The Press: Cost of War

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Reporters in Israel had access to the fighting front—but they also had access to danger and death. At week's end, three correspondents had lost their lives: LIFE Photographer Paul Schutzer, 36; NBC-TV Producer Ted Yates, also 36; and an Israeli freelance cameraman, Ben Oyserman, 54.

A Brooklyn-born Jew, Schutzer personally pleaded with Defense Minister Dayan to let him join the front-line assault on the Gaza Strip. "I feel terribly involved in this fight," he said. It was not the first time Schutzer had asked to be up front. A LIFE photographer since 1956, he had covered the Marine landing in Lebanon in 1958; the Algerian war; Richard Nixon's tempestuous Latin American tour; hurricanes; earthquakes. In 1965, he joined the Marines in an amphibious landing in Viet Nam, took pictures that eloquently expressed the human suffering of war. Dayan granted Schutzer's wish; next day he was taking pictures from a half-track personnel carrier when it was hit by an Egyptian antitank shell and burst into flames.

A producer of on-the-spot TV documentaries, Ted Yates always went where the action was. He liked to say that he had been stoned in Sumatra, shot in Laos, charged with bayonets in Java. "You have to stick your neck out a mile," he explained. "That is why this kind of program isn't done very often." His documentaries were taut, full of action, rarely bland. During the fighting in Jordanian Jerusalem, Yates was supervising a camera crew from the doorway of the Intercontinental Hotel. When a volley of firing began, everyone else ducked. Yates, typically, raised his head to see what was going on—and was struck by a bullet.

A London-born Israeli, Ben Oyserman covered the 1956 Arab-Israeli war, was the only one on hand to record the surrender of the Egyptian commander to Israeli forces. When war broke out again, he headed for the front on an assignment for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Approaching Gaza in a private car, he found the road blocked by a pile of stones. He got out, pushed a rock aside. A mine exploded, and he was killed instantly.