“When the war comes to Gaza,” writes the poet Mosab Abu Toha, “my wife and I do not want to leave.” as he began documenting his perilous journey out of Gaza with his family and getting detained into israeli custody, humiliated and beaten. His essay in the New Yorker captured something no news report ever could, the human cost of wars.¹ The journalist Ahmed Alnaouq, who lost 21 family members in a single Israeli air strike, puts it in this way. “We’re chronicling history in Gaza,” he says, “not by facts and statistics and news stories, but by the lived experiences of the people. It’s not a political project: it’s a human project.”² Through this essay I want to propose for a fundamental redefinition of wartime reporting. Suggesting an approach that focuses on individual experiences, memoirs, fictions based in ture experiences, and photography, an approach I refer to as “Narrative Journalism.” Drawing on Palestinian literature, I argue that these forms do not merely supplement traditional reporting but offer a more truthful account of war.

Criticism of Traditional Wartime Reporting

The traditional war journalism is not designed to deceive. They evolved from practical necessity: deadlines, access restrictions, the need to appease the target readership. But these very conventions lead to distortions. Mainstream wartime reporting often channels its storytelling through official sources: military briefings, government statements, aid organisation press releases. The people most affected, are often reduced to witnesses rather than protagonists. As Plestia Alaqad, the young Palestinian journalist questions: “Why did the world expect Palestinians to be ‘the perfect victims’?” after expressing her frustation of living in a “dystopian world” where journalists must carefully word reports of mass death for fear of being silenced.³ This expectation that oppressed people must present their suffering in a way that is familiar and acceptable to Western masses illustrates how conventional journalism can reproduce the hierarchy it claim to only document.

The Case for Narrative Jounalism 

When we read headlines like “Kamal Adwan Hospital out of service following a raid yesterday and repeated attacks since October,” ⁴ about ‘Northern Gaza’s last operational major health facility,’ we are entirely oblivious to the human cost of this development. But when we read Musab Abu Toha writing how his sister-in-law “Kawthar gave birth while bombs were falling all around us,” in a “windowless room that was running low on blankets,” without a doctor, in that same hospital, the reality of this headline hits close to home.⁵

Memoirs, personal essays, literary fiction, and photography zooms in on one specific person, moment, or detail focusing on experiences over information not concerning the reader with the bigger picture, geopolitics or historical context. This captures the cost of war beyond numbers dead, square kilometers lost, strategical advantage gained capturing the human cost on a micro level that doesn’t reduce them to mere numbers and preserves their humanity. 

Palestinian literature offers some of the most powerful and enduring examples of this approach, in part because Palestinian writers and artists have had to endure the systematic erasure of their narrative from mainstream media. Their response has been to write it themselves, insistently, in every form available. Mourid Braghouti’s memoir I Saw Ramallah open with the author crossing a bridge back into the West Bank after thirty years of exile. That crossing, a bridge, a checkpoint, a soldier’s glance carries the weight of displacement, loss, and longing that no casualty figure could represent. Edward Said, called it “the most eloquent and powerful account of Palestinian exile” he had ever read.⁶ That power comes precisely from its refusal to generalise.

Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Men in the Sun follows three Palestinian refugees attempting to cross the desert into Kuwait hidden inside a water tanker. The novel is sparse, almost documentary in its precision, but it builds its political argument through the inner lives of its three protagonists. Each with a different history, a different calculation of risk and hope. When they die, the horror is specific. We know who these men were. The tragedy has names.⁷

Kanafani achieved what media often fails to, audiences do not engage emotionally through scale, but rather through proximity. One person we come to know fully moves us more than thousands in number. This is not a failure of empathy, but a condition of it. Literature exploits this condition in a way Journalism often fails to.

Fiction Beyond Leasuire 

The scepticism about using fiction as a vehicle for understanding conflicts is well-founded as the fiction may compromise the factual elements. But fiction based on lived experiences are very different than pure invention. It offers us a window to things no news report ever can; the internal monologue under a rain of bombs, the texture of a particular grief, finding hope in God and simultaniously questioning his existence. 

