In the spring of 2021, a young man stood in the courtyard of his family’s home in Sheikh Jarrah and looked directly into his phone camera. Mohammed El-Kurd was not giving a press conference. He was not issuing a statement. He was doing something that older forms of journalism had rarely managed: he was simply there, narrating, in real time, the incremental erasure of the neighborhood where he had grown up.
That directness — unmediated, unscheduled, unfiltered — would reach millions of people who had never heard of Sheikh Jarrah. It helped trigger a global wave of solidarity that Israeli officials and mainstream Western newsrooms alike were slow to anticipate. It was also, in many ways, a template for what young Palestinian social media activism has become: a form of bearing witness that is simultaneously personal, political, and structurally precarious.
Sheikh Jarrah and the El-Kurds: A Family Story Becomes a Global Flash Point
Mohammed El-Kurd and his twin sister Muna grew up in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem, where Palestinian families have faced decades of legal pressure from Israeli settler organizations seeking to displace them from properties claimed under Israeli law dating to the pre-1948 period. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and UN experts have described the forced displacement of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah as a potential violation of international humanitarian law and, in the broader context of Israeli policy across East Jerusalem, a component of what they characterize as systematic dispossession.
In the months leading up to and during the May 2021 Israeli military offensive on Gaza, Mohammed and Muna El-Kurd posted daily — sometimes hourly — video dispatches, photographs, and written threads documenting settler incursions into their home, court hearings, and neighborhood protests. Mohammed’s Instagram following surpassed one million. Time magazine named him one of its 100 Most Influential People of 2021. He was subsequently appointed Palestine correspondent for The Nation, becoming, at twenty-three, one of the most widely read Palestinian writers in the English-language press.
His poetry collection, Rifqa, published by Haymarket Books in 2021, extended the same method — granular, domestic, rooted in the specific textures of his family’s life — into a literary form. Muna’s parallel presence on Twitter (now X) brought the same material to audiences who processed news primarily through short text. Together, they demonstrated that the Palestinian story, told by Palestinians in their own idiom and on their own timeline, could break through the framing conventions that had long governed its coverage in Western outlets.
Bisan Owda: Documenting Gaza From Inside the Siege
When Israel launched its large-scale military offensive on Gaza in October 2023, the strip’s population of roughly 2.3 million people — already living under a blockade that the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) had repeatedly described as devastating to the territory’s economy — found themselves facing what the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) would describe as a humanitarian catastrophe of exceptional scale.
Among those who kept filming was Bisan Owda, a twenty-five-year-old filmmaker and activist from Gaza City. Her dispatches, posted to Instagram under the handle wizard_bisan3, began with a now-iconic phrase — “I’m Bisan from Gaza, and I’m still alive” — that carried, in its plainness, the full weight of what survival in those conditions required. She documented displacement, the destruction of residential neighborhoods, the collapse of the health system, and the deaths of people she knew by name.
In May 2024, Owda was awarded a Peabody Award — one of the most prestigious honors in broadcast and digital journalism — alongside a group of Palestinian journalists working in Gaza. The Peabody Board cited their “extraordinary feat of eyewitness reporting” conducted “at great personal risk.” The recognition was significant not only as an honor but as an institutional acknowledgment that what these journalists were doing constituted journalism: rigorous, consequential, and irreplaceable.
Plestia Alaqad and the New Vocabulary of Witness
Plestia Alaqad, a twenty-two-year-old journalist and photographer from Gaza, gained an international following in the early weeks of the October 2023 offensive through Instagram and TikTok posts that combined photojournalism with direct address. Her images — of destroyed streets, displaced families sheltering in schools, the faces of children — were shared by millions and picked up by major international outlets including the BBC and The Guardian.
Alaqad eventually evacuated Gaza and has continued reporting and speaking publicly from abroad. Her account of what she witnessed, and the sheer volume of her reach, illustrated a shift that media scholars and press freedom organizations have been tracking with increasing urgency: in conflict zones where international journalists face severe access restrictions, local reporters and citizen journalists — armed with smartphones and social media accounts — have become the primary conduit of visual documentation to the outside world.
Platform Power: Suspension, Shadow-Banning, and the Fight for Visibility
The reach of young Palestinian social media activism has not gone uncontested. Human Rights Watch published a report in December 2023 documenting a pattern of content moderation on Meta platforms — Facebook and Instagram — that disproportionately suppressed Palestinian voices during the October 2023 offensive. The report cited hundreds of cases of content removal, account restrictions, and reduced reach affecting journalists, activists, and ordinary users posting about Gaza. Meta acknowledged “a bug” affecting some content but disputed the scope of the problem.
Palestinian digital rights advocates, including the organization 7amleh — the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media — have documented similar patterns across multiple platforms going back years, cataloguing what they describe as systemic under-enforcement of rules against incitement when the targets are Palestinian, and over-enforcement when the speakers are Palestinian. Muna El-Kurd and others have described having posts removed or accounts temporarily suspended during precisely the moments when their documentation was most urgently needed.
The tension is structural. The platforms that have given young Palestinian activists an unprecedented ability to speak directly to a global audience are the same platforms whose content moderation systems — shaped by advertiser pressure, regulatory environments, and, according to critics, political lobbying — have the capacity to silence them at will. What Mohammed El-Kurd, Bisan Owda, Plestia Alaqad, and their peers have built is real and consequential. It is also, as they know better than anyone, fragile.
Sources
- Human Rights Watch, Meta’s Broken Promises: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content on Instagram and Facebook, December 2023
- OCHA oPt, humanitarian situation reports on Gaza, October–December 2023, ochaopt.org
- UNCTAD, Report on UNCTAD Assistance to the Palestinian People, 2022
- Peabody Awards, 2024 announcement citing Palestinian journalists in Gaza, peabodyawards.com
- 7amleh — Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, digital rights reports, 7amleh.org
- Mohammed El-Kurd, Rifqa, Haymarket Books, 2021
- Time magazine, 100 Most Influential People 2021
- Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports on Sheikh Jarrah and East Jerusalem, 2021
