As the scale of the brutality and barbarity of the Hamas attack on Israel became apparent in recent days, U.S. correspondents have struggled at times to keep their composure.
With missiles raining down overhead, the security situation for reporters is precarious, evidenced by the number of live shots where crews are forced to take cover.
And the prospect of the war in Israel has a number of potential new challenges to coverage, particularly if ground troops move into Gaza or a full-scale conflict starts with Hezbollah in the north.
The networks are preparing for a long, protracted war, and they have scrambled to get teams into Israel. Some, like Fox News’ Trey Yingst, already were in Tel Aviv when the attack started early Saturday morning, while other correspondents, like Nic Robertson, have been covering the war in Ukraine recently.
CBS News‘ Imtiaz Tyab, who long has covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, recalled how he knew that this burst of violence in Israel was different, describing the initial eerie calm he noticed on the streets of Tel Aviv when he first arrived. But “the tension itself was palpable,” he said.
Said Yingst, “Within the first few hours, I knew it was unlike anything we had seen in recent history.”
As Israeli troops amass at the border of sealed-off Gaza, network correspondents are in some cases relying on producers who already live in the region for reports and updates, describing the destruction from Israeli counter-missile attacks as well as a lack of fuel for power with supplies cut off. According to the most recent figures from the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least seven journalists have been killed, two are missing and two have been injured.
Deadline talked to Yingst, Robertson, Tyab and PBS NewsHour’s Amna Nawaz — all now in Israel — about covering the war there, the challenges in explaining the situation to viewers and the precautions they are taking for what is ahead. Correspondents for ABC News and NBC News were not available.
The start of the attack
TREY YINGST: I was at my apartment and got a call from my producer at around 7 a.m. on Saturday morning, so I knew right away it had to be breaking news, but not sure what. She said there had been an incident in the south, so I called our VP Greg Headen and briefed him. It was just a few minutes later when I heard air raid sirens sounding in Tel Aviv as rockets were intercepted outside of my apartment building where I started reporting immediately from my balcony. (Yingst answered questions via email).
IMTIAZ TYAB: I was at home in London, and I got a call at 5 a.m. in the morning by a friend who happens to be Israeli, and I’m surprised to get a message so early in the morning, and the message was ‘have you seen the news’? And you know, I kind of rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and opened up my phone and started looking, and my jaw dropped as I started reading the initial early reports. Bear in mind this really was the very early hours of what was happening. And again, as someone covering this conflict for so long … to hear reports of Hamas fighters, an unknown number of them inside Israeli territory, in several communities, with weapons, killing people, abducting people taking them back into Gaza. It was hard to find words to really express my absolute shock at what I was seeing and what I was reading. And almost immediately I called my desk and said, “We need to go. This is huge.”
We booked our flight, and I got to the airport and it was canceled. And I went to the information desk and they just said, “Nobody’s flying to Tel Aviv.” And it was just by luck that a group of people clearly watching what was happening, decided to cancel their flights on a British Airways flight, leaving from a different airport. So we had to race across London to this other airport to get on that flight into Israel. And it probably wouldn’t surprise you to know that flight was full of a lot of journalists from a lot of news organizations, as we all raced to Israel to cover this very sad, very tragic and very scary moment in Israeli history.
NIC ROBERTSON: I was woken up in my bed by CNN at 14 minutes past six Saturday morning. It was my daughter’s birthday over the weekend, so we had family plans. And when the phone rang and I saw it was CNN at that time, you know it’s automatically important. So immediately after that, I’m booking flights and packing my bag and making sure I can get to the airport, making sure I can get on the plane, and then hoping and willing that the plane will take off, and the plane took off pretty much on time, around about 12:30. And then the pilot kept everyone informed in the air. He was telling us, checked with the British government, checked in with the airlines, people on the ground at Ben Gurion [Airport], checked in with Israeli security. We were getting checks in the air right up until the last, I’d say 30, 15 minutes before landing even. Then we were on the ground, and it wasn’t long before events were happening around us.
