Plestia Alaqad, a 21-year-old renowned Palestinian journalist, in her book, The Eyes of Gaza, unveiled the struggles of Gazans in daily life, destruction, and resilience following October 7, 2023.
The famous and award-winning Palestinian journalist whose on ground reporting from Gaza attracted global attention during the initial days of Israel’s military assault two years ago.
Plestia’s video clips went viral and gave the world a rare glimpse of life under brutal bombardment of Israel on innocent civilians.
The journalist, who fled Gaza with her family in late 2023, has now published a book drawn from the diary she kept in the weeks following October 7, 2023.
Speaking about her book she told an international media outlet that “I never thought that I would actually write and document about a genocide that I’m living.”
Alaqad remind readers on her time when she was a reporter in Gaza, saying, “Journalists are starving while reporting on the starvation. Journalists are also a target, getting killed while reporting everything that’s happening… Yet they wake up every day and try to tell the truth to the world.”
And while Alaqad has physically escaped the genocide, she speaks about a vulnerability that still persists: “I don’t ever feel safe. But it’s not this type of safety that Israel will kill me. It’s this type of safety knowing that I’m not in my homeland… the challenging part is ever since you leave Gaza, you understand that this world isn’t yours, that you never belong.”
She concludes, “Sometimes I feel Gaza was protecting us from the evil world.”
“I don’t understand why the media is shying away from calling things what they are. And it’s not only about the term conflict or genocide. It’s even the term, calling it the Israel-Hamas war. If it was “Israel-Hamas war,” then why are kids and babies, women and elderly people and men getting killed and starved? These terms that they’re using, it’s really misleading,”, she added.
The author said “the genocide made us feel grateful for the life before the genocide, even if it wasn’t perfect” when asked about wearing the keffiyeh at public appearances. She declined to dive any further into cultural norms and significance in a time as perilous as this. History, she said, didn’t start on October 7, “but you can’t talk about culture and your people in a genocide”.
