War and the press

How do journalists report on war when they’re denied access?

“For the first time I think since the Second World War, Israel has not allowed foreign journalists to come into Gaza. This is unprecedented,” says Israeli journalist Meron Rapoport.

Palestinian journalists, who live in Gaza, have paid a terrible price for their reporting.

“Gaza has been a horror story. The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that around 200 Palestinian journalists have been killed in the past two years,” says Nick Cumming-Bruce, contributor for the New York Times.

Many appear to have been deliberately targeted.

Irene Khan, UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression and opinion, says: “I’ve been told by journalists that wearing a jacket marked ‘press’ doesn’t protect you. It actually makes you a target. That is just unacceptable."

Aid agencies travel to Gaza – they, too, report on what they see. 

“We’ve reported on a war on children, a famine and a polio outbreak. Always, always, and only with data and testimonials,” says James Elder from the UN children’s charity Unicef.

But often their evidence has been dismissed.

“There is no famine in the Gaza Strip. It is simply not true,” said Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar.

Should journalists have pushed harder for access?

“International media should have told Israel, ‘We won’t accept any comments from the Israeli government unless you allow us access,’” adds Rapoport. 

Join host Imogen Foulkes for a fascinating discussion.

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Host: Imogen Foulkes
Production assitant: Claire-Marie Germain
Distribution: Sara Pasino
Marketing: Xin Zhang

Chapters

• 0:47 Setting The Stakes
• 1:00 Gaza Access Ban And Its Impact
• 2:54 War Reporting Lessons From The Field
• 7:08 Why Gaza Is Different
• 9:28 Inside Israel’s Media Restrictions
• 11:35 Should Media Boycott Official Statements
• 14:43 Timidity, Propaganda, And Famine Denial
• 17:11 UN Witness Accounts From Gaza
• 19:43 Evidence, Politics, And Inaction
• 22:37 Freedom Of Expression And Legal Protections
• 25:42 Accountability Versus New Rules
• 28:35 The Precedent Risk For Future Wars
• 30:40 Open Source Tools And The Fog Of War
• 34:00 Final Reflections And Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:47

This is Inside Geneva. I'm your host, Imogen Folkes, and this is a production from SwissInfo, the international public media company of Switzerland. In today's programme.

SPEAKER_05: 1:01

Every bit of news which comes out of Hamas of Gaza is controlled by the terrorist organization. But international journalists are not allowed into Gaza, are they? Why not?

SPEAKER_08: 1:11

For the first time, I think, since World War II, Israel did not allow foreign journalists to come in to Gaza. This is unprecedented.

SPEAKER_02: 1:21

Two years of this conflict, there's really been no access for international media.

SPEAKER_03: 1:27

Sad breaking news.

SPEAKER_07: 1:35

Gaza has been a horror story. The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates around 200 Palestinian journalists killed in the last two years. What we need is accountability where these abuses occur, and that has been conspicuously lacking.

SPEAKER_06: 1:50

Be in no doubt that this is irrefutable testimony. It is a famine. The Gaza famine.

SPEAKER_00: 1:58

There is no famine in Gaza Strip. It is simply not true.

SPEAKER_09: 2:02

We SC UN, specifically WHO, we have a role to inform. We've been informing from the start. We inform on health and we inform as factual as possible.

SPEAKER_04: 2:14

Now in that time, we've reported on a war on children, a famine, and a polio outbreak. Always, always and only with data and testimonials.

SPEAKER_01: 2:24

Israel can't have it both ways. All Israel has to do is to allow international media in and let international media see what is actually happening. And I have said that quite openly. This is a cover-up of genocide.

SPEAKER_08: 2:36

I would suggest that international media should have told Israel that we will not take any comment from Israeli government unless you let us go in.

SPEAKER_02: 2:55

And today we're going to take a long and slightly soul-searching look at the challenges and the risks of reporting on conflict. We'll be hearing from journalists, UN aid agencies, and press freedom analysts throughout today's episode. They'll bring us their perspectives on those challenges. And listening with me here in the studio, I've got New York Times contributor Nick Cumming Bruce. It's good to have you here again, Nick.

SPEAKER_07: 3:22

Yeah, hello, Imogen.

SPEAKER_02: 3:23

Now, our jobs at the moment are here in tranquil Geneva. But what some of our listeners might not know is that to report here from the UN in Geneva, it's almost a prerequisite to have spent some time reporting on wars, reporting from conflict zones. I know I have, I know you have, Nick. Let's each of us tell our listeners something that stands out.

