Wael Dahdouh had been one of the prominent Al Jazeera Arabic journalists reporting on the airstrikes in Gaza when he received devastating news – the very strikes he had been documenting had tragically taken the lives of his beloved wife, teenage son, young daughter, and grandson.
Wael Dahdouh has been a steady face of wartime news out of Gaza for Al Jazeera Arabic viewers. But on Wednesday night, his work turned personal when he learned that the strikes he had covered from the ground all day had claimed the lives of his wife, teenage son, young daughter and grandson.
Images and video show him weeping as he embraced the dead body of his 15-year-old son, Mahmoud, who wanted to be a journalist like his father. He also held up the body of his 7-year-old daughter, Sham, whose face was bloodied.
“When we carry out our duties, we do it to the fullest with high professionalism — in the middle of bodies and the injured, and in the middle of destruction,” Dahdouh said in an interview only hours after learning of their deaths. “We work [so that] everything that takes place on the ground, we capture, without any fabrication or without even exaggerating.”
Marwan Bishara, a senior political analyst at Al Jazeera, pointed out afterward that Dahdouh, who has worked as an Al Jazeera journalist covering Gaza for about two decades, “lives in the midst of death and mayhem and destruction.”
“Listening to him, you would expect a man so angry to be cursing, but he’s not,” Bishara said. “His revenge is to tell the truth.”
Source: Washington Post