Susan Abulhawa’s novel Mornings in Jeninfollows four generation of a Palestinian family from their displacement in 1984 through the 2002 Jenin refugee camp massacre. Abulhawa, draws from her own experince of displacement as child in a Jerusalem orphanage. The characters’ losses are presented in a way that readers encounter the history of Palestinian dispossession not as an abstraction but as something that happened to people they have come to know.⁸

Literary fiction can achieve emotional truth at the same time as historical fact, and in doing so it creates understanding that outlasts the news cycle. Mornings in Jenin is still being read, still generating conversation, long after the headlines from Jenin in 2002 have been forgotten by most Western readers.

Are war photos speaking the right words?

Photography occupies a controvertial space in wartime reporting. While the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unequivocally said, “There is no starvation in Gaza.” ⁹ Pictures of malnourished babies from Gaza by photojournalists like Saher Alghorra¹⁰ told an entirely different story. Prompting President Donald to disagree, “Those children look very hungry,” ¹¹ he commented.

“I do not want to show war in general, nor history with a capital H, but rather the tragedy of a single man, of a family.” said James Nachtwey, the acclaimed warphotographer, “For me the strength of photography lies in its ability to evoke humanity.” ¹²

War photography in its conventional mode reaches for the dramatic: the burning building, the fleeing crowd, the wounded child. These images are important. But they risk confirming a particular view of people caught in conflict; as passive, as defined by their suffering, as lacking the dimensions of ordinary life. It is important to document these people beyond the conflicts, just living their life. How they’re as ordinary as us, just less privileged and caught between the egos of forces beyond their control. 

Photographs can be a Yet photographs are limited. They can be weaponized, as Israeli soldiers did at Abu Ghraib, turning war crimes into “visual souvenirs”.¹³ They can be staged or their authenticity questioned. The image of lawyer Miead Abu Al-Rub, confronting armed settlers taken by Italian photojournalist Pietro Mastrozo in the West Bank, became the cover of the Italian magazine L’Espresso.¹⁴ The Israeli ambassador in Rome called the photograph “misleading,” “fabricated,” and “AI-supported.” The journalist was forced to release field video to prove the image was real.¹⁵

The scholar Judith Butler has argued that Western media weaponize images to construct “a hierarchy of grief” that determines whose life is publicly mourned. Publishing a war photograph “is not just an act of documentation—it’s an act of interpretation. It shapes what others think is happening”.¹⁵

The question is not whether photographs are partial; all representation is partial. The question is whether they are truthful. And a single photograph, even if it cannot capture the totality of war, can achieve something essential: as the placards carried by protestors on the Sydney Harbor Bridge declared, it can ensure that “you cannot say you didn’t know”.¹⁶

A Step Toward a Narrative Journalism

None of this is to argue that conventional war reporting should be abandoned. We need casualty figures, geopolitical analysis and the latest update. What is being argued is that breaking news should not drown out other forms of storytelling and that journalism might benefit from borrowing methods of literature. 

My idea is neither new nor radical as long-form journalism already does this. Great narrative pieces are being published by outlets like The New Yorker on conflicts in Gaza, and elsewhere that has achieved what traditional reporting cannot; They follow a single person, their family through an extended period of conflict. 

But this form of storytelling remians marginal in the overall media landscape. It requires time, access, and editorial commitment that are increasingly scarce. The alternative is to take literary tradition seriously as a parallel to the news. To treat the memoirs, personal essays, literary fiction, and photography not as a supplements to the news but as primary sources for understanding the what war does to actual people.

Wartime reporting will always struggle with the tension between immediacy and depth, between the news value of events and the human value of lives. What Palestinian authors demonstrate is that literature can resolve this issues in a way that’s effective. 

