Statement from Drop Site News on Israel’s Murder of Our Colleague Hossam Shabat: We Hold Both Israel and the U.S. Government Responsible
Today, March 24, 2025, Israel killed journalist Hossam Shabat, a reporter for Al Jazeera Mubasher and a contributing reporter to Drop Site News, in what witnesses described as a targeted strike. Hossam was a tremendous young journalist who exhibited remarkable courage and tenacity as he documented the U.S.-facilitated genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. One of the few journalists who didn’t leave the northern Gaza Strip, Hossam was murdered in Beit Lahia, the site of some of the most intense Israeli bombing and mass killing operations.
Hossam Shabat. Source: X.
Drop Site News holds Israel and the U.S. responsible for killing Hossam. The journalist Mohammad Mansour, a correspondent for Palestine Today, was also killed Monday in an Israeli attack on a house in Khan Younis in southern Gaza. More than 200 of our Palestinian media colleagues have been killed by Israel—supplied with weapons and given blanket impunity by most Western governments—over the past seventeen months.
“If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed—most likely targeted—by the Israeli occupation forces,” Hossam wrote in a statement
posted posthumously by his friends on his social media accounts. “For [the] past 18 months, I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury. I slept on pavements, in schools, in tents—anywhere I could. Each day was a battle for survival. I endured hunger for months, yet I never left my people’s side.”
Hossam, who was just 23, filed poetic and painful dispatches from Gaza. He never separated himself from the people whose lives and deaths he documented. “Time now is measured not in minutes, but in lifetimes of pain and tears” as people in Gaza waited for the implementation of the ceasefire, Hossam wrote in an
article for Drop Site in January. “With every passing moment the anxiety and tension of the people here grows, as they wonder whether they will stay alive long enough for the fire to cease.”
As Palestinian journalists in Gaza continue to document the genocide against their families and their people, most of the world encounters their work only through their video reports on social media. They are so much more than those videos. Hossam was born into a period of escalating Israeli annexation, siege, and genocide. Unflagging in the face of constant deprivation and violence, Hossam once summarized his life’s dedication in an
interview: “I say to the world, I am continuing. I am covering the events with an empty stomach, steadfast and persevering. I am Hossam Shabat, from the resilient northern Gaza Strip.”
Hours before he was killed, Hossam filed a story for Drop Site about Israel’s resumption of its scorched earth bombing of Gaza last week that killed over 400 people, including nearly 200 children in a matter of hours. He was eager to publish. “I want to share the text urgently,” he wrote in Arabic. He always wanted to get the story out—to report what was happening on the ground. About a year ago, Hossam wrote, “Before this genocide started, I was a young college student studying journalism. Little did I know I would be given one of the hardest jobs in the world: to cover the genocide of my own people.”
In October 2024, the Israeli military placed Hossam and five other Palestinian journalists on a hit list. Hossam regularly received death threats by call and text. What we have witnessed for nearly a year and a half is the Israeli military engaging in a systematic campaign to kill Palestinian journalists, as well as members of their families. Hossam leaves behind his beloved
mother and his people, whose lives he tirelessly worked to represent and protect.
During this unprecedented killing campaign against journalists, the silence of so many of our colleagues in the Western media is a stain on the profession. The International Federation of Journalists has put out a
list, by name, of many of the journalists and media workers who have been killed or injured in Gaza. In a just world, those who helped to kill Hossam—and all of our Palestinian colleagues—would be brought to justice and tried for their crimes. We call on all journalists to raise their voices to demand an end to the killing of our Palestinian colleagues who have risked, and often given, their lives so that the truth itself can live.
Hossam’s last message was: “I ask you now: do not stop speaking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting, keep telling our stories—until Palestine is free.”
