An evocative, gripping account of an overlooked toll of the war in the Middle East is the epitome of extensive on-the-ground reporting paying dividends to advance AP journalism.
The team of Adam Geller, Bram Janssen and Jalal Bwaitel spent six days in and around Jenin, enduring significant challenges and safety risks but also delivering impressive results.
The AP journalists, a partnership between enterprise and Middle East news, built a rapport with a family whose 15-year-old son had been killed in a May raid. They did extended interviews with them twice at their home, where they showed his bedroom and computer, as well as the site where the boy was killed. Later, when they were visiting the cemetery where he is buried, the family came to clean his grave, allowing photos and video to be taken as his mother wept on his headstone.
On the team’s second day there, they were in the Jenin refugee camp when Israeli forces launched a surprise raid, prompting a quick evacuation. As troops pulled back, Janssen was able to capture photos from inside a hospital ER and the funeral procession of one of the militants killed. By witnessing a raid firsthand, Geller was able to explain what life in the West Bank is like and how suddenly the camp regularly turns into a war zone.
Later in their time in Jenin, they were close enough to the site of another raid to reach a morgue where family members of a teen who’d just been killed were gathered around his body and agreed to both interviews and photos.
Bwaitel helped overcome huge obstacles on the ground. Multiple subjects declined to be identified by name or turned down requests, concerned about drawing attention to themselves from the military. But Bwaitel diligently worked his contacts, enabling connections and reporting including a teen held for months without charge in an Israeli prison who told AP he thought it was important for the world to know what Israeli authorities were doing.
Judges were impressed by the on-the-ground view from the violence-torn West Bank city and the AP’s ability to explore the deaths of teenagers in the conflict, including the cost to their families.
For a masterful narrative told in all formats, and with hand-in-hand partnership in what was among AP’s best in going deep about the war nearly one year into the fighting, Geller, Janssen and Bwaitel earn this week’s Best of the AP — First Winner.
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