PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: ‘We threw ourselves out of Gaza, but never really left’
This transcript was generated using an AI transcription service and lightly edited for readability. Please consult the corresponding audio before quoting.
[music]
Mohammed Mhawish
“When they pulled me out, I remember like light hurt my eyes at the very beginning. The first thing I saw was Rafiq’s face. He was covered in dust and he wasn’t crying. He was past crying. I think they had put him on my arm and I could feel his heart going like a bird. I really remember that. And then at the hospital, they listed fractures in our bodies, fingers, toes, back, rib, and they kept telling us about how bad it was. But we were very grateful that we’re still alive, and that was really what was important. That was what mattered, I think, at the end.”
Ghousoon Bisharat
Welcome to the +972 podcast, your direct line to the journalists, thinkers, and activists struggling for justice in Israel-Palestine.
Our podcast grounds the discussion in lived realities to bring you closer to the issues that matter most between the river and the sea.
+972 is independent and reader funded. If our work matters to you, become a member or donate at 972mag.com/members.
I am Ghousoon Bisharat, editor in chief of +972 magazine and your host for today’s episode.
Mohammed Mhawish is a friend and a colleague. For six months of the genocide he reported from Gaza for +972 Magazine and other outlets. In April 2024, he was forced to flee Gaza but continued reporting on his home from afar. Today, he joins me on the +972 podcast, exactly three years after the Hamas led October 7 attack on southern Israel and the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, to reflect on living through the genocide, the psychological and physical burden of surviving it, the role of journalism and Gaza’s past, present, and future.
Mohammed, thank you very much for talking to me today on the +972 podcast.
Mohammed Mhawish
Thank you so much, Ghousoon, for having me.
Ghousoon Bisharat
You are currently in exile in New York after living through months of relentless bombardment, displacement, and hunger in Gaza. How are you and your family doing?
Mohammed Mhawish
Thank you for asking. I mean, in the narrow sense, we’re doing okay. We’ve been adjusting to the transition. We’ve been trying to settle into this new place, into this new reality after leaving Gaza. As someone who has like spent his entire life in Gaza, born and raised in there, to leave it after 25 years, particularly during everything that was happening and all of a sudden transition into safety, into full safety, I would say, it shook me. And it was really like surprising in so many ways to me and my family, and I think we’ve been asked… How you’re coping and how you’re doing and how you’re navigating this new place with your family. And I think I don’t really think there is the perfect answer. You know, like it depends on the hour. Sometimes reporting on Gaza, even though you’re thousands of miles away, you’re still connected somehow to what’s still happening there.
You still have family there. We still have people and friends and colleagues. So my family is safe. There is no bombs falling obviously. But in the background of our heads, we’re still somehow attached to Gaza, the home and the place from which we have been trying to survive and just leave. But I don’t think we were able to leave Gaza after all. I mean, we threw ourselves outside the fences of Gaza, but still, it’s so heartbreaking to leave it in such a forceful way, in such a saddening, painful way. We left during April 2024 during very, very complex and very hard conditions for me personally as a journalist and for my family as well. And I don’t think it has much improved since in terms of material conditions in Gaza. The situation, I think, is still very hard. People have been reporting to me very painful testimony in terms of their access to the day to day necessities. They’re still having trouble fighting permanent safety unlike me, which is kind of like a difficult struggle to navigate at the moment. As a reporter, as a writer, sometimes I’m on my calls with people who are displaced, who have nowhere to go, who have no place to sleep, and have been like trying really hard to secure a meal’s food for their kids. I have these conversations. I can’t help but think how really painful it is to live in this split reality. When, me, I have here my food, I have my bed, I have my warmth, my safety with my two kids. Whereas people who we have left behind are still dealing with the very same challenges that we left behind. I think as a family from Gaza, we’re never in the same room altogether. I left and then my parents left, and they’re still in Egypt right now. My wife’s family, some of them still in Gaza right now, and we still have family scattered elsewhere. And so I don’t think if exile is the right term to say that, but we’re in a very concrete sense we’re, I think, fragmented.
Aside from being here on our own, navigating this entirely new environment with two kids and as surviving parents, we still have family all over, which is quite difficult to give you a sense of permanent safety and adjustment and settlement. And there is something I think I haven’t been able to put up with, which is a feeling of guilt. Sometimes we sit down to a full meal and I think about the kids and the tents and the family still in Khan Yunis, in Al Mawasi, in Deir al Balah.