SPEAKER_07: 3:50

Well, I I think one of the first experiences of violent conflict I ever had was in Iran at the time of the revolution. Um and one of my first experiences, in fact, was watching rioters scaling the wall and ransacking the British Embassy in Tehran. And while the event was self-evident in one sense, you could see it actually unfolding in front of you, it kind of also demonstrated the challenges of reporting in conflicts. It begged the question of who exactly was doing it and why uh was it spontaneous. Was it a spontaneous outburst of crowd anger or carefully planned? And this is one of the challenges. Initial focus of diplomats and journalists in that revolution was largely on the sort of the liberal-minded lawyers and critics of the Shah who had opposed him in the early years and who were soon swept aside and later brutally purged by the forces of loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini, who were in fact the people really driving the revolution, but who were not initially perceived to be doing so.

SPEAKER_02: 4:55

That's really interesting, and I think there is this phrase, isn't it, the fog of war, which kind of means that you can you can see what's in front of you. You can't necessarily assess exactly what the big picture is, what's really going on. I've got my own anecdote. I've been in a few conflict zones, but this is one, one of the first ones I went to that stands out for me. I went to Macedonia when the war in Kosovo was starting. NATO had started its bombing of Serbia. It hadn't started the uh ground invasion. And I went from the airport in Skopje Street to an empty, echoing hotel ballroom and a French colonel with epaulettes and a big map and one of those long pointers. And he sat us all down and showed us, you know, it was like, you know, tanks on a map. We are here, here, here, and here. And I was sitting there thinking, I want to get I need to get out of here. This is not what I came here for to sit in an echoey ballroom looking at a map. And so eventually I escaped, hitched a ride with a couple of other journalists, and we went to the border, and this was at the moment when the real ethnic cleansing, the push by Serbia of Kosovars out of Kosovo was happening. And I d I won't ever forget that boiling hot sun, tens of thousands of people, mostly women and children, sitting on trucks and in unventilated buses. They'd lost everything and they were waiting just to get to a bit of safety. And that's when I thought this, if I am going to report on conflict, it's this. I want to talk to real people who are really affected and not sit in an empty ballroom with a French colonel and a map and a long, a long pointer. But the fact is, sometimes to get into a conflict to report on it, you do have to, you do have to spend a bit of time with the colonel and his maps and his pointer. What I would say, though, listeners, and I'm sure you're expecting it, this program is going to focus on one particular conflict, and that is the current conflict, Israel-Gaza. Because Nick, I think we would say that the media has faced unprecedented challenges reporting on this war.

SPEAKER_07: 7:33

Well, yes, it's completely different in one very essential sense, and that is that media have always had access to wars and conflicts, often facing extreme peril, um, exemplified by the career of someone like Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times, who reported wars in Balkans, Iraq, and Sri Lanka, and ultimately she paid with her life after getting smuggled into Syria. But journalists found ways to get in. Um but in this conflict, Israel has essentially hermetically sealed Gaza from access by international journalists. It's denied that access, citing the dangers that would face reporters on the ground, which is a rather brutal irony given the Israeli military's record of killing journalists, and that only kind of really fuels suspicion that they were imposing that kind of ban because they wanted to prevent any kind of scrutiny of their conduct of hostilities on the ground.

SPEAKER_02: 8:30

I think it's the case. I mean, many don't want us to draw that conclusion, but it's hard to come up with another when you think that two years of this conflict, there's really been no access for international media. And even since the ceasefire, which is what, three weeks in now, there's been one very small, very limited, organized trip for the international media, accompanied at all times by the Israeli defense force just inside the edge of Gaza. So one trip in two years. Now, I did say we were going to hear from other journalists and aid agencies and so on throughout this podcast. And in fact, as I was preparing this episode, the Israeli journalist Meron Rappaport was in Geneva. Now, listeners not familiar with his work, take a look at the magazine plus 972 because it has honest, heartfelt, but yeah, critical coverage of the conduct of the war in Gaza. Now, Meron was in town to give a talk at the Graduate Institute on the challenges, risks, and actually, as he said it, Nick, the failures of the media in this war. And I was lucky enough to be able to sit down with him for an interview, and the first thing he really wanted to stress was the number of Palestinian journalists, because they have been able to report on Gaza because they lived there, the number of them killed over the last two years.

