Listen to this article:

​​Consider this image of a man fleeing bombs in Tehran with his dog.

The photo was posted on X by a user named @never_oppressed, who has a display picture which is a still of the Abbas Kiarostami masterpiece, Close-Up. The late Kiarostami’s home in the city of Chizar in Iran was recently damaged by US-Israeli missiles and bombs.

A film students’ staple, Kiarostami’s Close-Up lifted a veil from narrative story-telling which many did not quite know existed in the first place. 

The film is adapted from a real-life incident in which a man pretended to be a famous Iranian filmmaker, got some people to act for him while pretending to make a film and got into trouble in the process. All its actors – everyone from the man, the filmmaker, a reporter, the judge, the passers by, a passenger, to Kiarostami himself – play themselves. This pretence-stripped, brazen telling of an apparently insignificant tale has always enraptured audiences. Many have marvelled at it, at why one of Iran’s most famous cinematic minds, operating as he was under crushing censorship, treated a seemingly tiny story so strangely. But in collapsing the extent to which your disbelief will need to be suspended to watch the film, Kiarostami spoke a new language. His vision of reality gently prodded at a viewer’s preconceptions. The academic Hamid Dabashi likened this fact-as-fantasy translucence to a diaphanous lens. 

Thirty-five years later, in the same city in which Close-Up was shot, this lens and what it shows lends itself to distinct importance. 

User @never_oppressed notes in their post that the photograph they have posted is by one Pooria Hatami. A Google search points to the fact that the Hatami who took the photo is possibly the same Hatami who is a Tehran-based photographer. “Through nature and people, I tell stories,” says the landing page of what appears to be Hatami’s website.

Most of us are not familiar with Hatami. We have seen their photo and known at the back of our minds that this is a person who instead of running from an explosion, waits around to photograph what emerges of it. We have identified the four remarkable aspects of their photograph – that there is smoke in the background, that a city sprawls between the smoke and the foreground, that a sweet dog stares at the cameraman and that with the dog is a man who is as close as can be to a pictorial representation of the word ‘afraid’.

A man and his dog fleeing bombs in Tehran. Photo by Pooria Hatami. pic.twitter.com/f9WO6FvCPf — kev joon (@never_oppressed) March 28, 2026

A man and his dog fleeing bombs in Tehran.

Photo by Pooria Hatami. pic.twitter.com/f9WO6FvCPf

— kev joon (@never_oppressed) March 28, 2026

In that city where Kiarostami’s camera once allowed fact to replay itself, another camera has rallied to collapse the distance between a scrolling audience and the victims of man-made cruelty. The dog, with its brow furrowed with god-knows-what worry, its tongue out, and a sense of preoccupation that has taken over its whole body, is the photographer’s punctum. It is the point at which the pin pricks us. 

But if we keep aside the marvels of the photograph’s composition, that line in @never_oppressed’s rapidly viral post on X, crediting Hatami for the devastating image they have possibly captured brings to us a reality we would do well to acknowledge – that we only get to know about a war’s atrocities because of the people who for some reason have taken it upon themselves to show it to us.

In some societies, such people are called journalists. 

In some others, they are branded members of organisations it is sort of okay to relentlessly target.

Two days ago, Israel killed three wartime journalists in Lebanon and immediately afterwards, said that one of them was a “Hezbollah Radwan Force terrorist under the guise of a journalist”. This journalist was Ali Shoeib, who worked at the Hezbollah-owned Al Manar television channel. Israel, as is its wont, offered no evidence or elaboration on its claim that the journalist was not, in fact, a journalist. The IDF later publicised images of one of the journalists it had killed in military fatigues, but with rippling candour told Fox News that the photo “was photoshopped.” 

Since early March, in addition to its increasingly aggressive occupation in the West Bank, genocide in Gaza and strikes on Iran, Israel has been invading parts of Lebanon where it says it aims to fight the Iran-backed group, Hezbollah. 

Ali Shoeib, along with Al Mayadeen channel journalists Fatima Ftouni and Mohammed Ftouni, were struck as they were driving far from the frontlines. 

Later reports said that the IDF have claimed that Mohammed Ftouni was also a Hezbollah operative. It did not offer evidence for this either. News outlets have faithfully reported these claims, making them part of social media shares.

