‘Sharing the human stories’: What keeps our Gazan reporter going

Episode transcript

Amelia Newcomb: A year ago this week, Israel reeled as Hamas fighters surged from Gaza across its southern border in an attack that killed some 1,200 people and took 250 hostage. Soon after, Israel invaded Gaza. It was the beginning of an aerial and ground campaign that has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians and wounded tens of thousands.

Much of the Gaza Strip’s housing and infrastructure has been destroyed. How do you properly report this story in which intense suffering and destruction exist alongside powerful humanity and a determination to cling to hope?

This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Amelia Newcomb, the Monitor’s managing editor and your guest host. Joining me today as the war grinds into its second year are two Monitor writers who have been covering all aspects of this story for the past 12 months. Ghada Abdulfattah has experienced the war not only as a Monitor correspondent, but as a resident of Gaza. Taylor Luck, the Monitor’s correspondent based in Amman, Jordan, has worked closely with Ghada and our correspondents in the West Bank, Israel, and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Welcome, Ghada and Taylor.

Taylor Luck: Thank you.

Ghada Abdulfattah: Thank you for having us.

Newcomb: It’s great to have you here. My first question is for both of you, but we’ll start with you, Ghada. After the war started in Gaza, can you tell us a little bit how you began to wrap your head around how to cover this conflict, even as you were having to navigate all the danger as a resident of the Gaza Strip?

Abdulfattah: Initially, my expectations were shaped by the previous wars that we lived through, but the scale of this war and its violence and the rapid escalation were unprecedented.

It is way more intense than any war that we lived through or we went through. As the war escalated, I started to realize that the humanitarian crisis was more severe than we all anticipated and the emotional toll on myself and on the community that I belong to and on the beloved people was very profound.

I started to center my writing and my reporting around the human stories and capturing the lived experiences of those who are affected by this war. And I felt that this approach is trying to connect the community and the people who are affected with the numbers.

Newcomb: Yeah, and that must have been something you and Taylor talked through a lot. I mean, Taylor, how did you think about working with Ghada in such an intense moment?

Luck: I think as Ghada said, one of her strengths is bringing humanity to this very inhumane war, and kind of breathing life to what otherwise would be statistics. And I think, you know, we’re both in sync on that. And I think one of the challenges that we have is perhaps, humanizing each story without being repetitive. I think one way that we work together so well is to find new ways to tell almost the same story, in a year long war. Not only does she put humanity into what otherwise would be numbers, but she’s also giving agency.

I think she can chip in now about how often I ask her, you know, let’s add more details, let’s get more details as we can about each person. What was their job before the war? Where did they live? What was their life like? Now where are they living? What are they eating? What are they buying for the market and how much? And she comes back with the most powerful reporting.

In November, you just mentioned, offhand, something that you and your family saw, which was a child standing by the side of the road, holding a broken arm, trying to get to a hospital, but he couldn’t. So, just kind of this quick exchange, we decided, well, let’s put this in the next story. So we had a story.

It was about six months into the war, and we basically ended with this two sentence scene. “Outside in a UNRWA school in Rafah, a 12 year old boy with a broken arm stands by the road, looking for a taxi to take him to the European Gaza Hospital. He waits silently, clutching his arm, tears rolling down his cheeks.”

To me, as a reader, that one scene sums up the conflict, or as the conflict was at the time in November. It tells you about the lack of healthcare, the lack of basic facilities, the suffering of children. All in two sentences, and so I think by painting these word pictures, by giving these full of portraits, what we’re trying to highlight and what Ghada does so well is showing people’s agency – that Palestinians in Gaza are not only victims, but real men, women, and children who strive for success, search for shelter, who laugh, who love, who grieve, who cook, who go to the bank, who study. And I think that really shines through.

Newcomb: I think that’s one of the hardest things to thread through in a story, because I can imagine there’s always that impulse to say, I want the outside world to truly understand how awful this is. And, as you say, that example that you just read is so powerful. It’s very compact, but incredibly impactful description of what is going on.

But how do you manage that emotion, Ghada? Is that something you struggle with at all?