SPEAKER_08: 10:08

This is unprecedented. Certainly since World War II, and maybe even World War II, there were not such huge numbers, and if you take into consideration that the population Gaza is not that huge, and the number of journalists there is not that huge, this is really a huge number. We have also, for the first time, I think, since World War II, uh Israel did not allow foreign journalists to come in to Gaza. Uh, this is unprecedented, no international journalist media allowed by Israel to come in, so uh we depended totally. The only information we got is from Palestinian journalists who were very limited in their ability to move, and uh as so many of them were killed. So uh this is I think a big, big failure. I would suggest that international media should have told Israel that we will not take any comment from the Israeli government unless you let us go in. I think international media was completely lenient about it. It allowed Israel to do so without protesting and without saying this is not the way it works. If you don't allow us in, we don't report on you.

SPEAKER_02: 11:31

Can I jump in there? Because I think that's for me as a journalist, sharing the frustration of this lack of access, I think that's a very interesting point. And you might know that in the editorial rooms of Western media there have been quite some tensions. This has been discussed quite intensively. But do you accept that it's very hard for a media organization to say, okay, then we're just not doing it?

SPEAKER_08: 12:01

No, I think it's not that uh complicated. I think that uh big organization like the BBC and others could have said to Israel, listen, if you don't allow us in, we don't take the Israeli announcement of the IDF. We just ignore them. And uh you want to set rules of the game that are completely in favor of Israel, we don't accept it. And I think BBC American networks are strong enough, Israel would have conceded the next day. I'm telling you, there was a lack of consistency here by the international media. They just gave up and waited for Israel, uh, and Israel still does not allow them in. The excuse is that they cared for their lives, which is let's say uh very problematic.

SPEAKER_02: 12:55

If Do you think we we would have to take that with a pinch of salt given how many journalists have actually been killed in Gaza?

SPEAKER_08: 13:01

A sack of salt, yes. A huge sack of salt, 25 kilos sack of salt.

SPEAKER_02: 13:07

So Nick, I found that really interesting, but if I'm honest, I wasn't entirely persuaded by Meron's suggestion that the uh the big mainstream media could just have said to the Israeli government, look, let us in, or we're not gonna report on your statements, we're not gonna report on your your line. What do you think?

SPEAKER_07: 13:33

Well, I'm not persuaded at all that that's tenable. Obviously, I I don't have his knowledge of the IDF, but I question whether their position would change particularly, as I doubt that you would get all the major media networks to agree to this position, and so if there are some that are willing to go along and some that refuse, I don't see that that would be a a sufficient consensus to to sway the IDF suddenly to change its rules of engagement with the press. But I mean you also have the fundamental problem that I don't think you can simply airbrush out of the picture one of the dominant uh actors in the war. It's our job to talk to these people.

SPEAKER_02: 14:17

Yeah, I agree with you. I'm I'm not really convinced either that that would be a tenable position. What did occur to me though is that here in Geneva we are in kind of a unique position because we can't go to Gaza, our colleagues can't go to Gaza, but here you and I talk and interview on a regular basis people who do go to Gaza, who go in and out, and they are the humanitarian agencies. Now they tell us what they see, they bring fact-based, evidence-based witness accounts of what's happening there. And I don't know about Unique, but I have found that very, very valuable over the last couple of years.

SPEAKER_07: 15:10

Absolutely. And I think, you know, Meron's basic point about the timidity of the media is is a valuable one. Um it comes back to this difficult question of how you balance reporting and the requirement to obtain an Israeli comment on information in relation to reporting on Israeli atrocities or in the conduct of hostilities invariably gets uh a pro-former response that, you know, essentially you're gullible, that the media has fallen prey to Hamas propaganda, um, and that all the messaging that's come out of Gaza from any source has essentially been through a prism that's been approved by Hamas. I I think there's been a lot of criticism of media timidity. And I you while you can't be naive about the desire of Hamas to try and shape coverage, you can understand the anger and frustration that people have felt when interviews uh allowed flagrantly misleading Israeli assertions. For example, that there was no shortage of food in Gaza at a time when starvation was taking hold, allowing those kind of assertions to go largely uncontested.

