The New Yorker:

Clarissa Ward, the first Western reporter to enter Gaza without an I.D.F. escort since October 7th, has faced accusations of pro-Israel bias even as she strives to highlight Arab suffering.

By Clare Malone

On December 12th, the CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward became the first Western reporter to enter Gaza without an I.D.F. escort since the war began. Crammed into the back seat of a car, she and her crew captured images of the bombed-out buildings and streets of Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza which shares a border with Egypt. According to one recent U.N. estimate, eighty-five per cent of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents had fled there. Crowds milled outside a bakery, and parents walked hand in hand with their children past mountains of rubble. “The Israeli military says it has hit Gaza with more than twenty-two thousand strikes,” Ward said during the ride. “That by far surpasses anything we’ve seen in modern warfare in terms of intensity and ferocity, and we really, honestly, are just getting a glimpse of it here.”

Since the start of the Israeli invasion, it has been largely Arab media that have provided the world with on-the-ground reporting from Gaza, where the death toll has surpassed an estimated twenty-three thousand in just three months. The coverage is often harrowing and raw. A recent live report from Rafah by the Al Jazeera reporter Hani Mahmoud captured what sounded like the whine of a plane overhead and several missiles hitting a group of buildings, one after the other, sending plumes of dense black smoke into the air. “Oh, my God,” Mahmoud can be heard saying after ducking out of the frame to take cover. “That’s the hospital!” According to a later Al Jazeera report, the strike did not hit the hospital but nearby residential buildings, killing at least ten people.

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