Disclaimer: Asymmetrical Haircuts is produced as a podcast, meaning it is meant to be listened to and not read. Because of this, we recommend that you listen to the episode while reading, because the written word does not do justice to the emotion or tone used by our speakers. However, because we recognise there might be bandwidth issues or you might be using a hearing aid, we have provided written transcripts for all our available episodes.

[INTRO MUSIC]

Sam Maguire: 00:00  What does it mean to bear witness when the world turns a blind eye? And who bears witness when the witnesses are silenced? Hi, my name is Sam Maguire, and I’m a production intern at Asymmetrical Haircuts. Welcome to the third episode of our 2026 summer series, chronicling the theme Witness to War Crimes. A series where, together with my colleague Gigi Green, we’re diving into the archives and republishing episodes looking at how journalists, filmmakers, and investigators bear witness to global atrocities, often when no one else will. In this episode, we sat down with Hélène Lam Trong and Yann Ollivier, the director and the producer of Between the Lines Inside Gaza, a documentary following Palestinian reporters working for the AFP as they cover the war from inside Gaza. This conversation was recorded in 2025, and if anything, it’s only become more urgent since. Stay with us until the end, and we’ll be updating you with what’s changed.

Yann Ollivier: 00:54  There’s another scene where one of the protagonists of the film is asking another colleague who is lying on his hospital bed if he’s going to keep on reporting after having had his family killed, after having been himself a target. And the guy answers without hesitation, Until my last breath, may God save us all.

Narrator: 01:20  No one can act with impunity.

Janet: 01:24  These are crimes that are beyond the pale. We are talking about human beings. We’re not talking about numbers. We need a court that’s as simple as that. This is Asymmetrical Haircuts, your international justice podcast with Janet Anderson and Stephanie Van den Berg. All rise. Hi, Steph.

Stephanie: 01:42  Hi, Janet.

Janet: 01:43  So, Steph, today’s pod is all about Gaza, about how we know what is going on there, about the work of journalists and about the making of a documentary about them. So, let’s start, shall we, with what’s actually going on right now in Gaza?

Stephanie: 01:57  Yeah, that’s incredibly hard to summarise. I haven’t been keeping a close eye on it. I googled here for the latest Reuters blurb, and I’m going to give that because that’s the best way I have to summarise it. And Reuters says, Since restarting its military offensive in March after two months of relative calm, Israeli forces have killed more than 1,600 Palestinians, Gaza health authorities have said. The campaign has displaced hundreds of thousands of people and imposed a blockade on all supplies entering the enclave. Then Reuters goes into the Israeli hostages and the numbers there. And we have to mention that overall, in the entire Gaza conflict from the beginning, we’re now past the 50,000 mark for Palestinian victims, according to Gaza health authorities.

Janet: 02:43  Yeah, I mean, it’s almost just too much. And we’re recording this now, middle of April, we’ll be putting this out at the beginning of May. And I’m sure that there will be in the next couple of weeks, again, a number of different things that make us all pay attention to Gaza because it is such an awful situation there. I’m going to put you on the spot again, Steph, and say we should also mention because we are a legal podcast, there’s a number of different court cases going on. The most important, I would say, in this context of which is the genocide case at the International Court of Justice. So what’s your Reuters blurb there?

Stephanie: 03:23  Well, this is a case that South Africa has started at the UN’s top court, and it accuses Israel of violating the genocide convention in Gaza. We have now preliminary, several preliminary measures from the court, which is kind of like emergency measures where they have asked Israel to stop committing genocidal acts in Gaza or prevent anybody from committing them. But this is, with all these genocide cases, it takes years to get the actual substance of the case. So we haven’t gotten any further than the court deciding that there is a not implausible risk that Israel is violating certain rights guaranteed to the Palestinian group under the genocide convention. And therefore, they should take measures to make sure that they don’t aggravate whatever is going on before the case gets heard in full by the court, which, as I said, could take many years.

