testimonies from survivors of massacres, such as the one at Beit Hanoun Elementary School (bombed in January 2025) and a funeral in Jabalia targeted during the iftar hour, following Israel’s renewed offensive on Gaza.
For nearly 15 months, the grieving mother lived apart from her son. While she was displaced in central Gaza, Hussam remained in the north, where he reported amid relentless bombing, starvation, and death.
“I spent most of the war away from him… He kept bread and cheese in his pocket the whole time. Even when we returned to the north, we hardly had time together because his work was so demanding,” she told the Palestinian Journalists Protection Center (PJPC).
In a testimony to the PJPC on October 24, 2024, Hussam revealed that he had been subjected to an intense campaign of incitement and received constant death threats from Israeli extremists.
“The Israeli military published fabricated files accusing us—the last remaining journalists in northern Gaza—of terrorism. These false accusations are an open threat of assassination and a clear attempt to justify killing us in advance,” Hussam stated.
He added: “When our colleague Ismail Al-Ghoul was assassinated, the Israeli army released a document claiming he received a military rank on July 1, 2007—when he was just ten years old.”
“The Israeli military wants us to stop reporting. But we made a promise—we will not abandon our mission to document this genocide.”
On the day before he was killed, Hussam called his mother and told her: “Mom, if anything happens to me, don’t be sad. I chose this path.”
The next day, on March 24, 2025, while driving in northern Gaza, Hussam’s vehicle was directly targeted by an Israeli warplane.
According to his colleagues, including journalist Imad Zaqout, Hussam’s reports stood out for their “accuracy and courage… He would rush to the sites of bombings as soon as the alarms sounded, while others ran the other way.”
Hussam’s death adds yet another name to the growing list of journalists in Gaza who have paid the ultimate price for uncovering the truth. His mother now poses a question to the world’s conscience:
How many journalists must die before justice is served? And will the truth always be the first casualty of war?
