Time once called Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza the world’s “eyes and ears” in Gaza.
There is an uncomfortable irony in that description now.
In a recent podcast interview, Azaiza described following a vehicle belonging to Hamas’s armed wing, the al Qassam Brigades, as it carried Israeli hostages through Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023. People gathered around. Some struck the hostages. Azaiza followed and filmed.
He did not publish the footage.
His explanation was not that the images were unverifiable or that publication would endanger the hostages. He said he feared Israel could identify the Palestinians visible in the footage and target them. He did not want to “ruin the lives” of the people he had filmed.
Azaiza later said coverage of his interview had been distorted, poorly translated, and taken out of context. That deserves mention. But the published Arabic transcript records him describing people hitting the captives, his decision not to publish the footage, and his concern that Israel could identify those shown.
That presents a serious journalistic problem.
Journalists appropriately protect sources and innocent people. They blur faces, withhold names, and sometimes delay publication when disclosure could cause unnecessary harm. But none of that required making the event disappear.
Azaiza could have obscured the faces. He could have reported what he witnessed without identifying anyone. He could have preserved the footage for independent investigators or news organizations.
Protecting an identity can be ethical journalism. Hiding the event is something else.
Azaiza was no obscure bystander with a cellphone. Time placed him on its 2024 list of the 100 most influential people, praising the extraordinary window his photographs gave a world whose foreign journalists were largely unable to enter Gaza independently.
That lack of access needs context. Press organizations strongly opposed Israel’s restrictions, but those restrictions should not simply be treated as proof that Israel had something to hide. Israel’s stated rationale was security: Independent reporters could reveal troop positions, endanger soldiers, or place themselves at risk. Israel’s Supreme Court accepted that rationale in early 2024 while allowing limited access under military escort.
The consequence, however, was that much of the world came to depend heavily on Palestinian journalists operating under Hamas rule.
And that was hardly a free press environment.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented Hamas threats, interrogations, beatings, arrests, surveillance, publication bans, and interference with journalists’ work. Palestinian reporters told the CPJ that some abuses were never publicized because they feared retaliation. The CPJ concluded that Hamas violations against journalists during the war were “vastly underreported.”
That record also complicates Hamas’s claim to act on behalf of Palestinians. An authority that threatens or beats Palestinian journalists for showing Palestinian dissent is suppressing the very people it says it represents.
Azaiza’s own interview describes this climate. But the hostage footage presents a different problem. He does not say Hamas ordered him to suppress it. His own explanation points to a choice: publishing the images might expose the people shown to Israeli retaliation.
That matters because evidence becomes most important when atrocities are later disputed.
Just this week, I argued in these pages that Israel itself failed one of its responsibilities after Oct. 7. Israel preserved enormous amounts of evidence and assembled a 47-minute compilation that it screened privately for journalists, diplomats, and officials. There were legitimate reasons not to broadcast every horror indiscriminately, including the dignity of victims and objections from some families.
But protecting victims did not require keeping so much verified evidence outside public view.
The principle I argued then applies here as well, but the motives were very different. Israel withheld some of the most graphic evidence out of concern for victims and their families. Azaiza says he withheld his footage because he feared Israel would identify and target the Palestinians shown abusing hostages.
The ethical choices were not equivalent. The consequence, however, was similar: important evidence remained outside public view.
Israel could have shown more while protecting victims. Azaiza could have shown what happened while protecting identities.
When evidence remains hidden, a vacuum forms. Doubt, distortion, and denial rush in. False narratives claiming that Israel staged Oct. 7 or was itself responsible for the massacre circulated despite the enormous documentary record.
A journalist who possesses evidence of an atrocity has obligations beyond weighing the danger of publication. He also has an obligation to the historical record.
None of this means Azaiza’s photographs of Palestinian suffering were false, nor does it mean every Palestinian journalist made similar choices. Palestinian reporters worked under extraordinary danger, including documented pressure from Hamas.
That makes transparency more important, not less.
International news organizations that relied on reporting from Gaza should now ask what their contributors saw but did not show. They should ask what was withheld because of intimidation, what reflected editorial judgment or advocacy, and whether audiences understood those limitations.
Time should ask itself a similar question. It honored Azaiza in 2024 precisely because his photographs made him, in its words, the world’s “eyes and ears” in Gaza. If he deliberately withheld evidence of hostages being abused in order to protect the people abusing them, that fact belongs in any reassessment of the accolade.
Those are not hostile questions. They are questions journalism owes its audience.
A camera can record only what happens in front of it. But the public sees only what the person holding it decides to show.
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TIME called Azaiza Gaza’s “eyes and ears.” His own account now tells us those eyes and ears were selective.
What the world was not allowed to see still happened. The victims were owed the truth. So was history.
Arie Blitz is a retired physician and independent writer in Weslaco, Texas, who writes on foreign policy, medical ethics, and public policy.