Janet: 04:12  So now let’s just add in now the focus of today’s podcast. And this is about the information we actually get out of Gaza. Of course, there’s a load of material that comes via social media, and that gets gathered up in the open source investigations. And there’s stuff via satellite imagery. And then there’s kind of the foot slogging interviews that people provide and do with big actors around the world. But we today are looking at Gazan journalists. And why are we doing that? Well, because we had the opportunity to do so. But we’re very bad normally at hitting these international UN days and things. But just coming up as we put this out is World Press Freedom Day. So we think it’s quite important to make a focus here.

Stephanie: 04:56  And we have to make the point that for the images that you’re seeing from inside Gaza, international journalists are not allowed to go in. And so the world has relied very much on Palestinian journalists doing their job day in, day out. And I know that a lot of international teams would have loved to go in and cover it and also relieve our Palestinian colleagues who have been doing this now for over a year and are very much in peril in Gaza. And that’s not allowed. So that is also why when you get a lot of complaints about how little comes out of Gaza, this is one of the reasons we can’t get in.

Janet: 05:31  I’ve just been spending quite a lot of intense time with a whole bunch of journalists. I mean, a good couple of thousand of them, which is not my usual natural habitat.

Stephanie: 05:41  Yeah, I think maybe I would be more in that natural habitat as a person dealing with a lot of Reuters colleagues. But of course, I’m also in a very cushy position being in the Hague Bureau of Reuters, which is completely different from my colleagues who have to cover Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, for example.

Janet: 05:57  Well, talking about cushy habitats in April, I was in Perugia in Italy at the International Journalism Festival. One of those really weird throw me up in the air in the blanket sort of occasions because I don’t know where I am and what I’m doing, because you’re in beautiful venues with wonderful baroque painted ceilings and winding cobbled streets. And every hour there are 10 different sessions.

Stephanie: 06:21  So why are you telling me all this about your lovely trip, which sounds delightful? And I saw pictures of you eating ice cream. So is this just to make me jealous or is there a point?

Janet: 06:30  No, just getting to it. I mean, there was a thread through many of those amazing sessions. I mean, a big contrast with the settings we were in. A thread about journalism in Gaza. And it gave me a lot of ideas for the kind of coverage that we should be doing in the future of the war. But it also was talking a lot about the journalists who, the Palestinian journalists who have been dying in Gaza. So just putting on the Stephapedia hat for this. As of April the 15th, 2025, the Committee for the Protection of Journalists Preliminary Investigation showed that at least 175 journalists and media workers were killed in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel and Lebanon since this war began, making it the deadliest period for journalists since the CPJ began gathering their data from 1992. 167 of those journalists were Palestinians. And the CPJ has determined that at least 17 journalists and two media workers were directly targeted by Israeli forces and it’s investigating 20 more cases. Now at the Perugia conference, you had events like one that I attended from Forbidden Stories, who worked with these press freedom organisations on these killed journalists.

Yann Ollivier: 07:48  Now the targets are waiting for the planes to land. By this blackout, they’re trying to stop the world from seeing what’s happening in Gaza.

Hélène Lam Trong: 08:01  Where there is a strong potential for a war crime being committed, the live stream becomes critical evidence.

Janet: 08:12  The words that you hear, there are, this is the worst thing we’ve witnessed in our lives as war reporters and you see them on the ground wearing the press vests and filming scenes of destruction, bombing civilians, taking away their loved ones. And we’ll put links to the session that was held in Perugia about that, which was discussing those who have died in the war.

Stephanie: 08:34  But today we are highlighting and previewing a different documentary that is coming out probably next fall called Between the Lines.

Janet: 08:40  And this one is specifically about the Gaza reporters who work for Agence France-Presse, AFP. Their names are Mai Yaghi, Adol Zaanoun, Mohamed Abed, Mahmud Hams, Yahya Hassouna. And they have between them decades of experience as journalists covering numerous wars on behalf of AFP.

