A Palestinian Journalist Escapes Death in Gaza

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

This 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 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 7th, 2023, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

A 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, while 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.

And 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.

They 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 closing all the way ends 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 the freedoms and the basics of life.

One 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.

Jaffa being a town south of Tel Aviv that was primarily Palestinian and then after 1948 that all changed.

Yes, my grandparents come from Jaffa And so they were among the people who had to flee their houses and villages in the 1948.

And then they settled in Ashkelon, where my parents were born.

And then in 1967, my parents...

Ashkelon the port city

inside of Israel right now.

Right, in 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.

And 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 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.

And 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 it was a very impossible job to do, of what was happening.

And 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.

Aaron Powell, 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.

A bulletproof vest that's a press on the bottom.

Exactly.

The one that had a press on the bottom.

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.

And who would they say they were calling them?

They were identifying themselves as officers of the Israeli military,

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 a Shifa 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.

2023.

After

15 minutes of stibbing 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 scariest 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.

I'm going to stick inside the house and I'm not going to go out, meet people, speak.

deal any by lines

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.

In a matter of seconds, I started screaming

only

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 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.

I 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 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.

My parents were last to be rescued.

So by the time 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 what was available of the medical treatment back then.

Mohamed, forgive me.

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.

Although 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.

Your child and your parents.

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 person.

He does remember it keenly.

Yes.

He's triggered even these days when he sees a helicopter,

even a civil plane.

He'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 lost.

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.

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.

I'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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this 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.

This 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 Sinoar, the leader of Hamas, had said numerous times that if 20,000, 30,000, 100,000 people have to die, and he meant Palestinians,

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?

The 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.

We felt something was coming.

I remember Yahya Sinwar, 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.

Aaron Ross Powell,

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 grateful,

no matter how adept you are

at a new place, it's unimaginable.

It'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.

I 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, it'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 there in Nabilsi, roundabout in Gaza City.

I remember being there

because I had been diagnosed with malnutrition with my young kid at that moment.

And I have been there to the site 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, you know,

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.

Mohamed, there's a thousand things we could talk about.

I want to concentrate for a moment

on the subject of your piece for New Yorker.com.

We've talked about physical hunger, hunger, but we haven't talked at length about psychological trauma.

Tell me how you reported this piece and what your main discoveries were after all this time.

You're right.

Mental health is often the most overlooked part of war, right?

Like we are counting the bodies, we fill in the rubble, but

the minds that carry the trauma, I wanted to speak about this, to see and capture the psychological ruckus that is being caused on a daily basis, non-stop.

I was hearing from therapists who lost entire families, loved ones and colleagues and their clinics,

that they were still trying to show up and help others.

One of the therapists that I talked to for my story lost family members early in the war, including his house, including their clinic, including friends and colleagues of his.

And they kept trying to heal others and showing up to them with the least amount of resources and supplies possible.

They were telling me we cannot wait for the war to stop to start healing or for ourselves to heal, to start healing others.

So I understood they were trying to heal by helping others heal.

And so Even from where I am right now, outside of Gaza, I work closely with survivors and I'm in touch with aid workers and mental health professionals.

And so it took weeks of phone calls just to understand really well, or at least part of it, what it really means and does to someone's mind to be inflicted to this kind of horror on a daily basis for two years non-stop and not having the space to heal or to grieve or just

have enough time to process what's happening.

In one of my interviews in the story, one of the therapists told me about a frequent case that they have been seeing over the past few weeks.

It is a girl who's no longer than 14.

So she's basically a child who went out for a few moments to grab something from outside the shelter.

It was a house.

And this young girl went outside the house to, you know, get something and she came back to see the entire house was leveled, it was bombed, and her entire family was gone.

And now she's seeing the therapist, and she's only asking for her family back.

Therapists around her trying to offer some comfort and some spiritual engagement and some, you know,

practical drawing, games, and

healing, and therapy sessions for her.

But she has been reporting a very, very difficult

psychological toll.

She's living in despair.

She's desperate.

She's experiencing very severe symptoms of a continuous traumatic stress disorder, which is the case, we could safely say, across Gaza.

It is widespread because there is no post for the trauma there.

It is something that people have had to live with over the past two years, and they're not having any safe place to turn to or any security.

And so these people are trying to, you know, live with the fear and not get rid of it because there is no way to escape what is happening at the moment.

Do you expect to return there one day?

Well, I have the hope to return

to Gaza at some point and also have the chance to visit where my grandparents lived one day in Jaffa and also where my parents had a place in Ashkelon.

It's, you know, part of the legacy that we're from a bunch of places, but we belong nowhere.

It's part of the emotional toll that it takes on me as a Palestinian journalist and writer

to keep thinking of those voices and those places and those people, those family members that we have lost, the friends and colleagues who trusted me as a writer with their stories and voices to keep moving forward.

But it's very difficult to keep on doing that, David.

It's very, it's

the same reason that brings me down is writing.

It's the same reason reason that brings me up sometimes and keeps me holding and pushing forward for someday a change to, you know, look at a glimmer, a glimpse of hope along that line.

Mohamed, thank you so much.

Thank you so much for having me, David.

It was an honor.

You can read Mohamed Mawish's article, Treating Gaza's Collective Trauma, at newyorker.com.

And of course, you can also subscribe to The New Yorker at NewYorker.com as well.

I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today.

Thanks for joining us.

See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbis of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul.

This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer, with guidance from Emily Botine and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett.

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