But indeed, a lot of social media users were already familiar with Shoeib and the Ftounis, thanks to the fact that they were indefatigable war reporters and feature in or have shot brave video snippets from the frontline of Israel’s attack on Lebanon. 

Some shared footage of Ali Shoeib reporting right in front of Israeli soldiers in 2022 and 2023, his alleged connections with ‘terrorism’ not rendering him dangerous enough for the soldiers to apprehend him then.

🚨Here’s Ali Shoaib reporting from right next to Israeli soldiers in Sep 2023 If he was a “Radwan force elite combatant,” why didn’t they arrest him? how come they didn’t feel threatened by him while standing literally next to him? Israel murdered a journalist in broad daylight… pic.twitter.com/uBt6LI5Jmp — Muhammad Shehada (@muhammadshehad2) March 29, 2026

🚨Here’s Ali Shoaib reporting from right next to Israeli soldiers in Sep 2023

If he was a “Radwan force elite combatant,” why didn’t they arrest him? how come they didn’t feel threatened by him while standing literally next to him?

Israel murdered a journalist in broad daylight… pic.twitter.com/uBt6LI5Jmp

— Muhammad Shehada (@muhammadshehad2) March 29, 2026

VIDEO | Footage shows late Al-Manar correspondent Ali Shoeib confronting Israeli soldiers on 19 September 2022 in the occupied Shebaa Farms, south Lebanon. pic.twitter.com/iCqOqmqWNn — The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) March 28, 2026

VIDEO | Footage shows late Al-Manar correspondent Ali Shoeib confronting Israeli soldiers on 19 September 2022 in the occupied Shebaa Farms, south Lebanon. pic.twitter.com/iCqOqmqWNn

— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) March 28, 2026

Fatima Ftouni’s video broadcasts were shared millions of times. Most of them were shot by her brother, Mohammed. Earlier this month, the two had reported on the death of seven of their own family members in an Israeli strike in Southern Lebanon. 

مراسلة #الميادين فاطمة فتوني: “ارتقاء 7 شهد|ء من أفراد عائلتي من جراء العدوان الإسرائيلي على الجنوب”. @ftounifatima pic.twitter.com/xzrx5GD2IC — الميادين لبنان (@mayadeenlebanon) March 2, 2026

مراسلة #الميادين فاطمة فتوني:

“ارتقاء 7 شهد|ء من أفراد عائلتي من جراء العدوان الإسرائيلي على الجنوب”. @ftounifatima pic.twitter.com/xzrx5GD2IC

— الميادين لبنان (@mayadeenlebanon) March 2, 2026

Many of Fatima Ftouni’s posts show her reporting in a ‘press’ helmet and vest on a territory under attack. It is true that she valorised the resistance. Shoeib too had pro-Hezbollah sympathies, translations of his broadcasts indicate. But it is also true that if the crime of picking a side is grounds to kill a journalist, then the biggest press institutions of the Global North would run the risk of decimation in a conflict. At best, the journalists hoped their reporting would foster an understanding of their home and world. At worst, their reporting reflected the fact that they hated those who were attacking places they inhabited.

Sitting kilometres away, we can only marvel at the legions of Ali Shoeibs and Fatimas and Mohammed Ftounis who run towards war, who speak in a language we do not know, but whose journalism manages to be the point at which the pin pricks us. 

In an Associated Press video of the site of the attack on the three, journalist Hussain Sayeed Naji is heard asking while sifting through the carnage, “How is the international press to witness what Israel is doing, committing massacres against the voice of the media?” 

The Committee to Protect Journalists’s special report last year said that more journalists and media workers were killed in 2025 than in any year since it began collecting data more than three decades ago. Of the 129 journalists who died, 86 were felled by Israeli fire.

The claim that a journalist, or an activist, has designs in excess of the calling of their profession is not a new ploy. For forces like the IDF and their authoritarian counterparts worldwide, which use disinformation on a daily basis, find it hard to except the fact that there are individuals whose only interest is to document what happens on the ground. But then, if a “terrorist” is, “under the guise of a journalist,” simply reporting on the horrors of war and ensuring the viewer gets to see for once what a 21st century invasion looks like, are they playing journalist or terrorist? Does the fact of their journalism override the IDF’s’ terrorism’  fantasy? This is a problem for Abbas Kiarostami’s casting director to solve.

A condensed version of this essay appeared in The Wire‘s Sunday Newsletter.

© The Wire