When we read Palestinian author Mohammed El-Kurd writing, “We have seen a nation punished for another nation’s genocide. And we have seen God employed as a real estate agent, bestowing Jerusalem houses to Brooklynites.”¹⁷We are hit with the absurd justification that has been used for ethnically cleansing generations after generations in a way no political analyst can ever put forth. This is political knowldge of the deepest kind. It is what literature gives us that headlines cannot. And it is why, in redefining how we tell stories from conflict zones, the most important shift is not technological or institutional, it is a shift of attention, from the general to the individual, from the event to the person who lived through it.

References

1. Mosab Abu Toha. (2023, December 25). Mosab Abu Toha’s Perilous Journey Out of Gaza. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/01/a-palestinian-poets-perilous-journey-out-of-gaza
2. ‌Fox, K. (2025, April 13). Journalist Ahmed Alnaouq: ‘It’s our duty to make Gaza’s stories immortal’. The Guardian; The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/13/ahmed-alnaouq-pam-bailey-we-are-not-numbers-the-voices-of-gazas-youth
3. Alaqad, P. (2010). The Eyes of Gaza. Little, Brown and Company.
4. World Health Organization: WHO. (2024, December 28). Kamal Adwan Hospital out of service following a raid yesterday and repeated attacks since October. WHO. https://www.who.int/news/item/28-12-2024-kamal-adwan-hospital-out-of-service-following-a-raid-today-and-repeated-attacks-since-october
5. Mosab Abu Toha. (2024, February 24). My Family’s Daily Struggle to Find Food in Gaza. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/my-familys-daily-struggle-to-find-food-in-gaza
6. ‌Barghouti, M. (2000). I Saw Ramallah (A. Soueif, Trans.; 1st ed.). American University in Cairo Press.
7. Kanafani, G. (1999). Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories (H. Kilpatrick, Trans.). Lynne Rienner.
8. Abulhawa, S. (2010). Mornings in Jenin: A novel. Bloomsbury.
9. Israel’s leader claims no one in Gaza is starving. Data and witnesses disagree. (2025, July 28). PBS News. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israels-leader-claims-no-one-in-gaza-is-starving-data-and-witnesses-disagree
10. The New York Times. A Portfolio of Work From The Times’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning Photographer. Nytimes.Com. (2026, May 4). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/world/middleeast/pulitzer-saher-alghorra-breaking-news-photography.html
11. ‌Israel’s leader claims no one in Gaza is starving. Data and witnesses disagree. (2025, July 28). PBS News. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israels-leader-claims-no-one-in-gaza-is-starving-data-and-witnesses-disagree
12. University of Technology Sydney. (n.d.). Images from Gaza have shocked the world – but the ‘spectacle of suffering’ is a double-edged sword. https://www.uts.edu.au/news/2025/08/images-from-gaza-have-shocked-the-world-but-the-spectacle-of-suffering-is-a-double-edged-sword
13. ‌Quotes by James Nachtwey | PhotoQuotes.com. (2026). Photoquotes.Com. https://photoquotes.com/author/james-nachtwey
14. Copertina “L’abuso” de L’Espresso, l’ambasciata della Palestina in Italia: “Giornalismo responsabile, le violenze dei coloni avvengono in un contesto di totale impunità” | L’Espresso. (2026, April 14). https://lespresso.it/c/attualita/2026/4/14/ambasciata-palestinese-in-italia-copertina-lespresso-abuso-israele/61312
15. Turkman, M. (2026, April 18). The Palestinian woman on the cover of L’Espresso: Settlers were ready to kill us. Middle East Eye. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/palestinian-woman-cover-lespresso-settlers-were-ready-kill-us
16. Watson, K. (2025, August 3). Sydney Harbour Bridge: Tens of thousands turn out for pro-Palestine march. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clydnvw1dg5o
17. El-Kurd, M. (2025). Perfect victims: And the politics of appeal. Haymarket Books.