On the morning of Saturday, October 7, 2023, the first information from correspondents in Jerusalem reached the head of Le Monde's international desk in Paris shortly after 7am. From Jerusalem to Beirut, via Washington, Cairo and the Middle East desk at the newspaper's Paris office, staff mobilized immediately to cover the massacres carried out by Hamas, followed by the war waged by Israel in retaliation.

For the past year, a dozen journalists from the international desk have been telling the story of this conflict, unprecedented in its scale, violence, duration and implications, but also in the working conditions imposed on journalists by the closure of the main theater of war, the Gaza Strip, as decreed by the Israeli authorities.

Other desks at the newspaper are involved in this work: photo, video and infographics use the images that emerge from the territory, thanks to social media and Palestinian journalists still on the ground, checking their origin and analyzing satellite data, which show from the sky a territory they cannot enter.

From bombed-out Gaza, eyewitness accounts arrive via a fragile thread of telephone conversations and texts and voice messages sent over the internet, power cuts allowing. These technical obstacles are compounded by the difficulty of maintaining reliable sources, at a distance and amid chaos. The paper's regular contributors continue to carry out this work, while themselves experiencing trauma, tossed from one "safe zone" to another by the Israeli army, and subjected to its massive bombings. Contacts already known to our journalists before the war help to provide information, images and testimonies. Members of humanitarian organizations, who still have access to the Gaza Strip, also report on the reality of life there.

As the weeks went by following the initial attack and the unprecedented information blackout wore on, the asymmetry in access to sources became more striking. Immediately after October 7, the Israeli army, police and political authorities organized press conferences in English, allowed supervised access to the devastated kibbutzim and offered press tours, under strict military control, in a Gaza Strip already in ruins.

Over the past year, correspondents and special envoys have been able to work in Israel, meeting the families of victims and those of the hostages of October 7, displaced persons from the northern front to the Lebanese border, political leaders, intellectuals, soldiers... all of whom give an insight into the impact of the war on Israeli society. The occupied West Bank is more or less accessible, depending on Israeli military operations, and reports from this part of the Palestinian population affected by the war are possible. Gaza, however, remains out of reach.