Earlier this week, the BBC correspondent Rushdi Abu Alouf was broadcasting live from Gaza when he was startled by a loud explosion nearby. The danger in the air was palpable. On Saturday, as Israeli rockets began to rain down on this 140-square-mile strip of besieged Palestinian territory, in retaliation for a barbaric incursion into Israel by Hamas militants hours earlier, BBC journalists had watched from the rooftop of their headquarters as a missile leveled a building just a stone’s throw away. Now they found themselves within striking distance yet again.

In the midst of the blast, Alouf, wearing a blue “press” flak jacket that accentuated the dark night sky behind him, reflexively ducked and turned around before fiddling with his earpiece. A concerned anchor in the UK asked if he was alright. It was the type of harrowing moment that, for better or for worse, is a hallmark of war coverage on TV news, conveying to viewers at home the sheer danger facing those in the field, while also providing a dramatic clip that can be shared across the internet—catnip for publications like Mediaite and the Daily Mail.

“That sounds quite close,” Alouf said, turning to a colleague off-screen. “I think we should move.”

A graduate of Falasteen High School and the Islamic University of Gaza, Alouf isn’t just some battle-hardened conflict reporter. He’s one in a relatively small group of journalists employed by Western news organizations and based in Gaza full-time. Watching the clip of him got me thinking about these Gaza-based journalists, as the Israel-Hamas war descends into its earliest bloody days.

Every major news outlet in the world has serious boots on the ground right now in Israel, where the unspeakable carnage and deep psychological toll from this past weekend’s Hamas attack have been utterly horrific. As is warranted and expected, heavyweights from all the American networks, like evening news anchors David Muir, Lester Holt, and Norah O’Donnell, have been parachuting into the country. But reporting from inside the Gaza Strip—long-blockaded and now facing a siege of epic proportions—is a trickier and, to put it bluntly, deadlier proposition. As of Wednesday, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least seven journalists had already been killed in Gaza, which was grim terrain for the press even before the start of the present conflict.

In 2007, the BBC’s Alan Johnston, at the time the only Western correspondent based full-time in the Gaza Strip, was kidnapped by a militant group known as the Army of Islam and held captive for 114 days, three months of which he said he spent in a room without sunlight. In 2014, a Gaza City native and longtime Gaza correspondent for the Associated Press named Ibrahim Barzak moved his family to Malaysia after their third family home in eight years was destroyed by direct or indirect air strikes. Two years ago, the building housing AP’s Gaza bureau was destroyed roughly an hour after Israeli forces warned staff to evacuate; Israel had ordered an air strike to target a Hamas intelligence unit that had allegedly taken up residence in the same building. (The AP celebrated the opening of a new Gaza bureau just a little over a year ago.)

A couple of highly experienced editors I checked in with said they doubt many journalists not already based in Gaza will be joining the press corps there, at least not imminently, because the security situation is just too precarious at the moment. And with Israel sealing the border, entry into Gaza appears to be unfeasible, although US outlets could potentially contract Gaza-based stringers. (In the most dangerous wartime scenarios, news organizations tend to be circumspect about their journalists’ movements. CNN, for one, apparently has some “personnel on the ground” despite there being “very few Western journalists in Gaza,” according to CNN reporter Oliver Darcy.)

In the absence of a massive media presence like what we saw in the opening days of the Ukraine war, Gaza journalists like the BBC’s Alouf are invaluable. They’re working at great personal risk to report, for those of us in America and the rest of the English-speaking world, on what is happening inside Gaza, which shares with Israel a devastating loss of civilian life.

There’s the AP’s Issam Adwan, who on Tuesday described a scene of “collapsed buildings, mangled infrastructure, streets turned into fields of rubble” in Gaza City’s Rimal neighborhood, home to Hamas government ministries as well as “shopping malls, restaurants, residential buildings, and offices belonging to aid groups and international media far from the territory’s hard-hit border towns and impoverished refugee camps.” Reuters correspondent Nidal al-Mughrabi’s latest dispatch, at the time of this writing, told of how “Gazan rescuers on Tuesday pulled the body of a four-year-old girl and other dead from the rubble of a municipal building where she and many others were sheltering.” AFP’s Adel Zaanoun described doctors and nurses “at Gaza’s overwhelmed Al-Shifa hospital” who “were busy treating hundreds of casualties,” including an 18-month-old baby injured in an air strike that led to 17 fatalities, a four-year-old among them. And while Youmna ElSayed was doing a live hit for Al Jazeera, she shrieked and recoiled as a building was struck directly behind her. “Youmna, take a moment to breathe,” the network’s anchor implored as ElSayed struggled to complete the segment.

Then, of course, there are the photographers, unsung heroes of war coverage, who show us in pictures what words can only go so far to describe. In the images below and above, AFP photojournalist Said Khatib documents the aftermath of an air strike in the southern Gaza Strip, as residents scour the rubble for survivors. And Fatima Shbair of the AP captures family members mourning the death of a relative following an air strike in Gaza City.

Alouf, in addition to his on-air coverage, has been sharing raw, smartphone-style videos on social media. One shows a large swath of neighborhood reduced to rubble, trees caked with dust, and detritus all around. In another, he approaches a family that has just lost their house and business. “Where do we go? We have become homeless,” a man carrying his toddler daughter lamented to him. Alouf chronicled what he saw in an article for the BBC’s website. “As I drove around,” he wrote, “it felt as if there had been an earthquake. There was rubble, shattered glass and severed wiring everywhere. Such was the devastation that I did not recognise some of the buildings that I passed.”

In another line from the story, Alouf says his time in that decimated neighborhood was “the most difficult seven hours of my life.” One can’t imagine that his reporting in the days ahead will get any easier.