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FEATURING PLESTIA ALAQAD - It's been two years since Israel began its latest and worst genocidal chapter in Gaza. On October 7, 2023, after a Hamas attack that left more than a thousand Israelis dead and hundreds captured, Israel launched a relentless, 2-year long attack that killed on the order of 70,000 Palestinians. That number, when accounting for lack of food and medical aid, is likely far higher. Among those Israel has targeted and killed have been countless journalists. 

In a new book by young Palestinian journalist Plestia Alaqad, we learn what it was like to see Gaza through her eyes. Alaqad covered the beginning of the genocide and watched her colleagues and fellow Palestinians being massacred before fleeing to Australia. 

“Plestia Alaqad became our eyes in Gaza and has forever taken a huge piece of our hearts. In this series of diary entries, she welcomes us to live through the Genocide again but, this time, with greater intimacy,” writes Palestinian American attorney and academic Noura Erekat. 

Plestia Alaqad has won international awards for her coverage of the genocide and spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar from Lebanon about her new book, The Eyes of Gaza: A Diary of Resilience.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So your coverage of the first few months, a few weeks maybe of the genocide was so harrowing that I'm wondering if you can tell us, not necessarily what it was like there—people can read that—but what it felt like for you as a young person growing up in Gaza, having dreams of becoming all sorts of different things, and what led to you becoming this person through whose eyes we were able to see what was happening in Gaza. What was that transition like? 

Plestia Alaqad: I actually reported in Gaza for 45 days, but people think I was there for months. And I sometimes feel like that I was there reporting for years because even though it's only 45 days, but it was so extreme and I saw things that I never expected to see. I never expected that we live in a world where a genocide is allowed. And what I can't even understand or imagine is that it's been two years of the genocide and it's still going on the.

Unfortunately Israel succeeded in isolating Gaza from the rest of the world. So, the hard part really is, is like as a person being born and raised Gaza my whole life, when you're outside of Gaza, you realize that things have different meanings than they do in Gaza. Meaning in Gaza, when you see a tent, it's always like a negative thing. It means displacement. Outside of Gaza, it means camping. 

How in Gaza you're always afraid of looking at the sky of like, oh my God, is this bomb? Is this smoke? But outside of Gaza it's different. So that really is the hard part after surviving a genocide, just understanding and processing everything you went through and how your experience is basically different from the experience of the rest of the world and how your life in Gaza isn't normal.