TEHRAN – Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” describes the terrible ordinariness of a system that makes atrocity routine. In Gaza this October, the phrase revealed itself in flesh and blood.

Saleh Al-Jaafrawi — 27, a freelance reporter who had become, in the two-year Israeli genocidal campaign, one of Gaza’s most visible witnesses — was shot dead in Sabra days after a ceasefire.

Reporters say he was wearing a press vest and was killed by members of an Israeli-backed armed militia operating inside Gaza. This is not the roar of a bombardment; this is the soft machinery that keeps criminality functioning when the world briefly looks away.

Saleh’s life was a testimony. He broadcast from bombed neighborhoods and hospitals, filmed children amid blackouts, and translated rubble into names and faces the world could not ignore.

Saleh’s last public words were simple and urgent: gratitude to the millions who protested, helped, and amplified Gaza’s suffering — and a warning: “The military war has ended, but many other struggles will unfold in the coming days.”

Those lines were not elegy but instruction: the fight for truth and memory does not end when the bombs slow. It endures in the quieter battles over who may testify, who may live, and who may be erased.

That erasure is strategic. The deliberate use of proxy militias or collaborator networks to settle scores, intimidate communities, or silence critics turns cruelty into policy with plausible deniability.

When a regime outsources killing to local proxies, it maintains the appearance of distance while still harvesting the daily dividends: a fractured society, terrorized civilians, and the quiet elimination of inconvenient witnesses.

Israel’s own recent admissions about empowering local actors to weaken Hamas strip away any illusion of disorder. What might once have been dismissed as chaos now reads as a deliberate tactic.

The regime’s systematic targeting of journalists has reached a point where the numbers themselves constitute evidence of intent. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists’ September report, at least 235 reporters and media workers have been killed since October 7, 2023 — the highest toll ever recorded against the press in any modern conflict. This figure includes journalists slain not only in Gaza but also in Yemen, Lebanon, and Iran.

In 2024 alone, Israel was responsible for 85 of the 124 journalists killed worldwide, making that year the deadliest in the Committee’s four decades of documentation.

When those who document atrocities are targeted, the archive of evidence withers; impunity finds room to grow.

What followed Saleh’s death was a moral X-ray of the internet age: the complicit silence of the Western commercially-controlled mainstream media echoed alongside dirges and funeral processions, as well as screenshots circulating of Israeli users posting with glee over his murder.

To revel in the killing of a 27-year-old Gazan journalist — visibly marked with “PRESS” and who had already survived two years of Israel’s genocidal campaign — is to revel in the annihilation of witness itself. That spectacle of gloating is not incidental; it exposes a social permission to erase, to distort, and to render the unbearable ordinary.

That public exultation is not incidental; it signals a social license to erase, to distort, to render the unbearable ordinary. Such dehumanization is not an afterthought; it is the prelude and the justification for elimination.

We must treat his murder as more than an isolated tragedy. The legal and moral demand is simple and urgent: independent, international investigations into attacks on journalists; protective measures for reporters and media workers; and scrutiny of a murderous regime that converts a ceasefire into a quieter season of reprisals.

Arendt’s warning was not that evil would always appear flamboyant, but that it would triumph whenever ordinary institutions and people failed to notice, name, and act.

Saleh asked the world to stay with Gaza. His final words were both thanks and instructions. If we believe in truth — and in the proposition that a free press is the first line of defense against forgetfulness — then to honor him is not only to lament; it is to insist: document, investigate, protect, and spread Saleh’s message.

Otherwise, the lull will not be a peace at all, but merely a pause in which memory is buried and the banality of evil resumes its work.