AMNA NAWAZ: So the security situation sort of became very real for us even before we’d landed [on Wednesday]. Our landing was delayed [and] we were forced to circle for quite some time above the airport. We didn’t know it at the time, the pilot basically told us we’re circling because they had been told to not approach the airport because of ‘military activity.’ And when we later landed, we realized that Hamas had been launching airstrikes at the airport.
How they knew this was a different type of conflict
TYAB: There’s something unique about this part of the world, whether you’re in Gaza, or in Israel, or the West Bank, or elsewhere, there’s always this undercurrent of … tension, and sometimes it bursts up and it sort of consumes everything. And yet, I’ve always been struck at the ability of people, be it Israeli or Palestinian, to go back to their lives almost immediately. The streets will become lively, people will go back to cafes, people will go back to work. And yet arriving in Israel and driving from the airport to Tel Aviv, it was so quiet. There was almost nobody on the streets. It was eerie, so eerie it almost felt calm. But the tension itself was palpable, given what we knew. And remember, at that point, this assault by these Hamas fighters was still ongoing. There were large numbers of Hamas fighters who were rampaging around southern Israel in several communities. And nobody knew if they weren’t making their way to Tel Aviv or to other parts of Israel. And so, it really just underscored the fear in that moment.
ROBERTSON: The sirens went off [at the airport]. And so you know, whenever the sirens go off, everyone has to get shelter. And if you’re going across the tarmac in a bus to the terminal at the airport, shelter means getting out of the bus, getting away from that glass tin can, and then trying to get on the ground, get cover behind something. And that’s what everyone did. For me, that’s the moment that your professional skills kick in. It’s, “Get filming and record this.” This is what you’re here to do — and again, bear witness. So you just kick into professional gear. You’re thinking about being safe, but you’re not thinking about, “Oh dear, what have I walked into sort of thing?” When we got on the plane, we knew what we were coming to. And we started working, and I have to say I am with a great team [including his producer and cameraman]. Everyone had their camera out and they were filming.
NAWAZ: This is different than conflicts in the past. You can feel that you can see that in the streets, the streets that are normally bustling with people and restaurants and stores that are open later all shuttered. They were really quiet streets as we were driving around … and it just feels like a city on edge. Everyone you talk to, everywhere you go, there’s a sense that something could happen at any moment, and that this moment is different to moments past. So it’s one of those places where unfortunately people always live with the idea of knowing where their shelter is that they need to go to, being aware of sirens and so on, but it’s the first thing anyone tells you when we go anywhere. When we got to the hotel, we immediately went to go check out the shelter, immediately figured out how often the sirens have been going off.
ROBERTSON: Going into it, we didn’t know what we would expect to see. The scenes of a firefight, a very intense fight — a fight to rout Hamas from the control they had. There were dead Hamas fighters at the site of the tracts, around the houses; there was all the destruction that [the Hamas fighters] brought all over the place: burned homes, children’s toys pulled out, grenades left laying around. The people in the kibbutz who had been killed, they were either under like sleeping bags. So it was a couple of people with like sleeping bags over them outside. And other people in body bags. I’ve sort of traveled a lot in situations like this and seen a lot of things, so it was not out with what I was expecting. But it was, how can I put it, it was very chilling to see what had been done and how it had been done and the brutality of it all, and the scale and the scope and the intent.
On reporting on the brutality
YINGST: The footage is gruesome but shows the reality of war. I’ve seen many difficult and challenging things so far. We arrived in the south as Palestinian militants were still killing and kidnapping Israelis. One of the first things I saw was an Israeli soldier die in front of me at an evacuation point near the border. We also watched as bodies were stacked into a pick-up truck after being pulled from the Sderot police station.
