I often felt he was weary. Tired of hearing the same storylines – what Hamas thinks, how Israel reacts, what the position of Islamic Jihad is – and seeing journalists roll up after every Israeli bombing campaign, asking the same questions, and being confronted with the same answers, with a few nuances. Endlessly, from the outset of the blockade of the enclave in 2007, the same tale of the Gazan Sisyphus was told: how Hamas would roll its rock up the hill – before it fell, again.
That wasn't what interested Roshdi Sarraj most. He was passionate about his land, where he was born, and where his family came from. He had started filming it with digital cameras he had managed to obtain, despite the siege of the enclave. Roshdi's story intertwined with that of his dearest friend, Yaser Murtaja. In 2010, the two comrades posted their first shots on Facebook. "We were filming the sea, gardens, markets. When people saw our videos, they were astonished. They didn't know that Gaza could also be such a beautiful place," Roshdi told me in 2018.
In 2012, he founded a production company with Yaser, Ain Media. In a territory that seems at times to have been abandoned by hope, the two friends were committed to chasing life to the very end. In 2014, Yaser filmed the rescue of a 5-year-old girl, Bisan, who had just lost her entire family in an Israeli bombing, and followed her to make a documentary for the Qatari channel Al Jazeera.
Telling the stories of refugees' daily lives
Rushdi and Yaser also filmed stories of everyday life for the BBC and international organizations, which are too rarely reported: cooking, music and, of course, the daily lives of refugees, who make up 70% of Gaza's population. They also covered the slightest upheavals in their troubled enclave. In 2018, the pair filmed demonstrators marching to the Israeli border, demanding Palestinian refugees' right of return after having been driven from their land by the Nakba – the "catastrophe" – 70 years earlier, in 1948. But on April 7, 2018, an Israeli gunman killed Yaser with a bullet that struck him under the left arm – in the hole in the bulletproof vest marked "Press" which he was wearing at the time. He was the first journalist to be shot dead during those marches. One of the last photos he posted on Facebook was an aerial of the Mediterranean – taken by drone – stretching out to infinity. He wrote: "I hope the day will come when I take this shot while I am in the air and not on the ground! My name is Yaser Murtaja. I am 30 years old. I live in Gaza City. I have never traveled!"
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