Walid Batrawi: Reporting Palestine, Training Journalists, and Investigating Gaza From Canada

Palestinian journalist Walid Batrawi, originally from Ramallah and now living in Canada after arriving about two years ago, outlines a career that began in 1991 and moved across international and regional outlets including CBC in Jerusalem (1992), ABC Australia, the BBC, and Al Jazeera English, where he became a West Bank correspondent when the channel launched in 2007. After years of daily reporting from the West Bank, he shifted into media development, working with BBC World Service Trust (later BBC Media Action) and Internews, before BBC Media Action operations in Palestine shut down in 2017 due to funding, pushing him into freelancing. Batrawi describes frequently traveling for work, including repeated trips to Gaza and training journalists there on safety and hostile-environment practices, noting he was in Gaza a month before the war and last trained there in May 2023, when an Israeli attack halted the course and he was confined to a hotel for six days until evacuation. He explains how his investigative journalism path began in 2005 when an NGO asked him to write a manual—Al Mustaqsi (“The Investigator”)—which he describes as the first investigative journalism manual in the Arab world, tailored to Palestine and designed for both trainers and journalists. He later coached investigations with ARIJ, often mentoring Gaza-based journalists remotely and meeting in third countries because the West Bank and Gaza were disconnected and communications were risky and difficult. Batrawi highlights his role with Forbidden Stories in Paris on the Gaza Project investigating the targeted killing of Palestinian journalists, emphasizing that investigative work requires proving widely suspected claims through repeated verification, cross-checking, and rejecting unreliable testimony, while noting that evidence in Gaza can be difficult to preserve or trace. He says working from Canada provided focus, access to resources, time-zone advantages for interviewing sources, and greater peace of mind, even as he argues access to Gaza and face-to-face training remain major constraints.

He identifies safety, movement restrictions, communications blackouts, and increased harassment and violence against journalists—ranging from tear gas and stun grenades to beatings and killings—as key challenges, and stresses that risk assessment must guide decisions even when journalists are highly motivated. Batrawi also reflects on the tension between safety and freedom of expression in Canada, describing backlash and hate speech after publishing an article in The Globe and Mail and noting he is often viewed first as Palestinian rather than a journalist. He argues exiled and international journalists in Canada lack clear pathways into Canadian newsrooms and that visibility, networking, and practical roles (contributors, fact-checkers, consultants) are needed—work he says he is pursuing with Journalists for Human Rights. Using examples from Gaza and Yemen, he illustrates how locally connected journalists can quickly reach key sources and provide on-the-ground context that newsrooms cannot replicate by searching online. He calls for stronger cross-border investigative collaboration and more meaningful action from journalist-protection institutions beyond statements and conferences, including pressure to allow journalists into Gaza and to hold perpetrators accountable in cases such as Shireen Abu Akleh. Throughout, he insists that while impartiality is difficult when journalists are part of the story, accuracy comes from verified facts, separating rumor from evidence, building audience trust, and treating journalism as the first draft of history.