Dearborn community members hold candlelight vigil in honor of journalists killed in Gaza
DEARBORN, Mich. (CBS DETROIT) - Community members across eight different organizations gathered in Dearborn Wednesday with one mission in mind, to give power to journalists, specifically those covering the war in Gaza.
"We here to spread awareness about what is going on but we are also here to spread awareness on the war on journalists," event organizer Adam Abusalah says.
Lying on the grass, lifeless and motionless, was a display of several martyr bags representing the bodies of journalists. Now, more than 100, according to the government media office in Gaza, were killed while reporting on the war.
"Israel is continuing to kill journalists every single day not only in Gaza but they are killing journalists even in Lebanon," Abusalah says.
Each martyr bag was dressed in a press jacket, similar to the press jacket Palestine TV's Mohammed Abu Hatab was wearing 30 minutes before he and 11 members of his family were killed in an Israeli airstrike on November 2nd.
It's nearly the same press jacket Al Jazeera Arabic cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa wore before he was killed in an airstrike in the southern Gaza Strip on Dec. 15.
His colleague, Wael Dahdouh, a reporter for Al Jazeera, whose wife, son and daughter were also killed in an airstrike, continues to wear that same press jacket after being shot by an Israeli sniper the same day.
However, Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh did not survive while reporting on the job when she was killed by the Israeli military back in May 2022.
"We're not going to be silenced. Israel is targeting our journalists because they are the voices and voices of people of Gaza," Canton resident Ruba Odeh says.
All of the names of journalists killed by Israel, before or after Oct. 7, were displayed on a large digital billboard truck during Wednesday night's candlelight vigil in Dearborn.
Unlike numbers reported by the government media office in Gaza, the Committee to Protect Journalists says that as of Dec. 23, its count indicates at least 69 journalists, not 100, have been killed: 62 Palestinian, four Israeli, and three Lebanese.
While the Israeli government has openly and repeatedly denied any accusations of deliberately targeting journalists, it wasn't long ago on Nov. 9 that Israel parliament member Danny Danon called for the "elimination" of journalists "who participated in covering the massacre," according to a post written in Hebrew on X.
Barbara Weinberg-Barefield, a retired U.S. journalist whose parents were Holocaust survivors, says despite Israeli government officials' denial of any targeting of journalists covering the war, specifically in Gaza, the actions of its military say otherwise.
"It's hard to believe if you look at what's going on. Huge cities and neighborhoods are being demolished. They are telling them to go south, and then they are bombing them in the south," Weinberg-Barefield says.
Community members in Dearborn, like Odeh, hope their words bring more attention not only to what is happening in Gaza but also, to what many are calling a war on journalists.
"Our main goal here is a ceasefire. Stop the killing, stop the bombing. We can move onto politics later, but I think the important thing right now is to put an end to the violence," Odeh says.