"If I die, I want a resounding death."
For the past 18 months, Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna had been using her camera to tell the story of life in Gaza.
Known for capturing scenes of grief, displacement, survival and resilience among the horrors and destruction of the war, the 25-year-old had one request if she died: a death the world would hear.
"I don't want to be just breaking news, or a number in a group, I want a death that the world will hear, an impact that will remain through time, and a timeless image that cannot be buried by time or place," Hassouna, who was known to her friends as Fatem, wrote on social media in August last year.
Just one day after Hassouna found out a documentary about her life in Gaza was to premiere in Cannes, she was killed in an Israeli air strike alongside five members of her family, including her pregnant sister, in her home in the Al Tuffah neighbourhood, east of Gaza City.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it was targeting a Hamas member who was inside the house.
Hassouna's death marked another journalist killed during the Israel-Gaza war, which has now become the worst ever conflict for journalists, but also signalled another crucial Palestinian voice from inside the war zone lost.
'Worst ever conflict for journalists'
As of April 25, at least 176 journalists, camera operators and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, as recorded in a database by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) by name, nationality, workplace organisation and place of death.
Of this data, CPJ notes 168 killed were Palestinian, two were Israeli, and six Lebanese.
A new report by the Cost of War project at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs' Cost at Brown University places that number as high as 232.
The report — which tallies 13 deaths a month since the beginning of the war — concludes that more journalists have been killed in Gaza than in any other war, defining it as the "worst ever conflict" for journalists and media reporters.
This includes the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, according to the report.
"It is, quite simply, the worst ever conflict for reporters," the report said.
The report notes that more journalists in total have been killed in the Iraq War from March 19, 2003 through to March 26, 2025 — approximately 285 journalists — but says the death tolls are "not comparable".
While an estimated 13 journalists were killed a year in the Iraq War, more journalists were killed in the first 10 weeks of the Israel-Gaza war alone than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year, CPJ states.
The conflict has also killed more journalists over the course of a year than in any other conflict documented by CPJ since it began gathering data in 1992.
In its annual World Press Freedom Index 2025 published on May 3, Reporters Without Borders concluded that Gaza had become the world's most dangerous territory for journalists.
And due to ongoing restrictions from the Israeli government preventing foreign journalists or media from entering Rafah, it is Palestinian journalists inside Gaza like Hassouna who act as the main source of information to the outside world.
But they are also paying the ultimate price.
The 'eyes' in Gaza
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is a collaboration between award-winning Iranian documentary filmmaker Sepideh Farsi, who could not enter Gaza, and Hassouna, who could not leave.
Their meeting was a chance encounter, Ms Farsi told ABC's Radio National, after a Palestinian refugee in Cairo told the filmmaker she "had to meet" a young woman who lived in his same neighbourhood in Gaza.
"The absence of the Palestinian point of view [in the war] really bothered me, it became an obsession, in fact," Ms Farsi said.
"Other points of view and narratives were there, but not the Palestinians in Gaza. Not from inside. I needed to find that out."
Through back-and-forth video calls, the filmmaker worked with Hassouna over the course of a year to capture the war through the eyes of the 25-year-old photojournalist.
"She has become my eyes in Gaza, and I, her connection to the outside world," Ms Farsi said in the documentary's description on the film festival's website, which runs parallel to Cannes.
Ms Farsi told the ABC Hassouna "opened her soul to me".
"The name of the film comes from a phrase that she said herself: 'When you take photos here, you have to put your soul on your hands and walk,' that's how she described what she was doing."
The filmmaker said the "talented, curious, generous, resilient" Hassouna was determined to document the war "for humanity and for the world" despite the challenges she faced, and saw, firsthand everyday.
"What she was describing to me, is far beyond what we get through the media," she said.
"Sometimes I would ask her, 'Does it bother you to make photos of shredded bodies?'" Ms Farsi said in an interview with Vulture.
"And she was like, 'I think it needs to documented, so I do it, and don't think about it.'"
Palestinian journalists face unprecedented risks whilst trying to do their job, including air strikes, famine, displacement and destruction of buildings.
"Without protection, equipment, international presence, communications, or food and water, they are still doing their crucial jobs to tell the world the truth," said CPJ program director Carlos Martinez de la Serna in New York.
Ms Farsi told the ABC that despite talks about Hassouna attending the film premiere, she emphasised that she would always return to Gaza.
"She said, as long as the war is there, I have to be there, and resist, and keep my homeland," Ms Farsi said.
Losing journalistic pulse
CPJ and Reporters without Borders both allege that Israel is directly targeting journalists in Gaza, something which Israel denies.
"Israeli forces have done everything in their power to prevent coverage of what is happening in Gaza, and have systematically targeted journalists who have taken tremendous risks to do their jobs," Reporters Without Borders campaign director Rebecca Vincent said.
Hassouna's house was targeted just hours after the photojournalist learnt her documentary would be premiering at the French film festival.
The IDF said the house was targeted because a Hamas member was hiding inside, a claim which Farsi called "absurd".
"It seems off, the coincidence," the filmmaker said. "It has been the deadliest war ever for reporters."
On World Press Freedom Day, marked annually on May 3, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said that Palestine is "witnessing the most horrific and brutal media genocide in history".
"Palestinian journalists insist on clinging to the noble, humanitarian mission of journalism — searching for the truth beneath the rubble and under the fire — affirming their professional, national, and human identity, and continuing to carry out their duty in exposing the truth and occupation's crimes to the world," they said.
In April, the Palestinian National Council called for the protection of journalists amid alleged Israeli attacks on journalists and media in Gaza.
"The Israeli occupation is fully responsible for its crimes against journalists," it said in a statement.
"Assaults against journalists are a deliberate attempt to silence the voice of Palestine, and annihilate its narrative."
In January 2025, the Foreign Press Association (FPA), which represents foreign media in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, called for the Israeli government to lift restrictions banning foreign press.
"These unprecedented restrictions have severely hindered independent reporting, robbing the world of a full picture of the situation in Gaza and placing an undue and dangerous burden on our Palestinian colleagues in the territory," it said in a statement.
"These journalists have risked their lives to keep the world informed of this crucial story."
Hassounda was due to be married in the next few months.
"She told me she was documenting this war for humanity and the world, but also for her children, to know what she has been through," said Ms Farsi.
"Those are the words that end my film, and now there will be no children. She's gone."