SPEAKER_02: 16:19

Yeah, well, I did say at the start of this podcast that we would hear from aid agencies because increasingly you really sense the frustration of the UN agencies. Because let's just be clear about this. Humanitarian agencies have standard, internationally accepted ways of measuring things, for example, like malnutrition or maternal mortality, and they are using those standards in Gaza. And yet, as you said, Nick, they are sometimes, they bring this evidence and they're told, no, no, that's just what Hamas is telling you, despite the fact that they have been in Gaza witnessing the malnourished children and the women who can't get care when they're expecting a baby. And just a couple of weeks ago, I think in a way, this frustration, it it really almost boiled over. I think you were there too, Nick. It was the UN aid agency briefing. And both UNICEF's James Elder and the World Health Organization's Rick Papercorn, they were both in Gaza at the time. They hooked up with us via Zoom as they often do. And let's have a listen to what they had to say, because I said the frustration was really palpable.

SPEAKER_04: 17:35

The media in this press room has been very generous to listen to UNICEF brief dozens of times since we first bore witness to the carnage in Gaza. Now, in that time, we've reported on a war on children, a famine, and a polio outbreak. Always, always and only with data and testimonials. Now, two days ago I was at NASA Hospital and I saw children who've been paralyzed, who've been burnt, and who've had amputations, all following direct hits on their tents or tents in the surrounding area, all at around two o'clock in the morning. A couple of days earlier at around Alexa Hospital, I met children who've all been shot by quadcopters. When the world adjusts and normalizes this level of violence and of deprivation, something is profoundly broken.

SPEAKER_09: 18:23

We SCUN and also specifically WHO, we have a role to inform. We've been informing the public and the member states from the start. We always inform on health and we inform as factual as possible. That's why we came up now with this report, for example, on injuries in Gaza and the consequences of that and the insane kind of statistics that one quarter 45,000 people will have, will need lifelong rehabilitation, of which more than 10,000 children. Only that kind of facts. There's been a lot of reports on malnutrition and a lot of debate on that. Well, I've seen and have witnessed the children talk to the mothers and fathers of children as I saw as a medical doctor myself. This channel is two years old.

SPEAKER_04: 19:18

If you speak to the brave doctors through WHO, or speak to the many, many doctors and nurses who have been in Gaza from Australia, from the United Kingdom, from the United States of America, when they speak, it should cut through politics. They're trained to save lives, they're not trained to posture. And so one would think that when they testify around children with trapnel wounds when they were sleeping in their beds or shot by quadcopters when they were getting water or denied oxygen. This is the raw truth from the front line. However, what makes it ever more devastating is these most trusted voices in our society, doctors, nurses, surgeons, even when we hear their testimonies in halls of power and they share these horrific stories of children and indiscriminate attacks, it's not moved leaders to act. So we're in the place where a government is accused of systematic breaches of international humanitarian law. And even when its past denials are shown to be false, demonstrably false, that voice is still somehow treated as indispensable in balancing a story. Now that's giving a platform to those engineering starvation. That's a real problem.

SPEAKER_02: 20:24

Well, James, as we know, who's speaking there, has been very passionate about what he's witnessed in Gaza, and I can genuinely understand that.

SPEAKER_07: 20:55

Yeah, I mean I don't want to let media off the hook here. But the fact of the matter is also that if the reporting hasn't been adequate and sufficient, particularly in the earlier stages of the conflict, when the world was still reacting to the trauma of the Hamas attack and the seizure of hostages. The fact of the matter is there has been large amounts of reporting detailing the abuses, the appalling cost of the Israel's conduct of hostilities in Gaza. And even with that reporting, politicians have not been taking up the cudgels in in a way that I think voters across large parts of the world have found in any way adequate. So, yes, I'm sure reporting could do with a very serious look at itself, and I'm sure studies will come to light as we go forward on the shortcomings of our performance. But um politicians can't really look at that as an excuse for their failure to uh act on the evidence that did come through in quite a lot of reporting.

SPEAKER_02: 22:04

Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the things I've heard many times from humanitarian workers. But also sometimes I think we have said it in our own reports, is that this is a conflict where the people who might have had the power to end it sooner can't argue that they didn't know. We've had excellent reporting out of Gaza from Palestinian journalists, many of whom, as we've heard, have been killed, more than 200 during this conflict. I still think we need to come back a bit to the question of access. Because the idea that the international media shouldn't be allowed into Gaza at all, into a conflict zone, is pretty much unprecedented. I mean, they went to the Second World War, they went to Korea, they went to Vietnam, they went to former Yugoslavia. So where does that fit in our acceptance of what journalists should be allowed to do, where they can report? Now that's something I put to Irene Khan. She's the UN Special Reporteur on freedom of expression, and she's particularly concerned, like Meron Rappaport, that Israel has perhaps taken unprecedented, perhaps unacceptable measures, trying, as all governments do, to control the narrative around a conflict it's involved in.