Stephanie: 08:59  But as the blurb on this documentary says, this war in Gaza is unlike any other. And the film explores the work they did trying to cover and document it. And also the dilemmas they face in being constantly torn between trying to inform the world, struggle for their own survival and their family’s survival, and the constant fear of becoming a target and the way that no one trusted them. Israelis described the Palestinians before as not real journalists. Hamas has distrusted them for their independence. And people in the Gaza Strip were very disillusioned about any power the media might have.

Janet: 09:37  So while they were here in The Hague, we managed to catch up with the producer, Yann Ollivier and Hélène Lam Trong, the director. And here’s a quick clip from their trailer.

Hélène Lam Trong: 09:47  It’s a long story, a long story of suffering. It might need long books and episodes. God is the witness. God is the witness. Who will tell the world, or can tell the world, what is happening here in the Gaza Strip?

Janet: 10:16  They have some really powerful images, and they say these are the stories of suffering that would take entire books to be told. And they show images from the deaths of their journalist colleagues. And they ask who else will inform the world of what is happening in the Gaza Strip. So we kicked off the discussion by asking, Hélène Lam Trong, the director, what the film is actually about.

Hélène Lam Trong: 10:42  So the film tells the story of the AFP team in Gaza during the first year of war. The team has been working for this big news agency, international news agency, for some of them for 25 years. So they had never experienced such a war. I mean, war is the heart of their job in a place like Gaza. But this is the first time when they are stuck in it for such a long time. At first, the project was about their experience inside, but it lasted so long and the war is still on. So now the second part of the film is about their life outside Gaza and about the way they think about their experience with some months of distance.

Stephanie: 11:29  Yann Ollivier, who works for Agence France-Presse, produced it. And in Gaza, where AFP has had a permanent office for decades, but in this office, his colleagues were locked in while the rest of the international press was locked out. And then just after October 7, the Gaza office of Agence France-Presse was targeted by a strike, and it has been established that it was an Israeli strike. Hélène explains how she got the material.

Hélène Lam Trong: 11:54  So you have to know that AFP is a very big news agency, so they have a way to receive, send and receive images in a very short period of time. Of course, it has been very complicating during this war, but despite the difficulties, the team has always managed to send photos, videos and texts. So at first, my work was to, you know, wait and see. I felt really helpless. I was just waiting for them to go out and I was watching day after day their work. But I had no idea about how to use this material because it’s huge. It’s everyday filming story for nearly a year. So at the very beginning, I just had to wait. Once they were out, we managed to talk together because I really didn’t feel like, you know, order them to film in a certain way for me. The only thing I told them, I asked them kindly if they had time in their really complicated life. So I asked them if it was possible, when it was possible to film a little bit behind the stage and share with us the videos of their everyday life. And afterwards, when they came out and I had the time to think about how to tell the story in a cinematographic way, I went deep inside the archives and I choose to select the single takes. I don’t know if it’s clear, but you know, the news today is really short images cutting in a very speed way. And in a documentary, what you can add to this is time, is its emotion and emotion grows as the time passes. So you don’t have room anymore in the news to have a long video of two minutes with uncut. It doesn’t exist anymore. You can only have this in documentaries, especially for this war. It’s a way, maybe the only way to understand a little what they went through as Palestinians and as journalists.

Stephanie: 14:01  Interrupting our regular programming, just to say, please come and support us on Patreon and get our newsletter for the price of just a cup of coffee. You can hear Janet and me talk even more about war crimes and books that we like to read and music that we like to read and what we are doing. Come and follow us and support the show. Thank you.

Janet: 14:21  So was it difficult, we wondered, to actually choose the precise angle and just have this basic focus on the journalists themselves?