Abdulfattah: The worst thing about this war is that this war touched everyone in Gaza And everyone in Gaza has somebody who lost throughout this war, whether a colleague, a friend, a relative, a sibling, and so on.

And it’s not that people are challenged with the idea of loss, but also there are unknown losses there. As Taylor just said, there is a very poor health system and deteriorating health system here and it’s also hard for the people if they got injured, for example, or if they got sick, to find a proper health system.

This is very intense for the person just to fathom all these facts and to fathom all of these challenges not once or twice, but on a daily basis. So everyone in Gaza went through starvation. Everyone in Gaza has been challenged with the idea of lack of water.

Everyone in Gaza has been challenged with the losses of [loved] ones or the losses of homes or the losses of close friends. Everyone in Gaza has been displaced not only once or twice, or multiple times. And this displacement is very expensive and is very exhausting because at a specific point you are at your home and all of a sudden you have to evacuate, and you have to leave everything behind you and move.

I feel like it’s very challenging to fathom and to understand what is going on around me and what is going on with our lives and it’s been a year. This cycle of challenges has been happening for a year right now and it is very intense, I mean, for any human being to think of it or to fathom it.

Newcomb: In regard to that, one issue that you’ve both brought out in your stories has been a cycling for so many people between hope, however modest it is, and hopelessness. And I’m thinking of a story you did together in May. Taylor, you were reporting from Tel Aviv, and Ghada, you reported from Zawayda in the Gaza Strip.

I wondered if you could share a bit with us about that experience, everything from interviewing people who are living through such gut wrenching experiences to how you balanced the reporting into very different places.

Luck: Well, I think one thing that struck me, because I was in Tel Aviv at the time, and also following everything in Gaza so closely, is the shared desire for a ceasefire amongst a majority of Israelis and everyone in Gaza, and the kind of shared feeling of abandonment. You know, you have kind of the international community failing, civilians in Gaza.

And you had the Israeli government kind of failing its own civilians as well. So, kind of working on that shared kind of desire, but dread, in terms of a ceasefire, kind of people’s hopes getting up then being crashed again, getting up and then getting crashed again, on both sides, both in Gaza and Israel was very striking.

So to me, it was only natural to do that story because it just was standing out so starkly, two peoples who just want an end to the war and the cycle of bombings. So for example, when I was in Tel Aviv, it was Passover, so I attended a ceremony by a Kibbutz Be’eri, which is one of the kibbutzim that was attacked on October 7th. And the emotions were so raw that they asked [that] no journalists enter the tent during the Seder ceremony. So instead I stood outside and I waited.

Some people decided to speak with me. Some people wanted to be off the record just because the emotions were so raw, and I think a lot of what I was hearing was similar to what I was hearing from Gaza through Ghada and others. Ghada, I was interested in hearing from you in terms of your reporting, kind of that cycle of hope and hopelessness.

Abdulfattah: So what I noticed is no matter how hard life is getting here, it is the hope that sustains people, and it is the thing that makes them alive. And this is striking because again, what is happening might lead a person to lose his or her last drop of sanity.

Throughout the whole year, I noticed that people started to believe that significant moments and big occasions like Christmas and New Year would bring an end to this war. And they looked at the holy month of Ramadan hoping that it would usher peace and they thought that Eid would mark the end of Ramadan And would probably signify a ceasefire. Because it’s the one year mark, people thought that it’s going to be the end of this war. People are living on this, on the hope that there might be a ceasefire any time soon.

Newcomb: One thing I was going to say that might be of interest to readers is that you two have never met in person, I believe. Is that correct?

Luck: Yeah, that’s correct. I’m the one sending her late night, early morning WhatsApp messages, bothering her, but she’s never had the annoyance of meeting me in person. [Laughs.]

Newcomb: Yeah, and that’s because, of course, international journalists have not been allowed into Gaza Sea or unable to go in you’ve developed this relationship throughout this war where you’re working together but also having really, difficult conversations and sharing The emotional difficulties of reporting on something like this, and especially with you, Ghada, living right in the direct line of fire.

How did your relationship develop over the past year, and how have you navigated that?

Luck: It’s been a privilege to work with Ghada and she’s been not only our eyes and ears on the ground, but also our heart on the ground kind of guiding our stories.

