“Safa,” a Gazan photojournalist, tried to support the 2019 demonstrations by providing coverage to international outlets. Police smashed her camera and her hand, jailed and tortured her family members, and even threatened her relatives abroad that if they posted information about the protests on social media, their loved ones back home would be punished. Un-bowed, Safa believes that “in the end, something will happen that makes them take to the streets again.”

According to the International Federation of Journalists, 42 Gazan journalists were “targeted” during the 2019 protests, facing “physical assaults, summons, threats, home arrests, and seizure of equipment.” Freedom House, which gives Gaza a score of 0/4 for media freedom, reports, “Gazan journalists and bloggers continue to face repression, usually at the hands of the Hamas government’s internal security apparatus.” The Foreign Press Association noted that its repression of the 2019 “We Want to Live” movement was just “the latest in a string of chilling attacks on reporters in Gaza.”

Hamas’s tactic of targeting critics’ families is a common thread in such episodes. In October 2022, one Gazan media activist posted a video of a Hamas enforcer threatening his parents in an attempt to silence him. When Osama al-Kahlout, an independent journalist, published a photograph of one protester with a sign reading “I want to live in dignity,” Hamas broke into his family’s home, smashed his furniture, and beat him on the way to the police station. There he was“advised” not to report on any more protests. As he later said, however, “I’m a journalist. I don’t regret covering it.”

Though more than three years have passed since the demonstrations were quashed, Gazan political scientist Mikhaimar Abusada appears to agree with Safa that Hamas has not heard the last of the “We Want to Live” movement. Just because they are not protesting, he observes, “doesn’t mean the Palestinians in Gaza are happy with Hamas.”