Hélène Lam Trong: 14:30  Actually, for this project, it was very easy. And I tell you why. Because the public is unaware of the fact that journalists, foreign journalists were locked out, as Yann said. So the way the Palestinian journalists could work, it’s not a good way. Not because they’re not good journalists. It’s because they are under fire. Most of them lost their homes. They lost loved ones, members of their families. Some people in the film, some protagonists of our film, lost like 50 members of their families. So they’re not only journalists, they’re people. So nobody can work in a satisfying way under those conditions, like nobody. And also journalism is a job that you cannot do if you’re not safe, at least at some moments. War reporters go to war, do their jobs, and leave the war and go back home and work in a kind of safety. Palestinian journalists have spent dozens, hundreds of days now under fire. So nobody can work under those conditions.

Yann Ollivier: 15:40  And the difference is also that one of the new aspects of their job is that they are being actively targeted. The Reporters Without Borders says more than 200 journalists have died since October 7. And it has been established by Reporters Without Borders that at least 42 of them have been actively targeted during the course of their job, by doing their job. And so when your press vest is equal to having a target on your chest, it’s very complicated to do your job correctly. Another important aspect that you don’t realize when you just watch on the social media images coming out of Gaza, you don’t know under which conditions these images were taken. The complexity of the world is something that is not reflected on the social networks. It is complicated. It is complicated because nobody wants journalists to see what they are doing. And that is right for the Israeli Defense Forces. And it’s also right for the other parties at war, the Hamas militants. Don’t want journalists to look exactly where they’re shooting from, etc. So it’s a complicated place to work as a journalist.

Hélène Lam Trong: 16:54  Not only the journalists were targeted physically, but their work has been also targeted and accused of being pure propaganda. And this is very unfair because, as Yann said, working under Hamas is very complicated for Palestinian journalists. So they are really caught between two fires, maybe three fires, actually, because they lost, like most of us in the whole world, they lost the trust of people. And in the film, they tell us that what has been very difficult for them is on the field when they try to interview people. People say, why would I answer you? I don’t trust you anymore. You’re unuseful because you tell our stories and nothing changes. So why should I lose time talking to you? I’ve lost my mother. I left my house. Just go away. You don’t have a use for us anymore. And this is a tragedy for all of us because this lack of trust is also a lack of hope for Palestinian people and for journalists. This is what stays in my mind after that film. It’s that journalism changes, can change a war. And we have an example of a war that happened behind closed doors. I really think that things would not have been the same way if the foreign press could have entered this war. It could not have lasted so long.

Yann Ollivier: 18:22  The fact that the only journalists who were witnesses of what was happening in Gaza has thrown suspicion over them. It was easy for propaganda to say there are no journalists in Gaza, they’re just Palestinians. And that’s the problem. And that’s also one of the messages of this film is they themselves regret the fact that they were not supported by their colleagues in the field. Because when a Palestinian journalist and an international journalist testify about exactly the same events, then it makes it impossible to throw suspicion over their work. That’s how the situation is. And the problem is that since you didn’t have any other journalists than Palestinian journalists, it was easy for the propaganda to throw suspicion over them.

Hélène Lam Trong: 19:16  Yes. So the team is Palestinian, but they work for AFP, which is a Western media. So they faced also the accusation of being spies inside Gaza. So one side accused them of being terrorists and they are targeted for that. Some people in the street just assume that if they work for French media, then they’re spies. Otherwise, why would they be here working in Gaza? So this put them in a very difficult situation. And we have a story of Mai Yaghi. So she’s the only female of the team. As the rest of the team, she had to move from her house in Gaza. So she went to Rafah, which is in the south of Gaza. And she rented a house. Very expensive, because people assume that journalists are rich, first of all. And she went on the field in Khan Younes, which was a horrible place in which journalists, people, everybody was living under tents. So it was, according to her, the worst part of the war for her as a journalist. And while she was there, she received a phone call from her son, from her 11-year-old son, saying that we are exposed from the house because the owner just learned that you were a journalist. And he doesn’t want his building to be targeted. So he just told us to take our bags and leave. So I am on the street now and I don’t know where to go. And this is an example of the fact that being a journalist, it’s not, you know, just an idea that journalists would be specially targeted. It’s reality. And Mai tells this story in the film.

