Vigil to honour fallen journalists in downtown Vancouver

As the death toll in Gaza exceeds 28,000, a vigil at the Vancouver Art Gallery Thursday evening was held, focusing on honouring the journalists who have been killed in the Israel-Hamas conflict.

About 100 journalists have lost their lives covering the war, organizers of the vigil say, with at least 92 of them being Palestinian.

Katarina Sabados, a reporter with the Global Reporting Centre, says the casualties in that field of work are alarming.

“We need to ask ourselves what is lost when a journalist can’t report or when there are no journalists to report what isn’t coming out, that should be known,” she said.

Sabados says the international community should pay attention to the death toll, as journalists are responsible for relaying information from the region.

“For the Canadian public, it means that the news coming out of Gaza is limited and we can’t really get a full picture of what’s going on,” she said.

“We need to keep talking about it. We need to, in Canada, report to the best of our abilities what is going on so that none of those journalists that have died, died in vain,” she said.

Organizers of the event say the vigil was designed to be a moment to collectively reflect and reaffirm the commitment to press freedoms here and across the world.