Later this week, Yingst reported on the massacre at a kibbutz in a small border community, Be’eri, going inside a home where the floors were stained with blood, and bullet holes were in the walls, and where civilians were decapitated and executed. He warned viewers about the images, describing the location as “the most horrific thing I have ever seen.”
Robertson, too, reported on the massacre at the kibbutz at Kfar Aza. He reported that the murdered members of the kibbutz included “men, women, children, hands bound, shot, executed, heads cut.” [President Joe Biden on Wednesday cited “confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.” But the White House clarified the president’s remarks, saying that the president was relying on news reports, and an Israeli official told CNN that the Israeli government has not confirmed the specific claim that Hamas attackers cut off the heads of babies. The network later reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office released photos of babies burned and murdered.]
A day earlier, Robertson had reported from the scene of a music festival where 260 bodies were found. During one segment, he got emotional and paused for a bit as he described the festivalgoers’ efforts to take shelter, only to be tracked down and killed by Hamas terrorists.
ROBERTSON: We have a professional job to do, which is to bear witness to a situation and not be overcome by emotions, not be overcome by your own revulsion, by your own fears, by anything. You’re the witness. You’re telling the audience what you’re seeing. But I do think it’s important in situations like that when you can see a scenario, and that one in the missile shelter was exactly one where it was so clear what had happened, and people were hiding in there fearing for their lives. And then all the blood and gore on the floor, and the blood on the walls, and the blood on the ceiling and the smell — that intense, sickly, decaying, decomposing human flesh smell, all of that. All of that, and you understand what you’re witnessing. And this is not something I think to paint in black-and-white terms, because I think it diminishes it, it minimizes it, and the audience I don’t think is asking for you to diminish or minimize something. They want to know it as you know, it. They deserve to know it as you know it. So I think, in that conversation with Jake [Tapper] I felt and I still do that it was important to show some humanity. You know, when I step away from the story and I stop being the professional reporter [who has] witnessed all these things, sure, I let my emotions come through. Over the years, many years now, in my house I am the first one to cry watching a movie, and my kids laugh about it. But that’s the way that it is. I think the emotions are in there, and they come out later in a different way.
NAWAZ: War is war. War is unnatural. And I think trying to make sense of anything that is unnatural and does not make sense doesn’t serve you as a journalist. So I’ve always tried in these situations to do two things. One is to approach with the ‘facts first’ mindset, because I think continually asking yourself, “What do I know to be true? What have I seen with my own eyes?” really helps to guide the reporting. But we also can’t lose our empathy as human beings in these moments. Death tolls can often become very sort of antiseptic, especially the higher they go. It’s hard to get a grasp of what’s really unfolding on the ground. And I think you’ll see, especially in the NewsHour‘s reporting, we do try to center and uplift the voices of the people who are impacted by what’s unfolding on the ground, whether that’s war or something else. In terms of my emotions as a journalist, I think I’m like a lot of people who’ve covered conflict: Do the job, like you’re doing the job, and then you figure out a way to process it later.
TYAB: As somebody who’s covered this story for a very long time— I used to be based in Jerusalem — to talk to a young Israeli man who himself had just completed his mandatory military service, to describe a scene of utter horror and carnage at a music festival that he was attending, in which he was shot in the legs by a Hamas fighter, and where he said he was lying there, trapped in what he described as a cabin that he was hiding in for hours and hours as he bled out, and no help had come. And I asked him, “Did you blame anyone? Were you angry at anyone?” And he choked back tears and said, ‘I blame the military, and I blame the government.’ And in Israel, it’s not often you hear Israelis show any kind of anger at the military. It is the one thing that they rally around, and please understand they are rallying around their military in an extraordinary way. But what this attack has done has shaken Israelis belief in their strength as a nation, and it is a strong nation. It is proven to be one of the most powerful and effective modern militaries on Earth. But this has showed them that they have weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and for that 22-year-old who went to a music festival with his friends — he doesn’t know if all his friends are alive, and he doesn’t know if he’s ever going to walk again— to lie there with blood pouring out of his body and not knowing if he was ever going to get back home again, to feel let down by an institution which defines so much of Israeli life, I think is a pretty damning indictment of the failures of the Israeli military and Israeli intelligence following this attack.