Yann Ollivier: 20:55  I mean, of course, one of the challenges that they faced by doing their work, trying to do their work, was the fact there was no internet and it was very complicated. So they had to find a lot of technical solutions to get electricity, just to reload their phones and to send the big files to the AFP headquarters. And so they managed to find a lot of solutions, of technical solutions to do that and to counter the attempts by the Israeli defense forces to scam all the information flows coming out of Gaza. So, for instance, they managed to find solar panels to recharge their phones and they had put also a camera on the top of the building that was sending a live feed from Gaza City. And that camera was hit by a strike. And so, well, not exactly actually. The office was hit by a strike. They had to leave the office. And at some point, the camera stopped sending its feed.

Hélène Lam Trong: 22:10  Adel Zaanoun, who is the boss of the team, explained to me that he had to share the team, just in case one part of the team would die, then the other parts would still be able to work. So this is a very particular way of organizing the work, you know, because it was not only about rest sometime. It was really about who will make the job if we all die together. So we cannot work all together. We have to split, just in case.

Stephanie: 22:42  Some of our more keen-eared listeners will know that we’ve done a podcast before on long-term crimes against journalists. And we’ll link to that in the show notes. And there we talked about unsolved murders in places like Syria and Sri Lanka and put kind of a context behind the stories behind all these journalists being killed in those places. And so from that, we know that this evidence and these images may potentially be the basis of cases about how journalists are being targeted and were being targeted. And here, I have to mention also that there is also a Reuters journalist who was killed in Lebanon. And so there are already thoughts about cases linked to the Gaza conflict.

Janet: 23:24  So we asked the team whether they think that this evidence will actually end up as a case in some form.

Yann Ollivier: 23:31  Maybe. We cannot exclude it. I mean, this is material that has been shot in the field. And if it can help international justice, we can have it at the disposal of international justice. I know that Reporters Without Borders has filed four complaints so far regarding journalists in Gaza. And, well, we’ll see how it ends.

Hélène Lam Trong: 23:57  It’s really difficult to collect evidence, actually, because the access to the field is smaller and smaller. But Adel Zaanoun, who is the boss of the FP team in Gaza, had his house targeted. And he knows that his neighbors were warned. And they told you, you’re making a mistake. They told the Israeli militaries that you’re making a mistake. He’s a journalist. He works for AFP. And on the phone, according to the neighbor, he got this answer that, oh, so may his perfect job help him. So there is no point of targeting an empty house, except put the owner of this house under pressure. Luckily, all the members of the AFP team survived. So we are very happy not to have to investigate about special evidence of a crime against them. But they lost so many colleagues in situations where they were wearing their jackets. They were wearing their helmets. They were driving a car on which TV press was written in big characters. So something they told me is that in the end, they did not wear the life jackets anymore because the fear that this would make them even more target.

Janet: 25:27  So what might be the long term effects of this movie? I mean, what are their expectations when this comes out?

Yann Ollivier: 25:35  We hope, you know, nowadays there is a growing mistrust against journalists. And there’s this growing feeling that you just need to look at the social networks to be informed. And I hope that this film is going to point out that we still need field journalists and that we really need journalists committed to fact-based journalism. And I think that’s the main message of this film is really we need to have free access because when we are well informed, we can make informed decisions.

