Journalists in Gaza are Still Living the Headlines

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Editor’s Note: Rasha Abou Jalal is a journalist from Gaza who has reported extensively on political events and humanitarian issues. She has recently launched a campaign to provide winter clothing for around 400 displaced children living in three shelter camps in western Gaza City.

Every morning, I wake up and life repeats itself. I look for water, think about food, and look after my children. I don’t know if the day will pass without an Israeli airstrike or whether our house will still be standing by the evening. I check the news, contact sources, follow what is unfolding around me, and try to document the reality of life in Gaza. Reporting is not something I can simply leave behind when I return home; it has become part of my daily struggle to understand what is happening to my own family and to people across Gaza.

At night, I spend hours looking out of the only window in my house – the kitchen window – staring at destroyed homes in front of me. Rubble and debris surround me in every direction. This kitchen window and this building are not mine, but someone else's that I rent; my family home has been destroyed. This place, too, is partially damaged. Instead of walls, we sit surrounded by wood and plastic sheeting.

We have been displaced 13 times during the war – moving between Rafah and Khan Yunis in the south of the Gaza Strip and Nuseirat Camp in its center. We flee one place for another, sometimes to escape the threat of airstrikes and shelling and at other times in search of water. With each displacement, I learn that the distance between life and death can be just a few streets. Every time we were displaced, we weren’t simply moving between locations, but living in a constant state of waiting – waiting for the shelling to stop, for a place to become safe, to know where to go next, or for the day when we could finally stop running.

There has been a “ceasefire” in place since last October, but the killing has not stopped, even for a single day. This is the eternal contradiction: Despite the continuous images of death, displacement, and destruction coming out of Gaza on a massive scale, I feel that the world has begun to turn away, treating Gaza as a story that ended the moment the “ceasefire” was announced. Our lives tell a very different story.

As I write this essay – at 3 a.m. on October 3 – I can hear the sound of Israeli airstrikes targeting homes somewhere in western Gaza City. Bombs, shelling, gunfire, and ground operations have continued, making it difficult or impossible to access two-thirds of Gaza. Israel has killed almost 1,500 Palestinians in Gaza during this time, according to the UN. There have been reports of almost 5,000 injuries. None of these numbers account for the victims whose bodies remain under the rubble.

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That same morning, news of more airstrikes emerged. Five civilians were killed in an Isra strike that targeted a residential building in western Gaza City: Maysa Khader Abu Daoud and her daughter Maria, Dr. Yasmeen Khamis Al-Boubou and her mother Haloum, and 21-year-old Bilal Ali Awda. All of them were killed while sleeping in their beds.

What does “ceasefire” mean when we still wake up to news like that? I wish people around the world would ask: What does this phrase mean to a mother who is still afraid of an airstrike? What does it mean to a child who is not returning to school? What does it mean to a patient searching for medicine? And what does it mean to a family still living in a tent?

The so-called ceasefire has not meant a safe sky or a return to my life from before. Instead, I wake up with a feeling that everyone around me knows well – the daily routine of counting the dead.

The same questions haunt me, over and over again: Who has died? Why is this still happening? Why is there no accountability for Israel’s prolonging of this tragedy? How long will we remain in this state of waiting? We wait without knowing exactly what it is we wait for. The war continues in our bodies, in our children, in our schools, in our hospitals, and in our daily lives.

The truth is, if I have to search for an answer, I am waiting for one thing only: to regain the life we had before October 7, when we did not constantly live in fear of being killed in a sudden and seemingly senseless airstrike.

Before the war, I believed the hardest thing a person could go through was losing what they loved. But then I lost my home, personal belongings, and memories throughout these years – and I eventually realized that the hardest thing is not only to lose many things at once, but to be expected to continue as if nothing had happened. There is no real time to grieve. Even when I lose something or someone, I’m quickly forced to think about other things. I have to contact sources and write about people who are living through the same catastrophe. I have to ask myself: What will I feed my children today? Will they be safe if a bomb falls nearby? Is the house we are currently staying in safe, or will it collapse on us while we sleep?

This is what it means to continue living as if nothing has happened. It means carrying your losses with you and doing the simplest things while part of you remains trapped in everything you have lost.

As a mother of five children, I cannot separate the details of my life from my work as a journalist. As journalists in Gaza, we don’t report on other people – we live inside the headlines. When I write about airstrikes, I hear them. When I write about displacement, I have been displaced. When I write about the water shortages, I have stood in the water line.

I send my dispatches to international media outlets while figuring out where we will sleep next. I carry my phone and notebook in one hand and my children’s hands in the other – trying to protect them from the same calamity that I attempt to describe in words for readers who are safe in their homes across the globe. The war lives with me at home, even when I do not have a notebook, a phone, or a deadline for a story. I see the faces of my children in my reporting, and when I return, I see the people I met on assignment in those same faces.. I follow news of airstrike targets for work but also for survival – to know whether we need to flee the area where we are sheltering.

