Cover of NDTV's book More News is Good News: Untold Stories from 25 Years of Television News
The magnitude of what we had witnessed - the assembly and the firing of the rocket - was too big not to report. It would have been patently dishonest to disregard this facet of the war. And so at around 3.30 p.m. local time, around 7 p.m. Indian time, the report aired as a first-hand account of how Hamas assembled and fired a rocket from a heavily built-up part of Gaza. To us, it was clear within reasonable doubt that it was Hamas, a conclusion based on two factors. One, the use of that prime location twice over in the course of a week, which greatly diminishes the involvement of one of the smaller players. Two, the rocket was not fired at random, but was one of a coordinated flurry of rockets launched before the ceasefire kicked in, again very much suggesting the handiwork of Hamas.
In a matter of hours, the story had gone viral, picked up by most major international newspapers, agencies, TV networks and online news sites. Predictably, the IDF leapt on to the story, posting links on their social media feeds. The euphoria over the worldwide attention the story - and NDTV - was receiving was offset by its mounting use by Israel in its propaganda war. This was Israel's 'I told you so' moment, proof that the media had, so far, disregarded Hamas's blatantly unethical war tactics. I followed up the report's airing on NDTV with phone-ins pointing out that this was a deeply disingenuous position, that the report in no way exonerated Israel for the brutality of its assault on Gaza, and that we had chronicled several instances in which the IDF had attacked locations from where there was no ostensible evidence of rockets having been fired.
Through all of this, we tried to remain in touch with Fatima. She was furious. 'Why did you show this?' she said. 'Why did you not tell me? If you had told me I would have never let you show this!' We tried to explain to her that this was hardly by design - we happened to chance upon the rocket being assembled and fired; so we reported it. It was our job as journalists. And that we kept it from her for her own protection. But she was unmoved. 'Do you know they have come to me, looking for you? I cannot leave my home!' She did not specify who 'they' referred to. She did not need to. We intensified our efforts to reach out to Hamas officials, directly and via India's permanent mission in Ramallah in the West Bank to ensure no harm came to Fatima. About a week later, we received word that while she had been questioned about us, there was no other risk. The news came as a relief. But Fatima had stopped taking our calls - a deeply unfortunate turn of events.
Some of the pro-Palestinian activists (who had helped us locate Fatima) were also disturbed, though with less vehemence. One of them wished we had supplied more context, pointing out that the Gaza resistance has hardly any space to fight from. We told them about our drive to Rafah where we could see open spaces from which the resistance could fight if they chose to: orchards, industrial areas, and semi-occupied areas. Of course fighting in open areas poses a greater risk; Hamas could be picked off far more easily. But that is a risk combatants take, rather than the more craven approach of using civilian areas, just as the three men in the tent had done, triggering the rocket a day later from a concealed location at a safe distance from the launch site. It was a military strategy that degraded the moral high ground which the resistance could justifiably occupy.
It was also argued that given the ineffectual, low-grade nature of Hamas's missiles, assembled in clandestine workshops in Gaza, their launching at Israeli targets was largely symbolic. Even by the IDF's own admission, 90 per cent of the rockets land in open spaces or are picked off by Iron Dome. (Of late, the IDF claimed that Hamas had acquired, and was using, more sophisticated and longer-range Chinese- or Iranian-made missiles. That, however, didn't seem to reduce the failure rate of 90 per cent.) But to argue that Hamas rockets are largely an act of token defiance is to make an even stronger case to cut down on the number of rockets fired. (By the end of the war, Hamas may have fired about 4,000 rockets at Israeli cities, an average of about eighty rockets a day.) Or at least to realign the rockets away from Israeli towns and settlements and towards military targets. Why give Israel even the slightest justification to retaliate, with brutal force?