At the beginning, I always was afraid that I’m bothering Ghada while she’s in the middle of field reporting, or, dealing with issues at home, or avoiding missile strikes, and I’m messaging her about where are the photo [captions], or I have a question on this part, so I always felt a little bit intrusive. I don’t know if it’s going to be a good time to call, I don’t know if the bandwidth will be good enough to send voice messages, so we just have this ongoing chat about what is going on, sending each other updates, and you know, sometimes, there are events where neither of us have the words, whether it’s an evacuation of all of Rafah, or if it’s a destruction of another hospital. But Ghada has been kind of my guide through all this, all this difficult, emotions that we have to ride through, I think, every single day. For me, it’s not even one percent of what she faces, but the fact that we’re able to have this ongoing nonstop conversation from morning to night, for me, it helps me process.

Luck: It’s not just about understanding, but it’s about processing this kind of war of dehumanization, that I have never seen in my two decades in the region. And, you know, how do we go about not only telling stories, but as Ghada said, how do we go about looking for hope? Which is the only thing that is sustaining the people we interview, but it’s also the only thing that’s sustaining both of us.

And if I hadn’t had that relationship with Ghada this whole time, I don’t know how I could have really gone through covering this war.

Abdulfattah: I just wanted to say that not having international journalists allowed to enter Gaza is making it more challenging for us because I feel sometimes it’s a huge responsibility. I always think of and see and look for the very minute details that are happening around me. And I always ask myself, what if Taylor, for example, sees this specific event, how would he report on this? And what if he, for example, sees this story, how would he report on this specific story?

The point is that it’s been a year, and sometimes we’ve got a sense of normalcy for the events around us, but it’s not normal. So it’s always important to kind of defamiliarize the events that are happening around us too. Just saying, is this something that is familiar for international readers or is it something common for people? For example, people in the northern parts of Gaza, they started to resort into animal feeds as their food. We got used to that. Is this something normal? No. So, it’s important, every now and then, to see things through a new lens and to see how would someone else, someone who didn’t get normalized and familiarized with these events, how would he or she report on that and how would he or she tell this story?

And the other thing is that Gaza is very crucial to the Middle East story. unfortunately, it’s always ... it’s through mere statistics. It’s always through numerical facts. It’s like always through, uh, 100 people got killed, but I found it very important to me to tell the story for the people who have been killed, like what was the thing that he or she used to do before he or she was killed?

And it’s important to connect these numbers to the human stories and to the people’s stories on the ground.

Newcomb: Yes, reminding everybody that every life has meaning and a purpose. And as you’ve looked around and worked so hard to tell these stories, obviously you’ve been dealing with a lot of incredible logistics and unforeseen obstacles and danger. Can you tell us a little bit about How you go about reporting every day and any planning to the extent that you can? How do you navigate this very fraught environment?

Abdulfattah: Since the onset of the war, we have faced lots of logistical challenges. One of them was the lack of safety. As you know, more than 100 Palestinian journalists were killed, and this is a concern for many people who are on the ground because you feel you are under fire all the time.

And the second thing, which is the lack of logistical supplies and support for journalists in Gaza, but there is also the need to tell the story. So this usually puts people under a moral dilemma. Do we have to look for our safety or look for the logistics or go ahead and tell the story? And in order to tell the story, you need to navigate from one place to another in order to find a place with an alternative solar panel to find a place with a proper signal to send the story from. There is a very limited number of places with such supplies, so sometimes you need to stand in a long line in order to get your turn until you charge the phone or you get the turn in order to get the signal and sometimes you have to pay for that.

Sometimes you go for a friend or colleague, who does this out of their kindness and courtesy and so on. So there is an act of kindness among people here, people appreciate also that you’re doing this for a noble cause and you’re doing this for a noble reason, telling their story, informing the world what is happening here and what is happening, behind, as I said, the mere statistics and facts that we’ve seen on the news.

Luck: How difficult is it to write a story on deadline if you have to wait in line for internet [access]? Or if you have to wait in line to charge your phone, how many hours of your day are you spending on the logistics side, trying to access [the] internet and electricity?

