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Episode transcript
For the first six months of Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian journalist Mohammed Mhawish reported from the ground for +972 Magazine and other media outlets. Born and raised in Gaza City, Mhawish chronicled the destruction of his hometown while enduring relentless bombardment, forced displacement, starvation, and the deaths of friends and colleagues.
An Israeli airstrike hit Mhawish’s family home in December 2023, causing the building to collapse and trapping him, his wife, and their young son beneath the rubble for several hours. Four months later, suffering from severe physical and psychological trauma and acute malnutrition, Mhawish and his immediate family left Gaza. He now lives in New York with his wife and two children, continuing to report on what is happening to his people and his city from afar.
Mhawish joined The +972 Podcast on the third anniversary of the Hamas-led October 7 attack on southern Israel and the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza to reflect on the emotional burden of survival, exile, and the difficulty of living at a distance from a place where relatives, friends, and colleagues remain in danger. “We threw ourselves outside the fences of Gaza,” he says, “but still, it’s so heartbreaking to leave it in such a forceful way.”
The conversation also turns to the particular burden carried by Palestinian journalists, who have continued reporting amid the killing of colleagues, displacement, starvation, and the collapse of basic infrastructure needed to do their jobs.
Mhawish reflects on how Israel’s assassinations of journalists is inseparable from the struggle over who gets to tell the story of Gaza — particularly as international journalists have been prevented from independently reporting from the Strip.
But for Mhawish, telling Gaza’s story means resisting the impulse to remember it only through its destruction. Recalling his own life before October 7 — growing up near the sea, studying English literature, and drinking coffee with friends — he describes a Gaza of universities, bookstores, coffee shops, beaches, and ordinary ambitions. Gaza, he said, “was a place before it was a war.” Bearing witness, then, is also about preserving the memory of what existed — and what its people still hope to rebuild.