NAWAZ: We are not the only source of information on these kinds of issues. I think it’s important to remember we live in an age where people can access these videos and images from other places other than news outlets. And so the decision of how we broadcast them and when we broadcast them and so on, is still one that we have to weigh very carefully. But these attacks were so horrendous and so atrocious. And it’s times like this that we know our goal is to add light and not heat. We want to always put the facts first in what we do. We want to always go to firsthand sources on everything we do. We want to always approach with the appropriate amount of skepticism and everything we do. But this nation has been through so much in the last few days. And you’ve seen in our reports we are really trying to center some of those stories right now so people can tell you in their own words why it feels different.
On the logistical challenges
ROBERTSON: The military here has a strong understanding of how it wants to work with the media and also how to protect the citizens of the country and protect the media from wandering into dangerous situations. So you will find an area that was OK half an hour ago to go into it, then suddenly half an hour later, it’s not OK to go in there because some situation has developed. So you’ll find scenarios like that. But where we’re located now, we communicate with the police and the army to say, “We’re in this house. We’re doing this. This is CNN, we’re doing live TV.” I was on a live broadcast earlier and there was a whole group of police or soldiers who were searching the vicinity and we just waved to make sure they knew it was us on the roof and told them it was CNN. And they were good and they were happy with it. … This area that’s close to Gaza, where we are now, the stores are shut. Our driver had to drive an hour and a half away to go get bottled water, some pita bread, some hummus and some vegetables and that was our supper. So you kind of got to plan ahead around that. If you’re in this area, you need to have a flak jacket and helmet at the moment as well because it is an unpredictable situation.
TYAB: No, you know, it’s a relatively small country. I think that is what makes this conflict so difficult in a lot of ways is that the reality is that those who are at the heart of this conflict live side by side, cheek by jowl. And more often than not, they tend to rub against each other mostly fine, and then these horrible flare-ups happen, and everything changes. But in terms of logistics traveling around Israel itself, it’s reasonably fine. In fact, we’re traveling to the northern border with Lebanon where Israel has been exchanging fire with Palestinian factions there as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon. So we’ll be traveling there to tell that side of the story. At some point we will be going to the occupied West Bank to talk to Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation there. … And the concern is while so much attention is focused on Gaza, so much attention is focused on Israel’s southern border, that there are other areas where things could explode in a very serious way.
ROBERTSON: Safety always comes first. So you know, wherever we stop around here, we always are aware of what shelter is available. There are these rocket shelters at most places, so we try to keep one of those handy… You just judge each situation where you are and what are the specific dangers. The judgment is always dependent on where you are and on what’s happening. [You ask] ‘Have you been there before? Have you experienced this there before? What’s it gonna be like? There’s always a judgment. It is always going on in your mind about, “Should we take cover now? Can we come out now? What can we do? How much danger are we in, etc.” It’s a constant calculation.
YINGST: Safety is our number one priority and we have protective gear and the latest information to ensure we can cover every aspect of this story. We are trying to sleep but our priority is bringing viewers the most recent, accurate news out of the region.
