For several days, between the morning of Friday, October 27, and Tuesday, October 30, Le Monde had no news from Hassan Jaber, the newspaper's veteran fixer in the Gaza Strip. Jaber is one of those seasoned professionals, over 60 years old, who has accompanied nearly half a dozen of the publication's correspondents through not only the geography of the Palestinian enclave, but also the political complexities of Hamas, the Islamist party that has administered this small territory since 2007. Without him, much of Le Monde's reporting in recent years would not have been possible. He and his family have been trapped under intensive Israeli bombing for the past three weeks.

Since October 7 and the Hamas terrorist operations in Israel, no journalist has been able to enter the Gaza Strip. The area is completely sealed off by the Jewish state, which has deployed its army all along and to the north of the enclave. To the south, Egypt is not letting the press through either.

In Jerusalem, our journalist Clothilde Mraffko spends long hours every day waiting for calls, text messages and the odd video from Palestinian colleagues in Gaza, but also from contacts she has made there over the years. "It's exhausting work," she said. "Not only do people in Gaza communicate as and when they can, depending on internet connections and if they can find a way to recharge their mobile phones since electricity was cut off on October 9, but they have often lost loved ones in the bombings. More than just the precise information they tell me, I'm often one of their rare outside contacts, with whom they can open up a little."

Outside the enclave, in Israeli territory, photographers stand a few hundred meters from the barbed wire and walls that enclose the Gaza Strip. This is the only spot from which they can capture the black smoke of burnt-out buildings and the ruins of neighborhoods destroyed by the bombings. Gaza City is only an hour from Tel Aviv, not much more from Jerusalem, and yet it's as if two separate worlds had been created. How can we be sure of what's going on inside Gaza?

Even before this violent conflict, journalistic coverage of the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip had been challenged since the early 2000s by Israeli military incursions, bombings, blockades of the enclave, bureaucracy, censorship and the conflicting interests of the Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority and, since 2007, Hamas.

All of Le Monde's correspondents for the past 20 years remember the Erez border crossing point between Israel and the Gaza Strip, the construction of which began during the second Intifada (2000-2005): Like an enormous airport terminal, where Israeli soldiers observed journalists, diplomats and Palestinians with work permits from desks high above the ground, speaking to them over a loudspeaker.

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