He doesn’t hide. I couldn’t either, even if I wanted to. Iker Jiménez who greets on the other end of the phone looks distressed. “I am very touched,” he confirms, “I am 50 years old and I have been in the profession for more than 33 years and this is the most horrible thing I have ever seen.”
The outbreak of violence between Israel and Hamas after the brutal attack by the Palestinian organization in the early hours of Saturday caught the leading journalist for mystery lovers at home, so he did what he does best: “We connected to YouTube to do a live show with La estirpe de los libre. It was the most watched broadcast in Spanish of the day.”
The next thing was a call from Alessandro Salem himself, CEO of Mediaset España: he wanted that display to take him to Telecinco, to explain to the audience what was happening. “He even told me that he didn’t care about the audience,” he says. And Iker Jiménez got to work. The result can be seen this Friday in prime time with a Horizonte special focused on the human side of the conflict.
What I have seen has left me with post-traumatic stress
“We will learn the stories of men, women and children who one day like any other saw how men came down from the sky to kill them, how they entered their homes by calling the video intercom and how everything turned into the most terrifying movie that anyone can imagine,” he says. the Basque journalist. “We will also have a part of analysis, reflection and geopolitics, but I confess that what has left me, I would say, with post-traumatic stress is what I have seen,” he says, “I am very empathetic and I am having a terrible time.”
“Nowadays terror is broadcast live, imagine if there had been mobile phones in Rwanda or Vietnam,” says Iker Jiménez, “war is no longer something distant, they are not headlines, it is the anguish of people escaping from whoever is behind them.” to kill or behead.” The host of Horizonte denounces the lack of empathy that he detects in certain analyses: “The process of desensitization of people is a bit heavy, you cannot imagine the horror that I have seen. 70% of the images are not going to be be able to emit because they are harmful to the human soul.
The hardest thing when preparing the special program has been, precisely, calibrating that selection: “I can’t scare people for free, but at the same time we can’t live in Dulcinea’s world, the viewer has to see what happens.” “It is difficult to establish the limit.”
It is difficult to establish the limit: I cannot scare the viewer but they have to see what happens there
12 seconds forever cut short the lives of those attending the Tribe of Nova peace music festival in the attack that has most impressed Iker Jiménez, who will try to reconstruct that brief but decisive period of time with the testimonies of various people who were in the area, who lost friends and were forced to flee. The program will also feature the first-hand account of a mother who lost her daughter and several residents of the kibbutzatacados who managed to save her life.
“There is a question to which I have not yet found an answer,” says the journalist, “why did those kibbutz, those 25 towns, spend hours at the mercy of an enemy who entered through the fence? We are talking about Israel, a power in defense and intelligence, what happened there?” Jiménez has consulted with “hacking experts and military experts” to try to unravel not only the how but the why of the Hamas attack: “Is this necessary now with this barbarism, all filmed and shown?”
That area is cursed, it has been bathed in blood since ancient times.
The program will also delve into how the brain works in stressful and extreme situations and human reactions to high-impact events with the participation of forensic psychiatrist José Cabrera and psychologist Sara Rico.
“It’s not going to be easy, neither for me nor for the audience,” says Iker Jiménez, who does not give up hope. A fan of archaeology, the journalist does not believe in coincidences: “That area is cursed, always bathed in blood since Antiquity. Even the gods and figures from 8,000 years ago are terrible. What is happening there?”