One of Palestinian filmmaker Bisan Owda’s Instagram posts from early January begins with these words: “2:09 am. Can you sleep while this sound is in your head?” When the viewer unmutes the post, they hear a loud, unwavering drone that continues through the next two frames, time-stamped 3:08 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. “This is the unmanned plane and the buzzling sound is what we have been hearing for almost 20 years . . . We call it in Arabic, ZANNANA,” Owda writes, using a word that means a buzzing sound or noisemaker. “This sound is loud because, they are multiple ones and so close! It’s an Israeli war craft, it bombs, destroyes and kills.” Sonic warfare, which causes post-traumatic stress disorder by paralyzing communities with fear, is the kind of thing that Palestinians are used to, and with Owda’s documentation, the rest of the world can also now hear it.
More than 4.1 million people currently follow twenty-five-year-old Owda’s Instagram channel, where she posts daily accounts of human, cultural, and capital loss—the devastation of a tiny strip of occupied land described as an open-air prison by rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Over the past few months, Owda and other Palestinian journalists and media workers, including Plestia Alaqad and Hind Khoudary, have broadcast the destruction and violence of Israeli attacks to millions of social media followers through their on-the-ground, immediate, unfiltered, and personal video stories. (Alaqad left Gaza in November but continues to post on the crisis from afar.) Twenty-four-year-old photojournalist Motaz Azaiza once captured joyful images for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), such as this photo of smiling Palestinian women wearing traditional tatreez embroidery. With an audience of 18.5 million on Instagram and additional accounts on TikTok and Twitter, he kept telling the stories of his people until he made the difficult decision to evacuate in late January.
