A Palestinian Journalist Escapes Death in Gaza

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1:34This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

1:43This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The war in Gaza has been among many other humanitarian disasters, deadly for journalists. Foreign reporters have almost no access to Gaza, so nearly all the reporting on the war's impact comes from Palestinian journalists on the ground. Israeli officials often accuse them of lying about what's happening, or they even accuse them of being terrorists. A week ago, the IDF struck a tent where Al Jazeera journalists were working, killing seven people. One of them, Israel said, was a Hamas operative, which Al Jazeera denied. Close to 200 members of the press have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

2:30A young journalist named Mohamed Mawish was very nearly among them. After surviving an Israeli strike, Mawish left Gaza, but he still reports on what's happening there. He just wrote for The New Yorker about mental health workers who are treating a deeply traumatized population. Well, they themselves, of course, are suffering all the devastation of this long and terrible war. I spoke the other day with Mohamed Mawish. Tell me a little bit about your life on October 6th, 2023. I was born and raised in Gaza City, and I grew up there. I studied literature. I had my passion towards writing and journalism since I was a freshman in college.

3:17And I started reading more. It was basically, firstly, literature stuff, reading poetry, studying it. And then I had the chance, which was a very, very difficult job to do, but it was a very beautiful time in my life that I got to teach some of it after I graduated at the Islamic University of Gaza. And how did you experience in Gaza City the, you know, some people would call it an open-air prison? But in any case and in any language, life was not ordinary there by any stretch of the imagination. How did you experience that? Gaza is not the hotbed of militancy that everybody thinks it is. It was for those who managed to visit Gaza before October 7th, they saw an insistence on living.

4:08They saw people waking up every day facing the worst version of the same challenges and just trying to overcome. Like there was some level of unemployment. The blockade that was crossing all the way into Gaza, restricting movement from in and outside of Gaza. and personally speaking, I lost an uncle and an aunt to a disease. They were not permitted exit to access treatment outside of Gaza. And I have been trying to be vocal about the situation that I was living, even myself personally speaking, and just trying to communicate with the world that Gaza should be at least allowed the freedoms and the basics of life.

4:51One of them is the freedom of movement. I'm coming from a place of Jaffa. and I have never been allowed to set foot there. Yaffa being a town south of Tel Aviv that was primarily Palestinian, and then after 1948, that all changed. Yes. My grandparents come from Yaffa, and so they were among the people who had to flee their houses and villages in 1948, and then they settled in Ashkelon, where my parents were born. And then in 1967, my parents— Ashkelon, the port city. Yes. Inside of Israel right now. Right, and north of Gaza. And so they were among the people who had to flee Ashkelon in 1967 and settle into Gaza as refugees, where I was born.

5:35And I have come to experience my own displacement in 2024 when I had to leave after working as a journalist. Before we get to your displacement out of Gaza, tell me what October 7th was like. It was a very disruptive, very unexpected day. It started with the usual. I was just getting ready to engage with some writing work throughout the day when all of a sudden the sky started to light. It was rockets from every corner, and I asked my family not to go outside. We were just trying to understand and absorb what was happening, and I switched on the news, and it was basically the announcements of these rockets being fired from Gaza.

6:23And then the retaliation came from Israel. And it felt like the whole earth swallowed us whole at that moment. We were navigating a very uncertain and a very terrifying situation. I tried to secure my family inside the house. I made sure everybody in, and I wanted out to report and see what was happening. And who were you reporting for at that time? At that moment, when it all first started, I was a freelance reporter. I received a call from Al Jazeera English later that morning to start reporting for Al Jazeera. And so for the first few hours, I was on my own just trying to grasp and just get a full understanding, although it was a very impossible job to do, of what was happening.

7:13and I started writing and filing breaking news around the clock starting from day one before being dispatched into the field as a full-time journalist throughout the war. Sooner or later, it became clear that Palestinian journalists in Gaza, and really they're only Palestinian journalists in Gaza because the doors, the gates have not opened for anyone else to come in, felt that they were being targeted, deliberately targeted by Israeli forces. And what is your sense of that? I have had my very personal experience navigating the risks and the danger of being a journalist on the ground. At some point, I had to abandon my press vest.