Abdulfattah: Sometimes, I go, for example, to a specific friend of my brother, and I let my brother do the, kind of connection. And I go to his house, and they give me the internet password and they allow me to use the internet for free, but the point is whenever I’m in the field I write as much as I can. I use my phone. I started to keep it in the notes. And once I looked into the internet, I tried to send it. It’s a challenge, but sometimes you feel like you need to do it. You need to tell this story. Sometimes, like, I know that I don’t have a deadline, but I know that there is a story and we should cover this.

Sometimes I send a story and I tell [Taylor], “listen, I might not be online for the next couple of hours because I don’t have an internet connection,” so it’s good to see it and see if you have any questions or if it’s appealing. So it’s a challenge but you have to do it in a way or another.

Newcomb: One of the challenges you both face is that obviously this war is showing no signs of ebbing, but instead appears to be widening. There’s a lot of coverage ahead of us, most likely. As you look to that, what will you both be looking at, to the extent that you know right now, and prioritizing in the coming months?

Luck: I think looking at the war spilling over to Lebanon, looking to spill on further, you know, there’s a lot that could happen in the next couple of weeks or months at the regional geopolitical level. You know, if this war escalates at the geopolitical level, there’s a lot of potential spillover.

The war could affect Egypt or neighboring Jordan, where I am based. A wider war between Israel and Iran could hit the oil markets or affect Gulf countries. But to me, and I think probably the same for Ghada, no matter what happens at the geopolitical level, I am refusing to give up our focus on humanity.

In this next phase of the war, we will prioritize looking at everyday people, just like we did last year, just like we did last month. We will double down and focus on the human cost of this war and the people trying to navigate it, and specifically, where this war began, in Gaza.

Newcomb: Ghada, what about you?

Abdulfattah: I’ll prioritize sharing the human stories and sharing the personal narrative of those who are affected by the war. And it’s important to highlight their individual experiences in a way that provides a deeper understanding of the human cost and foster empathy and sympathy among readers.

And it’s also very important to spotlight the stories of resilience and hope amidst the despair and amidst the war that we are living through. I think this is going to support the people, in a way or another. As I said, people sometimes rely on hope in order to sustain their lives.

Luck: I think this is something that we’re both on the same page on. If you look at our stories by design, and by what Ghada sees on the ground, the through line in our reporting is that Palestinian men, women, and children in Gaza don’t just deserve our empathy – they deserve our respect. And we show that by highlighting resilience, by highlighting people’s humanity, by highlighting other sides of the story, not just the trauma and the fact that people are victims. And what happens in the story is that when you put the reader and interviewee on the same level of respect, it raises the urgency. It raises the stakes.

I think what we try to do is make it so the reader can identify with these people. And when the reader can identify with the subject, they can envision that this could be me in this far off war, searching for shelter or protecting my children or looking for food and having readers and interviewees on the same level becomes fuel, not only for understanding – it becomes fuel for change.

Newcomb: That really speaks to how important the reader, or in this case the listener, is in this whole situation, right? I mean, that sense of connection has an impact, and I think you both have done an amazing job of connecting readers in a conflict that I think at a certain point people can feel like this is just grinding on and how do I think about this? But that’s your hope that they will stay connected.

Luck: I think that’s our duty. I think that’s our calling, is to prevent people from being desensitized. And to keep the flame of hope even amidst the darkness.

Newcomb: Well, thank you both for sharing your thoughts about your work during this war. We are all so grateful – editors, your colleagues who are writers and, of course, your readers – for all the work you are doing to help us understand what’s going on and to see the humanity and to respect what people are dealing with amid this conflict.

This has been such a powerful conversation. We really appreciate your taking the time.

Luck: Thank you for giving us the time and thank you, Ghada, for joining us from Gaza.

Abdulfattah: Thanks for having us.

Newcomb: And to those of you who have been listening, thank you for joining us. You can find our show notes, with links to the stories that we’ve just discussed, and to Taylor and Ghada’s work, at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Amelia Newcomb, and produced by Mackenzie Farkus, with additional editing by Clay Collins. Jingnan Peng is also a producer on this show. Our sound engineers were Tim Malone and Alyssa Britton. Our original music is by Noel Flatt, produced by The Christian Science Monitor, copyright 2024.