Hélène Lam Trong: 26:11  So all of them are still working for AFP. So they now live in other cities of the world. They cannot go back to Gaza. To be honest, most of them are not only journalists, but also parents of children who need to go to school, who need to grow up in a safe place. And this is something that they cannot think about doing in Gaza anymore. It’s not possible anymore. So also now that they are safe, they feel guilty because they are safe, while friends, cousins, parents are still under fire in Gaza. So they have to deal with that. So making the film with us is a way for them to leave something about the experience they went through. And also it’s a claim for field journalism, because you can see articles about Gaza everywhere. You can see images about Gaza everywhere. But this is not information. Information can only be made on the ground, in the fields. During this war, the field has been impossible to access. So now they can only tell and share their experience to warn people because they’ve seen with their own eyes what this kind of war behind closed doors looks like. Yes, they really feel bad, actually, because they feel helpless. They don’t know where to go. They don’t know what to do to help their loved ones. So they keep working about Gaza from outside, which is not a good way to work. But it’s the only way for them to work now.

Stephanie: 27:53  And this movie is not only about individuals, but also about the actual war. And we see horrendous images of that going on. So we asked the makers how they strike the balance between showing what is actually happening and what actually happened, but also making it, in a way, palatable for a more general audience to watch this documentary.

Hélène Lam Trong: 28:14  So this is a big question, obviously. First of all, there is something that is awful to say, but as a journalist, we all know that the war, really, it’s always the same. I mean, each day, they filmed the same scenes, explosions, hospital, wounded persons, dead persons, funerals. Every other day, it was the same. You cannot fill, as you say, a film with that because the war is not only that. The war is, especially when the protagonists of your story are journalists themselves. The war is also about how do I cover it as a journalist? What story do I tell? And what will be left of my work? So this is my job to make choices about what is interesting to tell, at what moment. And really, one of my main choices in this film is to keep as much as possible very, very long shots, very long footages that you can’t see anywhere else but in documentaries. And also, I’ve tried my best, even if it was not easy, to find some light in all of that. Some moments, because, you know, even during the wars, it’s not only about darkness. It’s not only about death. There is still a tiny room for light, for love. This is a very human story. It’s a very tragic human story, but it’s still very human. So I try my best to, you know, tell this sad and tragic story in the most human way as possible.

Janet: 29:48  And we also asked whether there was a particular scene, a particular part of the footage that really encapsulated the whole story, really stuck with the makers.

Hélène Lam Trong: 30:00  It’s a very intense film, maybe the most intense film I’ve ever met. So, there is, last week, one sequence which we edited a little with my editor, Nicolas, Nicolas Bier. We were both crying after watching it, but we made it, but it made us cry still. It was a moment when we put together all the sequences of wounded journalists, dead journalists, journalists grieving their families, press jackets, press life jackets, all of them together. And you can say a million times that many journalists have been killed and lost their families and were wounded, but when you see it in a two-minute sequence, it’s condensed, it’s really moving, and this is something that is the core of the documentary. So, there are journalists that died because they were journalists and Palestinians, but, you know, when you’re a journalist, when you choose to become a journalist, you accept that you can die doing this job, but you don’t want to die doing your job. So, you accept it’s a possibility, but in this war, it just raised the risk that you had to be killed, and it is totally unacceptable.

Yann Ollivier: 31:17  There are lots of very, very strong sequences in this film. One of them is the destruction of the Gaza office by a strike. The Gaza office was like a home for them. To see it destroyed, really blown apart, is really striking. There is another sequence in the film where you see people, it’s a very long sequence, where you see people just collecting things on a field of grass, and you don’t know exactly what it is, but slowly you understand that it’s body parts, and this is something that’s really… There is a contrast between the calm of the people doing this job and the tragedy that they are currently experiencing. I don’t know if this sequence will stay in the final edit of the film, because it is really… It’s the horrors of the war, and it could have been filmed anywhere in Ukraine, in Africa, in Gaza, but it’s… I mean, this is the ugliness of the war.

Hélène Lam Trong: 32:29  Yann is right. Most of the scenes you will see in the film could have been filmed in another war. The main difference with other conflicts, recent conflicts, is that the victims, the Gazan victims, barely had a name and a face for the public. And this is one of the reasons, is that there was no room for the journalists to do that. They did not have time. They were documenting bombing explosions. They were trying to verify the figures. They did not have time enough to tell human stories, and there was no room for those stories in the media. So to me, it’s important to show the ugliness of the war, especially of this war. So in my editing choices, we don’t shy away from the reality our protagonist went through, because it has not been seen enough for that particular war.

