Opening remarks from our second vigil for the martyred journalists of Gaza, held at Freedom Park in Atlanta, GA, US, on Saturday, Aug. 16, 2025.
Good evening everyone, and thank you for being here.
My name is Fiza and I’m an independent journalist here in Atlanta. Two hundred and forty-three days ago, I stood right here with a small handful of trusted colleagues of conscience as we gathered to grieve and honor the sixty martyred journalists and media workers murdered between October and December 2023.
It’s been nearly two years since, and the number of journalists killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza — widely recognized as an all-out genocide of the Palestinian people — has more than quadrupled.
We have witnessed bloodied press helmets and vests, targeted air strikes on journalists’ homes wiping out entire lineages, and we’ve watched as their coverage gets disparaged by Western media time and time again to discredit their realities, warp their intentions, and keep us from trusting even what we see and hear with our own eyes and ears.
I have been shaking for days trying to come up with the right words for these opening remarks today. Sometimes I feel like there’s nothing left to say anymore. Then I remember my silence is as violent as their bombs. Our bombs. And so is yours.
Never in our lifetimes have we seen this many journalists targeted and killed relentlessly and intentionally — and in such a small geographic area, a strip of land nearly identical in size to our own city of Atlanta.
Over the last 313 days, at least 274 media workers have been killed in Gaza. These journalists — our colleagues — were reporters, photographers, camera operators, TV and radio correspondents, editors, producers, writers, and others who make journalism possible. Some were forced into this work; a fervent calling to show the world the truth. Most were local journalists just like us, and they died covering the nightmare unfolding in their own homeland until their final breaths, wondering if just one more story of a 5-year-old child shot at 335 times, another flour massacre, another hospital strike, might be the story that does it, that ends it all, that brings urgent ire from their colleagues in the West, from us.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, one of the press freedom organizations we’ve relied on for data used in tonight’s programming, has said, since 2023, that the conflict in Gaza is the deadliest for journalists it has ever recorded. You only target and kill journalists when your enemy is the truth.
“The international community has been woeful in its condemnation of Israel’s actions,” Jodie Ginsberg, president of the CPJ, recently wrote. “Already our window into Gaza was becoming more and more limited. As Israel moves into the latest phase of its assault on the territory, it now risks closing altogether.”
The deaths of the 274 media workers we are honoring tonight make up only a fraction of the 60,000-plus Palestinians murdered so far in Gaza. Thousands upon thousands more are believed to be buried under the rubble or in areas inaccessible to local medics. Israel has also been using starvation as a weapon of war “to deliberately impose conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as part of its ongoing genocide,” according to recent report in Amnesty International. There are more child amputees in Gaza than anywhere else in the world. If you’ve been paying attention, you already know all this. There’s nothing any of us here can tell or show you that the journalists in Gaza have not been telling and showing us all for two years.
And so tonight, we are gathering to mourn our colleagues who have died doing just that, and honor those who continue on despite. May their courage empower us to break free of our chains and speak louder. As journalists in this complicit country, our words are not just copy. Our words are megaphones. What we choose to cover, and the language we use and the language we leave out have immense impact.
In a moment, my colleague Adam, Executive Director of Mondoweiss, will share some words from Gazan journalist Tareq Hajjaj. Then, we will hold a reading of the names of all journalists martyred in Gaza since October 2023. My friend Juan will close out tonight’s programming with the final words of martyred journalist Anas Al-Sharif, who was assassinated with his Al Jazeera crew in a targeted strike just days ago, and my colleague Sophia will end with closing remarks. We invite you to visit the tribute tree behind me and read more about those who have died. Thank you.
"May their courage inspire us to break our chains..."