8:04A bulletproof vest that said press on it. Yes, exactly, the one that had a press on the front. Because it became, in a sense, a target or it was no longer safer rather than… Exactly. It did not provide me with the protection that I was hoping to get wearing that and running across the city to meet survivors and first responders and witnesses and people just, you know, being pulled from under the rubble. It gave me a sense of security at first, but then it turned into a red target mark. I started receiving threatening calls and messages on my own personal number and social media text messaging, urging and warning me to stop reporting and stop writing and stop my journalism work.

8:48And who would they say they were calling? They were identifying themselves as officers of the Israeli military. Directly. Part of the IDF, exactly, yes. They were saying names. They were identifying themselves at the beginning of the call. And they were explicitly and very formally asked me to stop reporting. It escalated after late October 2023 until December 6th, 2023, when the house was targeted as a result of... Your house was targeted. Yes. Tell me about that. I had been away for around a week reporting from Ashifa Hospital in Gaza City when I decided after that week to go home and reunite with my family to check on them and have a moment of rest on December 6th, 2023.

9:41After 15 minutes of stepping inside the house, I received a call that was from a no-caller ID, basically a private number who I had to respond to because it was a scary gesture to get that sort of phone calls during this time. and he identified himself as an officer of the military in the IDF. And he warned me to get outside of the house and evacuate immediately because in 20 minutes the house is going to be bombed. I did not tell anyone in the house about the call. I thought it was an attempt to shut me down, to scare me, to stop me from my work and I made a promise internally between me and myself that I'm not going to be reporting for the next two weeks.

10:29I'm going to stick inside the house and I'm not going to go out, meet people, speak, do any bylines. I put down the phone on my side and I started watching the clock. In 25 minutes, nothing happened. So I thought maybe that was it. Nothing happened. So he's just scaring me. And I was really exhausted. I remember that day and I fell asleep. I was just waking up the next day in the morning. It was around 7.30 in the morning when in a millisecond the entire house collapsed. We didn't hear anything. We only felt the rubble and the weight of the ceiling and the roof being crushed against our bodies.

11:10In a matter of seconds, I started screaming all the smoke and a fog, a very dark fog of smoke and stones clotted in the air. and I started screaming the names of my family, including my son, who was two and a half at the time. Nobody returned my calls. Nobody returned my screams. And I thought at that moment, that's it, everybody's dead. Shortly after that, I remember nothing. I passed out. I woke up a few hours later. I remember it was around close to three hours when we were being pulled out from under the rubble by rescue teams and neighbors. and I only heard the screams of people saying they're alive.

12:00I couldn't talk. I couldn't move my body. Seven of my fingers and my two hands were broken. I remember my back. I wasn't able to, you know, move my back. I remember my left arm was broken, and I can't remember exactly the scenes of the surrounding area, But I remember my son, his face was covered in blood and he was unconscious. And I started asking the people rescuing us and helping us, whereas my parents were or my family. Everyone tried to calm me down and just tell me they're fine, they're good. You're going to see them later. They assured you they were alive. That's what they said. But I did not rest assured because I couldn't see them.

12:49my parents were last to be rescued. So by the time, by when I was rescued, they were still inside. A few hours later, I was at the hospital at the emergency gates just trying to receive, you know, what was available of the medical treatment back then. Mohamed, forgive me. Yeah. Who was alive and who had died? Two neighbors died. One of them was actually on the third floor. One of them was passing by the building the moment it happened. And among your family? Among my family, we had two people from one of them from my father's side of the family and one from my mother's side of the family. So in total, it was four people who were killed in the attack.

13:28Although I was the targeted one and I made it out. And I don't know if it was luck or fate that made me survive this. So you, your wife, your child, and your parents survived? Yes, my wife, my child, my parents, and my one sister, we made it out. but I, in all honesty, David, I feel like I'm carrying the guilt of everyone who's been impacted by that strike. That very same incident has plugged into my son's head a very traumatizing incident, a very traumatizing memory that he still remembers, although he was a very, very young kid. He does remember it keenly. Yes. He's triggered even these days when he sees a helicopter, even a civil plane.