On covering Gaza
TYAB: I think the sad reality is is that Gaza is often forgotten until something bad happens. And the reality is, is that when something bad happens, we start seeing airstrikes, and because Israel controls who could go in and could go out of Gaza, they close the crossing. I think that’s one of the things that’s also going to impede any chance for U.S. journalists or any journalists to go in is Erez, which is the main crossing point from Israel into Gaza, was overrun by Hamas fighters. They took control of the main crossing that Israel controls into Gaza, which is shocking to consider given I’ve been in and out of there many times myself and when you arrive, it almost looks as if you’re at a regional airport at some medium sized city, but as soon as you cross from essentially the Israeli desk where they stamp your pass, or look at your passport and you cross in, it then becomes this very dystopian place where you are essentially walking through narrow passageways and heavy metal doors as you snake your way into Gaza. And so for Hamas to be able to take over this facility is just a stunning, shocking unbelievable breach of Israel’s defenses. And so I can’t imagine that that facility will be up and running anytime soon, which again, is the main conduit or a passageway for journalists to enter into Gaza and to leave Gaza. But the reality is as Israel continues to mobilize ahead of this ground defensive, it’s pretty clear it hasn’t decided yet how it’s going to approach this given the challenges and the fact that there are so many captives inside Gaza … These are neighborhoods that are very dense, very tightly packed, and so to send in platoons of soldiers — it is very, very difficult terrain.
YINGST: Gaza is impossible to reach right now. On the Israeli side, the military has allowed us access to areas right along the Gaza border where the bodies of dead militants still lay. Logistics are easier than in other conflict zones I’ve reported from. Fox has the largest team of any American network based in Israel year round, so we are uniquely suited for an assignment like this.
TYAB: We’ve been trying to contact people inside Gaza. Because I’ve worked here, I’ve spent a lot of time in Gaza. I called my former producer just to check in on him. ‘How are you doing?’ He’s a great guy. He’s a good friend. And he was saying to me — bear in mind, this is a man who’s seen a lot of conflict and seen a lot of tension, as somebody who calls Gaza home and works as a journalist — he said to me, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.” He said he was afraid. And while we were … exchanging voice notes on WhatsApp, mid-sentence, I heard a big bang, and the voice note ended. And so I started calling him and calling him, and there was no answerr. And I finally about half hour later managed to get a hold of him. He said, “There was a strike. It was close. Too close.” And I was like, “Are you OK? Are you safe?” And he was, and he’s with his family. Now they’re sheltering in their apartments. But as he keeps saying to me, he doesn’t know what’s going to happen. As an independent journalist, as somebody who has no ties to Hamas, this is a very terrifying time for him. He and many people inside Gaza had no say in Hamas’ assault, but they sadly are likely to pay a huge, huge price.
NAWAZ: Reporting from Gaza has always been an issue. We again are lucky, as I think many international news organizations are, to rely on trusted sources of information and imagery and facts from the ground. But that’s getting harder. We’ve seen a number of journalists on the ground in Gaza who paid the ultimate price, and ended up dying as a result of the work that they are doing. It is a challenge. I’m not going to underestimate that. I think one thing we are preparing for, the one thing we are considering is the analysis and the perspective of the experts. People who know more in the area, who know the landscape in Gaza, who know the [Israel Defense Forces]. And the headline there is that the casualties will be enormous, potentially on both sides, and that’s something we cannot take lightly.
The broader impact
TYAB: Ever since I’ve started covering this story [I have been] trying to convey why this matters beyond the sadness anyone may feel of people being killed or people dying, as to why it matters beyond the headlines. The reality is this story, which has been really the lightning rod in the Middle East for the past 75 years, has huge implications not just for Israel, not just for Palestinians, but for the wider Middle East and indeed for the U.S. Remember, Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. military aid. Israel has rock solid support from the U.S. These are incredibly close allies. It is so interconnected with American communities inside the U.S. and of course here in Israel. And I think the important thing too, and I should say for the Palestinian diaspora, many who have settled in the U.S. as well.
NAWAZ: I think if anything, people have access to a lot of information, and people have very strong and maybe even calcified opinions about what’s happening on the ground here. I think part of our job as journalists is to make sure that we’re not making those same assumptions going into any of this reporting. This is a place that requires context, and it requires facts first, but not getting ahead of where the story is, not falling into assumptions or stereotypes or any of that. That is at the core of fair, accurate, empatheti, reporting from this region.
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