A few days ago, I spoke with a woman whose husband and 11-year-old son were killed in an Israeli airstrike while they were out shopping in May 2024. She now lives in a tent with her other three children. She was angry – not only about her loss, but about the world that had accepted the myth that the war had ended, even though she was living in it every minute. She spoke to me about her husband and son, how their absence stays with her in her daily life. But news reports about postwar arrangements infuriated her: there were no answers for grieving mothers like her. She was hearing talk of the future while she remained stuck in a present.

She asked how she would feed what remained of her family, and how she would provide warm clothes for her children as winter approached in their tent. Although the international community might accept the idea of a “ceasefire,” what does that word mean when a mother cannot answer a simple question: “Can I guarantee my children will be alive in the morning?”

We are robbed of normalcy, but as a mother I still do my best. Now, I attempt to continue my children's education, sending them to tents where they study after a long interruption. But it’s not a school as we knew it, and the basic necessities of a classroom are absent. My children sit on the ground during lessons because there are not enough desks and tables. Even blackboards and school supplies are not available to them. In Gaza, nearly 98% of school buildings have been damaged, and approximately 3 out of 5 children receive no in-person education at all, according to UNICEF. Like so many other parents, I struggle to explain why there is no real school. In those moments, I feel that the war is not only destroying the present, but also stealing the future.

I experienced that same feeling when, not long ago, I had to navigate the collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system to find treatment for my 8-year-old daughter Sham, who had suffered a facial injury when a stone fell on her as she walked beneath a destroyed building. I scrambled to get to the hospital, but the fuel crisis and restrictions on movement made the trip nearly impossible, even though the need for care was urgent.

I had to take her to Al-Shifa Hospital on foot, walking 4 kilometers (almost 2.5 miles). I walked with her, trying to hide my fear. I dreaded the hospital being overcrowded with the wounded, which is exactly what happened: I had to wait a full six hours just to get her wound stitched. I was also terrified of the journey itself, fearing an airstrike might target a vehicle driving alongside us – a common occurrence now. Sham watched me, her face bleeding. 

But when we arrived, the doctor told me to buy sutures and iodine from any pharmacy because the hospital did not have them. According to the World Health Organization, no hospitals in Gaza are functioning fully – and only 19 out of 36 are functioning partially. Medicines, diagnostic supplies, equipment, and fuel remain in acute shortage. But I could not believe my ears when the doctor actually said it. Then I went out and bought the supplies myself from outside the hospital.

My family is full of stories like this, which reveal the reality of the statistics you might read about. About a week ago, my brother’s wife had a miscarriage. She was three months pregnant. She began bleeding after severe physical exhaustion, like many mothers who bear major responsibilities in supporting their families, especially hauling water from distant places, cooking with firewood, and enduring exposure to toxic smoke. She wanted to reach the hospital as quickly as possible but could not find transportation and had to walk about 3 kilometers (nearly 2 miles). As she walked, the bleeding worsened, and by the time she arrived, she had lost her pregnancy.

It is the everyday details that might seem ordinary but have become, for our people, a matter of survival. The very time meant to save the life of a mother or her unborn child is precisely the time she does not have. The impact of this war is not measured solely by the numbers of the dead and the wounded.

But these are not the images I want the world to see from Gaza. After three years of war, I have one wish: for everyone to see the human beings who remained after the rubble. The world has seen the collapsed buildings, smoke, corpses, wounded people, tents, and lines, but have they seen us, people tired of living in these conditions?

I want people in the United States, Europe, and everywhere our stories are on screens to understand that those who appear in the news are not “the Palestinians” as an abstract human mass. They are people, each with a name, memories, a family, fears, and plans for the future. When Gazans are reduced to a number in a news bulletin, their suffering can be treated as a distant event. It makes it possible to ignore their humanity.

I want the world to see how a mother in Gaza has become an engineer of disaster management: Every morning, I know exactly how many liters of water we have left, when I need to go out to get more, how we can cook if there is no gas, how I can distribute what we have among five children – all while I try to hide my anxiety from them.

I want the world to see Sham sitting in front of me after her facial injury while I try to appear strong. I want the world to understand these moments I witness: a doctor telling a mother that she has to buy sutures elsewhere because the hospital does not have them. I want the world to see the pregnant woman carrying her pain and walking long, arduous distances because she cannot find a car. I want them to know that we all have to endure these daily tragedies and still “live,” moving through our days while existing in a state of profound wreckage.

As the world turns away, our job as Palestinian journalists becomes even heavier. We are not superheroes; we are not capable of enduring forever. We are human beings with limits – who still don’t know if we will live to see the next day.