14:14He's terrified of any sudden sounds or a sudden closure or a shut of a door next to him. He starts running to me and he just remembers what it was like to be trapped inside of the house and just not having the awareness of what was going on. But I got back to reporting after I was feeling a little bit better. It was only a few days after the attack, and I started filing stories. You started filing stories after being warned that your house was going to be burned. Yes. And it was much more scarier to get back to it in the second time, because once my name started to go up and online again, I started receiving the same kind of threats again.

15:03Yeah. And then I started considering leaving Gaza after it was clear to me. It was either I get to keep my story or my life.

15:17I'm speaking with Mohamed Mawish. He recently reported on Gaza for The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour and will continue in a moment.

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20:11This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm speaking with Mohamed Mawish, a journalist born and raised in Gaza City. Mawish has covered the war in Gaza both in English and in Arabic for a number of outlets, and most recently for The New Yorker. He fled Gaza last year after his home was targeted in an Israeli strike, an attack that left four people dead. We'll continue our conversation now.

20:39This is a hard question. there's no doubt who dropped the bomb and attacked at the same time hamas committed the act it did on october 7th and sinwar leader of hamas had said numerous times that if 20 000 30 000 100 000 people have to die and he meant palestinians of course then so be it toward the political ends that he was looking for when you look back at that decision by Hamas what is your sense of it?

21:24the political and military ideology of the Hamas movement in Gaza it was basically to engage in constant armed resistance with Israel and they made the decision to do this full-scale unexpected attack on southern parts of Israel on October 7th. That was basically a surprise, not only for Israelis. But for you too. For Palestinians inside of Gaza, it was a sense, I remember, feeling a sense of shock among the people when it all first started. Did you have a good sense of what it was? At first, no. But there were signs, politically speaking, before October 7th, inside of Gaza, that something might happen, but we didn't know what it was.

22:21We felt something was coming. I remember Yahya Senwar in one of his public engagements with the people, explicitly saying and hinting towards a military engagement with Israel, but nobody paid attention. There were also people inside of Gaza who were monitoring the political developments and the dynamics inside of Gaza, but none of these people were able to anticipate the move that was ahead. I hope you'll write a great deal more for The New Yorker, but I also feel deeply for you in the sense of it must be very difficult for a young person with a very young family to imagine in a future, no matter how good your experience, no matter how adept you are at a new place, it's unimaginable.

23:12It's very painful to look at the pictures and the footage that's coming out of Gaza at the moment. Because I know exactly what it feels to be reporting from inside of those places. And I have been there if not every part of Gaza, at least the biggest majority of it. And I remember reporting from places from the ground, not only my neighborhood, but also other parts of Gaza City and the north, where I was standing in places, and you could see the entire area, miles and miles ahead, flattened. I mean, people are escaping the bombardments by erecting tents on top of the rubble because there is basically no places left.

24:07I could see that in entire neighborhoods and blocks, there is no single building that has not been touched by the bombings. And we have seen some numbers and statistics on that as well. that said around 92 % or something around that figure of the residential compounds in Gaza. Are either damaged or flattened. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And so people are just navigating the situation by just holding fragments of what is still there and of what they have lost by trying to look forward. But at the same time, the ongoing challenges and the fear and terror and the lack of food and the shortages of the medical needs.

24:53It's very massive. It's very painful for people to keep living with that. You're on WhatsApp every day to friends and colleagues, family. How has the humanitarian aid situation changed even in the last couple of weeks? Well over a thousand Palestinians have been killed seeking food. Exactly. And these people are starving. They're looking for a bag of flour, a parcel of aid. It happened to me when I was inside. I remember it happened in March 2024, if you remember the floor massacre that happened around the Nabulsi roundabout in Gaza City. I remember being there because I had been diagnosed with malnutrition with my young kid at that moment.

25:45And I have been there to the side because I knew that there were a number of truckloads of food coming in. You were diagnosed with malnutrition so relatively soon after October 7th, by December. In March 2024. I had a kidney problem at the moment, but we were not hospitalized. There were no capacity. We were only rationing what we had, including some bites of bread. We had contaminated water. We had to make bread out of animal feed and barley. Unfortunately, that was only what was available. We had to survive through the day. We were not living. We were only just trying to make every day from the moment we wake up, make it to the evening.