Yann Ollivier: 33:27  There’s another scene where one of the protagonists of the film is asking another colleague who is lying on his hospital bed if he’s going to keep on reporting after having had his family killed, after having been himself a target, and the guy answers without hesitation, until my last breath, may God save us all. And that’s a very strong scene too.

Stephanie: 33:55  So we want to say thanks to Hélène and Yann for talking to us and sharing their stories and the stories of their colleagues and how they see and we can see and understand what is happening in Gaza.

Janet: 34:08  And we also want to say thank you very much to the foundation Movies That Matter, because they were the ones who gave us access to these documentary makers who are still actually, as you hear, still in the process of making their film.

Stephanie: 34:19  And some of the Asymmetrical Haircuts team also spoke to Colombian directors and the crew covering the climate change hearings at the International Court of Justice. And we also plan to bring you some insights from those discussions.

Janet: 34:31  Thank you, especially to Valentina Petrucci and to Margarita Capacci for actually doing the interviews, because we’re a really small team and we really rely on our assistant producers, our researchers, our interns to do an enormous amount of the work with us. Yes, we couldn’t do this podcast without you.

Stephanie:  34:48 So thank you so much. You know who you are.

Janet: 34:53  Interrupting our regular programming just to say please come and support us on Patreon and get our newsletter for the price of just a cup of coffee. You can hear Janet and me talk even more about war crimes and books that we like to read and music that we like to read and what we are doing. Come and follow us and support the show. Thank you.

Sam Maguire: 35:13  Hi, it’s Sam here again, back with a quick update on this one. Since we recorded this conversation, the core problem it describes hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s calcified. Israel has barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza independently since the war began in October 2023. And despite the ceasefire that took effect in 2025, that hasn’t changed. The Foreign Press Association has been fighting this in Israel’s Supreme Court for over two years now. And it’s been a very long legal saga. The government has been granted more than 10 extensions to respond to the FPA’s petition, which some say let them avoid the issue altogether. At a hearing at the end of January of this year, the government’s attorney argued that letting journalists in still posed a security risk, this time citing the search for deceased hostages remains and the limited reopening of the Rafah crossing as reasons nothing had changed. One of the judges pushed back, but the government asked to elaborate in a closed session instead, which the court allowed and once again declined to rule. By April of this year, more than two dozen of the world’s biggest news organizations, including the BBC, CNN and Reuters, had publicly called on Israel to lift the ban. The only access Israel allows is a small number of tightly controlled military embeds, where journalists are escorted by Israeli soldiers and required to submit their material for military review before it can be published. Which is really what makes listening to this episode again worthwhile. Because international press can’t get in, it’s Palestinian journalists like the ones featured in the film who remain the world’s only source of information from inside Gaza. If you were interested in today’s episode, we have an upcoming one with Mai Yaghi, one of the journalists featured in the documentary. Here’s a quick preview of it.

Mai Yaghi: 36:49  Every time I step out for a mission to cover a strike or to do a story, every time I would think that I might not come back. I was very much prepared for this. Very much prepared, Yanni, to be killed. And at some point, Yanni, I felt like it would be much better to die than living what we are living at that time.

Sam Maguire: 37:20  Thanks for listening. We’ll be back next week with our final episode from our summer series, Witness to War Crimes.

This was Asymmetrical Haircuts, your international justice podcast, created and presented by Janet Anderson and Stephanie van den Berg, in partnership with The Hague Humanity Hub. Music is by Audionautix.com. You can find show notes and everything about the podcast on asymmetricalhaircuts.com. This show is available on every major podcast service, so please subscribe, give us a rating, and spread the word.

[OUTRO TUNE]

Stay safe and enjoy your day.