SPEAKER_01: 23:25

On the one hand, it has blocked access to international media, and on the other hand, it claims that local journalists who very often are working for international outlets, either as freelancers or as employees, are either associated with Hamas and it's not telling the truth, but Israel can't have it both ways. All Israel has to do is to allow international media in and let international media see what is actually happening. And I have said that quite openly. This is a cover-up of genocide, actually. At this point, it is a cover-up of genocide, both the targeted killing of journalists in Gaza, and at the same time restricting or refusing access, blocking total access to international media in an unprecedented way, what you're really doing is, as Israel, is seeking to totally control the narrative of what is happening there. It just goes against anything that we know about international rules of behavior when it comes to media.

SPEAKER_02: 24:21

Would you like to see some UN resolution, they don't always do very much, about access for media into conflict zones? Because this is unprecedented when you think of the wars that have been covered by many of my colleagues. But this one no.

SPEAKER_01: 24:42

Well, actually, it's interesting that you should raise that. Right now, I'm actually thinking of a little project on looking at strengthening access and protection of journalists in armed conflict situations. Under international humanitarian law, journalists are civilians and deserve to be protected like civilians. But journalists are a very special kind of civilian. They can't move away from the fighting. They have to go where the fighting is, where the danger is, because that's what they're supposed to report on. So they need to have a scene in something equivalent to essential workers. I think in our digital age, information is a survival right, particularly in the context of armed conflicts. And journalists should have full and free access to uh areas of conflict. And for that reason, I think we need to go back. I'm not asking for a revision of the Geneva Conventions, but I am asking to recognize journalists as being particularly relevant in armed conflict situations and therefore to find ways, first of all, of enhancing their protection. At the moment, I've been told by journalists that if you wear a jacket marked the press, it doesn't protect you. It actually makes you a target. Now that is just unacceptable. There needs to be greater respect for journalists from the belligerent parties, and if they do not, there has to be some tough punishment for that.

SPEAKER_02: 26:02

Part of me, you know, my heart lifted when I heard that that the information journalists provide out of a conflict zone should be treated as as essential, like medicine, like what aid workers do. Part of me, I wasn't quite convinced. What do you think?

SPEAKER_07: 26:27

Well, it's I wouldn't want to dismiss something until we know what the exactly is being proposed. But I have to confess I'm also a little bit skeptical here. I mean, journalists like medical workers, and indeed civilians in general, are already protected under IHL, under international humanitarian law, under the laws of war. And I'm not sure that any new kind of regulation or convention is going to make life safer for journalists where there is not an intention on the part of warring parties to observe it, which is what we're seeing in the context of Sudan, in Gaza. Gaza has been a horror story. The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates around 200 Palestinian journalists killed in the last two years. What we need is accountability where these abuses occur, and that has been conspicuously lacking. The IDF, you know, has a pretty shocking record on this issue, going back to the death of a British freelance journalist, uh James Miller in 2003, or the highly regarded Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akle, who was shot by an Israeli sniper near Janine in the West Bank 18 months before the Gaza War. There has been no accountability for these deaths. And in the case of Shireen Abu Akli, who had US citizenship, the US has done really no better. I mean, it promised to investigate this. I think there was supposed to have been an FBI probe. If there was, the results of it have never been released. So accountability is what's needed here rather than, I think, more rules and regulations.

SPEAKER_02: 28:05

Yeah, or maybe more worthy resolutions at the Human Rights Council. Now, good though they can be for putting something challenging on the agenda, like, for example, the right of journalists to stay alive and report with impunity in a conflict zone and not to be killed by one side or another. But as you say, Nick, there appears to be no accountability. And I don't know about you, but what I'm more worried about is like everything going in the other direction. That the way this has happened with this conflict, that one party is completely preventing international media from going in, that that it might set a precedent. I mean, if we look at the kind of governments we have around the world now, some of them will be looking at this and saying, well, oh, Israel did this, you know, Israel's an ally of ours, or some of them. Maybe we can do the same. And in fact, this was something I actually talked to Meren Rapport about, and he too is quite concerned that we could, rather than getting the accountability that you mentioned, that we could be going in the direction of more and more conflicts being completely shut to the press.

