Youmna, between
a reporter’s duty and a mother’s love

 “There were days in Gaza when being alive was more difficult than others. I remember the fourth day of the war as the day of judgement, it was the first massacre committed by the Israeli army in the Jabaliya refugee camp. Thirty people had just been killed when the army warned us that they would bomb again. We started running in terror; there was chaos. My team was missing; I called the newsroom and asked them to warn my family, if I was dead, to look for me there”.

Youmna El Sayed - 34 years old, had been for ten years in Gaza. A Palestinian-Egyptian journalist, and correspondent for Al Jazeera English, survived that day, as well as those to come. For three months, she never stopped reporting on Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip in response to the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas.

 “I could not afford the privilege of pain. I used to work in the bombed areas, I used to do live reports in front of mass graves, I used to see children pulled out of the rubble, wounded, burnt, killed, and I had to tell the story, there was no time to mourn my people. I forced myself to work, stifling every emotion, if I had allowed myself to feel anything I would have collapsed”.

For more than a year, only Gaza reporters have witnessed the war, because foreign journalists are not allowed to enter Gaza.  However, there is nothing more difficult than reporting on a pain that belongs to you and often at the cost of your life. The New York-based Committee for the Defence of Journalists on December 20 put the number of colleagues killed in the Gaza Strip at 141.

Youmna leaves her children at home every day to go to the battlefield: “I forced myself through the heartbreak of saying goodbye to them without knowing if I would find them alive. I felt that I had a moral duty and that by talking about the children of Gaza I was also telling the world the story of my children”.

It was to save her family that Youmna was forced to give up her job as a war reporter. Since January 2024, she has been a refugee in Cairo with her husband and her four children aged 13, 12, 9 and 6. “One day the army called my husband and ordered us to leave because they were going to bomb the house. We fled south walking among the abandoned corpses. I begged my children not to look at them. As a reporter, I felt it was my duty to report that horror, but as a mother, I had to protect my children”.

by Lidia Ginestra Giuffrida