THE EYES OF GAZA

Palestinian journalist Plestia Alaqad gained millions of fans online for her unflinching live reporting from Gaza's war zone. Now, she's publishing her diaries to show how beauty can prevail alongside devastation

- WORDS ALEXANDRA ENGLISH

The last “normal” meal Plestia Alaqad had in “normal” Gaza was hot chocolate and pizza on the evening of October 6, 2023. Hot chocolate and pizza: it’s an odd combination, she admits, but looking back, it’s one that would seem utterly, well, normal.

The morning after that dinner with her friend Yara, Alaqad woke to news that Hamas - the militant Islamic group that controls the Gaza Strip in Palestine - had attacked Israeli communities around Gaza, killing 1200 people and taking 251 hostages. The Israeli government in retaliation launched an attack on Gaza and began bombing the Strip, aiming at Hamas targets but primarily killing civilians. (At the time of reporting, the number of Palestinian deaths has reached more than 50,000.) Alaqad was still half asleep when her phone started buzzing with messages about the bombings. She skimmed the group chat and, not thinking much of it, went back to sleep.

Read that again: not thinking much of the flurry of texts about her city being bombed, Alaqad went back to sleep. How accustomed to bombings do you need to be to be able to fall back asleep after hearing that kind of news? The answer is, very. Her mother, hearing the bombs fall in the night, thought it was raining. She got up, brought the washing in and went back to bed. “I thought that was hilarious,” Alaqad writes in her upcoming book, The Eyes of Gaza, a series of diary entries from the first 45 days of the war. Then she reflects: “How much trauma does it take to start thinking that bombs are like rain? And how much trauma does it take to consider that funny?”

Alaqad always wanted to be a journalist. She had studied and worked abroad and in Gaza, and when the attacks began she grabbed a press helmet and bulletproof vest and refused to be left behind by her two male colleagues, Mohamed and Hatem, who were heading off to gather footage across the region.