^{Palestinian photojournalist Mu’taz Azaiza speaks to the crowd at the end of the “14th National March For Palestine” in London, England, May 18, 2024. Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.Dan Kitwood/Getty Images}

By David Isaac

A Palestinian photojournalist who rose to fame covering the Gaza War revealed in a recent podcast that Hamas controlled the media and reporters didn’t dare publicize criticism of the terrorist group.

Mu’taz Azaiza, named to the 2024 TIME100 List in the “Icons” category, and feted by the likes of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and recently photographed with rapper Macklemore, revealed in a Sept. 3 episode of the podcast Taqarab (“Closer Ties”), that only those reports Hamas wanted exited the Gaza Strip.

Every journalist was in a Hamas-run group chat called SMART, Azaiza told podcast host Ahmad al-Biqawi. “Its manager was the media director of the Rafah crossing.”

When a Gazan would say something against Hamas, no one would cover it. “When someone gets out of the ambulance and says, ‘May God punish Hamas,’ while I’m filming, the people around him turn their camera away,” he said.

“The norm is not to publish it?” al-Biqawi asked.

“Many people lowered the camera when someone spoke like this,” Azaiza confirmed.

Unlike others, Azaiza said he did cover the criticism: “Honestly, I couldn’t bring myself to turn my eyes or my camera away from what he was saying. In the end he was blaming his government which was responsible for him and had brought him into a war.”

He admitted to an “inner conflict,” before deciding to publicize the negative attitudes of Gazans. “I had never seen a Gaza journalist publish something like this.”

Azaiza, who has since become a critic of Hamas, said he had to leave after publishing what Hamas didn’t want reported. According to the podcast’s bio of Azaiza, he left Gaza for Egypt prior to the closing of the Rafah border in early May 2024. He now lives in Qatar.

Azaiza, though on the outs with Hamas, can hardly be said to support Israel.

He said as a child that he supported Hamas and would wear the terror group’s headband, which sold for a shekel a piece outside his school. When he heard of the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, announced by Hamas commander Mohammed Deif that morning, and saw video of the invasion, which led to the slaughter of more than 1,200, he admitted it gave him “goosebumps.”

Azaiza also confessed to self-censoring. Filming a crowd of Palestinians beating and hitting Israeli hostages led out of a Hamas jeep, he said he didn’t publish the video. “Why? Because I did not want to ruin the lives of the people who were filmed. I understood that Israel would use those videos to identify every person who was there and eliminate them.”

He said it didn’t occur to him to hit or spit on the hostages. “Maybe that was because of the awareness Gaza had given me during the previous period: that the occupation does not forget, watches every detail and loves revenge,” he said, revealing that his motivation was less out of empathy than fear of retribution.

Azaiza, who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, supports terrorism—he uses the Palestinian euphemism “resistance”—but only when it leads to the desired outcome.

“I support resistance. I support armed resistance. I’m with it. But only when it serves an interest, as a tool that achieves a result,” he said.

To his mind, Oct. 7 did not lead to the right result. He criticized Hamas for leading Gaza into a war that led to the destruction of large parts of the Strip and the deaths of thousands. “[Hamas] brought us back to the Middle Ages,” he said.