UK Journalists On Covering The Spiraling Middle East Conflict One Year On From October 7
A year to the day after Hamas’ attack on Israel that left more than 1,200 dead and saw 251 taken captive, the conflict in the Middle East has moved to new fronts and is spiralling into a new, more dangerous realm. For the journalists on the ground, the threat is real — more than 130 Palestinian journalists have been killed since October 7, according to Reporters Without Borders. The situation in Lebanon, meanwhile, is worsening as Israel bombards Hezbollah, while the world awaits Israel’s response to Iran’s recent ballistic missile attack.
Channel 4 News Foreign Correspondent Secunder Kermani, who is currently in Tyre in southern Lebanon, told Deadline that reporters on the ground are conscious of the threat to their safety from the Israeli army, which has issued warnings that no civilians should be travelling south of the strategically important Litani River in vehicles until further notice. In a BBC report yesterday, Orla Guerin wrote that Tyre is almost completely deserted after the airstrikes. When driving on its empty roads, she said it is vital not to speed and make yourself an unintended target.
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The conflict has so far claimed the lives of thousands of Lebanese people, according to the country’s Health Ministry, along with a number of Israeli soldiers, as reported by the Israeli Defence Force. “All journalists here are very conscious of the tragically high number of Palestinian journalists who have been killed in Israeli strikes,” said Kermani, who remains in southern Lebanon.
The conflict began a few weeks back, though Israel and Hezbollah, which controls large parts of Lebanon’s south and has politicians in the Lebanese parliament, have been trading rockets since October 7, while the pair have been sparring for decades.
“Beirut is pretty tense right now,” said Channel 4 News anchor Krishnan Guru-Murthy, who is currently stationed in the Lebanese capital. “The uncertainly of this conflict drives so much of the worry, tension and fear.”
He added that people are waiting to see if Israel will expand its attacks on its regional enemies or whether the conflict in Lebanon remains localized. “The air strikes are frightening,” said Guru-Murthy. “They can be heard right across the city during the night and day.” Military operations simultaneously continue in Gaza, where nearly 42,000 people have been killed since October 7, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, while dozens of Israeli hostages remain in Palestine, some of whom are presumed dead.
“Controlling the narrative”
While the threat of injury or worse pervades for journalists in the region, the day job is much simpler: Reflect the realities of what happens on a daily basis. Kermani said getting to the heart of the narrative while working within a Hezbollah-controlled area of Lebanon posed challenges such as reporting restrictions and the fact that Channel 4 and its rival UK networks on the ground get the same access to the same people. “That’s not to undermine any of those interviews or the experiences those people had, but it does make it far more difficult to do something that feels different,” he said.
Hezbollah has made it “quite clear that all filming is coordinated through them,” added Kermani. “That’s obviously about controlling the narrative, but they say it’s about our security and there will be an element of that, too.”
The answer is to be transparent about the conditions, said Kermani. “That’s something we have to be alive to. It’s an uncomfortable position to be in, but so far it hasn’t reached the point where it feels unsustainable where they are intervening on interviews and telling us what we can and can’t say.”
The restrictions, which Kermani has felt becoming stricter as the conflict has rolled on, have primarily been around access, he said. “It does become difficult to known whether what you are being shown is truly representative,” said Kermani. “All we can do is flag this to the audience and describe what we are seeing.”
Kermani and Channel 4 News have therefore chosen to report on what is indisputable by sense-checking. For example, the reporter had witnessed the aftermath of an airstrike in a residential area, and found most locals blamed Israel. Sense-checking against people in other parts of the country subsequently became a key tool for assessing these views. “The control of Hezbollah is not uniform across the country,” said Kermani. “There are other parts where we are able to operate more feely and that is useful because it gives you a sense of what people’s sentiment across the country is.”
Guru-Murthy said his team works extra hard to “talk to people who support what Hezbollah is doing, some that might be critical of what it has done or people who feel the local population are unwilling victims in the whole thing.”
Digital viewing
The conflict is spreading dangerously, with Iran last week firing rockets into Israel in what was described by Iranian leaders as revenge for the deaths of senior Hamas and Hezbollah leaders. Israel is not backing down — as Kermani noted, “It is Israel that is firmly setting the agenda in this conflict,” while the likes of Hezbollah are in “reactive, firefighting mode. Though access to good Hamas and Hezbollah sources is nigh on impossible for most western journalists to cultivate, news programming is still vital to making sense of the unstable picture.
There is certainly significant demand for information and digital services are at the forefront. For example, Channel 4 News’ special news report program last Tuesday was released in full on YouTube and got 13 times the usual number of viewers on the platform. The demand for information is all the more pertinent given that Western news outlets are still restricted from reporting from Gaza, while access to other local countries such as Syria and Iraq is limited at best.
In Lebanon, there is the added confusion of a divided media sector, where some networks are controlled by Hezbollah and others are openly critical of the Islamist organization. The offices of Al-Sirat, a pro-Hezbollah network on the outskirts of Beirut, were destroyed last week with Israel claiming they were being used as a weapons storage. Sky News reporters on the ground spoke to people who disputed that notion. Al Jazeera’s bureau in the contested West Bank has also been closed for the first time, with the Israeli military claiming without evidence that it was being used to “incite terror and support terrorist activities.”
Like most major outlets, Channel 4 News, which was awarded an International Emmy for its Israel-Gaza coverage, will be running a special edition this evening at 7 p.m. local time to mark the October 7 attacks. Matt Frei will be in Jerusalem and Guru-Murthy in Beirut, where he said people are feeling “powerless” and “angrier” the longer the bombing continues.
“Obviously, it’s a very complicated story that is developing,” said Guru-Murthy. “It has layer upon layer and gets bigger every day as more countries are drawn in to the conflict. The only way we can [build the story] is by talking to as wide a range of people as possible. That means Iranians, Israelis and different people on different sides. In Lebanon, you have a constitutionally very complicated country, you have different groups – Shia, Christians, Sunnis – and you have to talk to everyone. That’s what we are doing.”
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