The camera battery is at seventy-three percent. Mohammed checks it before going out, every morning, the small display on the left side of the Sony, and the number is always seventy-three because the building's generator shuts off before the charge reaches a hundred, shuts off at seventy-three and Mohammed unplugs the cable and puts the battery in the camera and seventy-three percent is enough for four hours of footage and four hours are enough because after four hours there is no more light or no more road or the place where you were filming no longer exists. The red elastic is on his left wrist. He does not know where it came from. He has worn it since the first bombardment, October 2023, and the elastic has stretched and no longer grips but it stays there the way things stay that serve no purpose and that no one removes. The bread is in the satchel with the za'atar. No oil. The oil ran out in January. Za'atar without oil is dry and sticks to the palate and Mohammed unsticks it with his tongue as he walks. The camera is on his right shoulder. His right shoulder is two centimeters lower than his left because the camera weighs and the shoulder has dropped in eight years of camera on shoulder.

Mohammed Wishah has been a correspondent for Al Jazeera Mubasher in Gaza since 2018 and has filmed the war since the first day. Before that he filmed other things. Then he filmed the first building as it fell and the falling building was the news and the news was the work and the work was being where buildings fell, and Mohammed stayed. The newsroom is Al Jazeera, the contract is Al Jazeera, the salary comes from Al Jazeera, and Al Jazeera is the name on the vest and on the vest it says PRESS and the word PRESS can be read from a distance and can be read from above, from the drone, if the drone reads. He sends the videos from the phone connected to the hotspot and the hotspot works when the repeaters work and the repeaters work when no one has hit them and someone hits them every week. Two hundred and sixty-two journalists killed in Gaza since October 2023. Mohammed knows the number. Every cameraman in Gaza knows the number. The number is a list and the list has names and the names are colleagues. The colleagues are gone. The number grows, and the growing number is the work shrinking because fewer cameramen means fewer images and fewer images means less narrative and less narrative is exactly what the drone produces when it hits a cameraman: not silence, absence of image.

On the morning of April 9 Mohammed leaves the building. The road is the same as always, the road with the rubble, the dust, the walls cut in half showing rooms like a dollhouse open at the front, the sink still attached to the wall, the bed still made, the poster still hanging, everything exposed to the air like a body opened on an operating table. Mohammed films. The camera sees what Mohammed sees and what the camera sees goes into the phone and from the phone to the server and from the server to the newsrooms and from the newsrooms to the screens and from the screens to the eyes of people who are not on this road and who see this road because Mohammed is on this road with the camera at seventy-three percent. The ceasefire was announced last night. Mohammed knows. The ceasefire is between the Americans and the Iranians and concerns the Strait of Hormuz and the tankers and the price of oil and does not concern Gaza, does not concern Lebanon, does not concern the road where Mohammed walks with the camera on his shoulder. Two hundred and fifty-four people have been killed in Lebanon in the last twelve hours. A hundred strikes in ten minutes. Mohammed knows because the phone knows and the phone knows everything except where the next drone will be.

Mohammed walks on al-Rashid Street, the coastal road west of Gaza City, near the Nabulsi intersection. The camera is on his shoulder. The battery is at thirty-one percent. The drone makes no noise. Not the noise you expect. It makes a hum that blends with the generators, with the wind, with the background noise of a city that is no longer a city but is still a place where people live. Mohammed does not hear the drone. The camera hears the drone. The camera records a frequency that the human ear categorizes as ambient noise and that the camera's microphone separates from the rest because the microphone does not categorize, it records. The video runs three hours and forty-two minutes and the video shows the road, the rubble, the dust, the walls cut in half, the sink, the poster, a woman carrying two buckets of water, a child running, a cat sitting still on a block of concrete. At three hours and forty-two minutes the frame shifts. The audio records a sound that is not the hum. Then the video is over. The camera is on the asphalt. Mohammed's phone is in his trouser pocket. The phone rings at eight forty. Rings at nine twelve. Rings at nine thirty-five. No one answers. The red elastic is on his left wrist.