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“If I die, I want a loud death”, wrote Fatima Hassouna last year on Instagram. The young Palestinian photojournalist was killed, along with her family, by Israeli airstrikes on their home in Gaza City. Until then, she had tirelessly denounced the atrocities of war, channelling part of her work into the documentary she is starring in, which will be presented at Cannes in May.
“Put your soul on your hand and walk was my response, as a filmmaker, to the ongoing massacre of the Palestinians. My personal way not to lose my sanity,” said Farsi. “A miracle happened when I met Fatem through a Palestinian friend. Ever since, she became my eyes in Gaza, while surviving under the bombs and documenting the war. And I, became her connection to the outside world, from her Gaza prison, as she puts it. We kept this line of life going for more than 200 days. The bits of pixel and sounds that we exchanged constitute the film that you see. Fatem’s assassination on April 16, following an Israeli attack on her home has forever changed its meaning.”
For nearly a year, the two women had maintained an intense correspondence to document the extermination of the people of Gaza, and had finally achieved their dream: to bring the tragedy of a land ravaged by conflict to the big screen. Fatima’s murder, which occurred on the very day she was informed of her film’s selection by the jury of the Festival, stands as further proof of the brutal strategy of the Netanyahu government: to silence all witnesses to the crimes committed by its army by physically eliminating them.
In fact, since 7 October 2023, Israel has banned foreign press from entering the Gaza Strip where, according to a study by Brown University, at least 232 journalists have been killed in the span of 18 months: more than the total number of journalists who died in the American Civil War, in the two world wars, the Korean War, in the Vietnam War, the wars in the former Yugoslavia and in the conflict that broke out in Afghanistan after 11 September 2001. A true “news graveyard”, as the document states.
The Committee to Protect Journalists also declared the Israeli army responsible for the death of 70 per cent of the total number of media professionals killed in 2024, as well as for the detention of at least 84 reporters, who are currently in jail without formal charges.
“There is no doubt that what is happening in Gaza today is no longer, and has been for a long time, the response to the crimes committed by Hamas on 7 October, it is a genocide,” Farsi specified in a statement published a few days ago on the website of Acid, the parallel section of the Cannes Film Festival. “I accuse those who commit it and their accomplices, and I demand justice for Fatem and for all the innocent Palestinians who have been killed.”
This is why her death must not go unnoticed. It must be “loud” just as she herself had wished.