SPEAKER_08: 29:19

Certainly, why not? Why not tomorrow? Uh the US will uh invade Venezuela, something that's not impossible to foresee, and that uh they will they will not allow journalists to go in and report independently and kill the local journalists. Why not? If this went on for two years and I'm not talking about a conflict that is far away from the international public opinion, this is a conflict that has become the most important conflict in the world. There's nothing similar. So why should the US or I don't know whom not adopt the main policy and tell international press no? You you went silent when Israel did it. Why are you harassing us?

SPEAKER_02: 30:17

When I interviewed Irene Khan, the UN special rapporteur on the freedom of expression, she wanted to set up a project to work within the UN towards something that would require member states to undertake to grant access to journalists and to be required under international law. Law to grant them protection. Do you see this as possible or is it even now too little too late?

SPEAKER_08: 30:49

It is certainly too late for those uh more than 200 journalists who were killed in Gaza. But I don't think it's too late. I think it is possible. International law is not in a very good state now. I think this war in Gaza Israel challenged with the aid of the US, it really uh challenged the international order and the international law. We have a prime minister that is wanted for crimes against humanity, and he just completely ignores that. And uh but yes, I think it is very important first of all to uh have journalists act freely and being protected, at least as uh medical staff. Yes, I think it is important and uh should be adopted quickly because especially with new media, there are such a vast amount of information AI made, and uh without journalists going reliable journalists going to the ground to the witness with their own eyes on the ground what's going on, everything could be manipulated, and I think this is a great danger, not not for only for Israelis and Palestinians, but for the whole world.

SPEAKER_02: 32:15

Well that warning from Mehron Rappapur brings us just about to the end of this program. But I want, before we go, to ask you, Nick, for your final thoughts. How can we do better? How can we persuade those warring parties to work with us more? How can we fix this?

SPEAKER_07: 32:33

Well, I don't think there is any silver bullet here, and I entirely agree with Merrill's sort of broad concerns. I would say that I think it would be very difficult in in in most conflicts for any government to say this is a no-go area and and seal off access in the way that it was possible in Gaza, which is such a finite physical piece of geography. You know, President Assad did not open Syria to coverage by the press, but journalists still got in there and were still able to report atrocities that were going on. And conversely, you know, the Vietnam War, which was arguably the most intensively covered war of any, that access didn't on its own ensure a full understanding of the trajectory of the war. And reporting was overshadowed by uh, you know, an aggressively partisan narrative by the US administrations, successive US administrations. And it took years to get the full facts from the Pentagon papers and books like Neil Sheehan's wonderful study, Bright Shining Lie. So the other factor that any government has to take into account now, and which media also can take advantage of, is the huge access to better open source material. There is access to satellite imagery, and there is the huge amount of evidence that uh is available through social media, through citizen journalists, if you like, through what people film on their phones, that finds its way into public channels, which is absolutely making it difficult to hide completely what is going on on the ground.

SPEAKER_02: 34:24

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. In fact, it's, you know, somebody from UN Human Rights told me a few years ago that, you know, if you want to commit an atrocity, you can do it, but you will never be able to hide it anymore. You will be found out because there's just too much information and surveillance, in fact, out there. But what I would also say it's that what I mentioned at the start, that thing, the fog of war. Because there is such a huge welter of information out there. Online, some of it, as you said, Nick, is citizen journalism. But some of this propaganda, it's twisting the facts. All of it has to be verified. And this does make it actually quite difficult if you don't have professional journalists on the ground. So I would just say to wind up, there's another old saying that in war, truth is the first casualty. So, um, not to kind of bang our drum too loudly, but honestly, if you want at least some truth from a conflict zone, trust journalists and let us in. Okay, we understand we need to take some advice from the military, haven't forgotten that French colonel from all those years ago in Kosovo. But let us in, because you know, it's not a good look to try and hide a war. When, as Nick said, given all the information that's already out there, all the horrific things we have seen, particularly about Gaza, you still can't hide it. Thanks to all my interview partners and to Nick for joining us here in the studio. We hope you found this edition interesting. Join us again next time. Thank you for listening. A reminder you've been listening to Inside Geneva, a Swiss Info production. You can subscribe to us and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our previous episodes how the International Red Cross unites prisoners of war with their families, or why survivors of human rights violations turn to the UN in Geneva for justice. I'm Imogen Folks. Thanks again for listening.