Rafiq, my son, he’s almost five now. He sleeps through the night, starting to be a kid again, starting to have the opportunity to be a child again after everything he’s been through. And so I know there is this feeling of guilt, but it doesn’t feed anybody, right? It doesn’t help anybody. I know me being like this aching, this heartbroken parent and father doesn’t help any single person in Gaza. And that hasn’t gone away. And so people think sometimes leaving Gaza is the end of the story. And this is what I have been, if you remember, in our first correspondence in the immediate aftermath of leaving Gaza, you were trying to check in on me and my family. And we were, hey, we’re so happy we left. We’re safe. There is no bombs right now. But as time passed, we realized, calm and quiet started to do exactly the opposite, which is inflicting all these traumatizing events and situations we lived through and recalling them again and again. And so I think we’re trying to be more than alive. I don’t know if we have been successful doing that in terms of me and my wife.
Sometimes I think some days we manage it and some other days I think we just make it to the evening with the kids, and I think I’ve started counting that as victory, you know.
Ghousoon Bisharat
But do you feel that you have been able to begin to process this trauma or you’re still in it?
Mohammed Mhawish
I’ll be honest. I mean, I have a problem with the word process. I mean, as a person, as someone who’s lived through five wars within the span of 25 years, I know what people mean by it, and I don’t say it like to be irresponsible, but I think processing assumes this kind of meaning that things are over. Therefore, we’re now past the immediate catastrophe, and we’re trying to make sense of it. I think we’re dealing now with what it left behind and what it has caused to us. That’s, I think, post-traumatic sense means, which is supposed to mean, you know, living in the consequences of what has happened to you.
But I don’t think it’s over, not in terms of where we are right now, but in terms of what we left behind and how things are happening and how they have been improving on a daily basis on the ground in Gaza. And as a reporter, I think reporting on Gaza for most of my time, I don’t think people have experienced any sense of “after” yet. I think I said this like in a number of stories I’ve put out over the past few weeks and months. The trauma, I think, it keeps getting reactivated, if that’s the right word.
I think every week, almost on a nearly daily basis, there is a new strike and loved ones. And so there are names that are recognized sometimes by just looking at the news and reading the names of the dead and the bodies at the end of the day. I, by accident, I caught a paper the other day of some names of people who were sources to my stories since the moment I left Gaza, which now has been 25, almost two years since I left. And so these people were at some point to my reporting witnesses and survivors and first responders and neighbors and colleagues. Most of these names on the paper, they’re gone now. And some of them were even killed after the ceasefire was announced in Gaza in October 2025. And so that’s during a ceasefire. I don’t know how we step back from something that is still happening to the people we love.
I don’t think we can, really. So you kind of try to make room around it. And at the end of the day, if I can speak from a mental health perspective, as someone who’s dealt with that recently, I think the body keeps its own record, right? I mean, a year after the strike on our home in Gaza, I wrote that I still heard the explosion in my sleep, and that I’d wake up like in a cold sweat and reach over to check that Rafiq was breathing. And some of these days are now gone, but the trauma, I think, is still being regenerated by continuing to watch the news.
And we can’t stop watching the news because we either are reporting on stories that we have to be informed about before we’re writing about them, or we’re just watching the news to be checking on neighbors and families and neighborhoods that we know and we want to check if they’re doing okay. And so I think there is something that helps me through all of that, even by doing this painful work, which is keeping that record and keeping those testimonies and keeping those stories alive, even though the people are gone now. But their stories are still alive. And these people have trusted me with their stories. And I remember during the very early days, like in the morning of October 7th and then October 8th, I remember we were corresponding in terms of reporting from the ground. And you remember how each dispatch took me sweat and tears to put together. It was not only about a physical effort to run across Gaza and just meet with people and have testimonies and have survivors and have first responders and have medical personnel speak to you, but it was also about witnessing things that were happening to you as well at the same time.
And I remember reporting on, for example, the collapse and the destruction of the medical system when we were displaced and we didn’t have enough treatment for myself, for my parents, for my child, who was, by the way, in March 2024, was diagnosed with acute malnutrition, which is the stage that precedes starvation due to the shortages of food and nutrients and supplements for his body. And so I was reporting on that as it was happening to other people, but at the same time, we were experiencing it ourselves. We were going through it myself. We reported on people losing their homes of generations, homes they spent years and lifetimes building when we were looking for makeshift shelters, like to spend the night with my family and with my wife and with my parents. I was reporting on the targeting of journalists, if you remember, and I lost friends. And I lost colleagues, but at the same time, I had to act professionally and do the story as it was supposed to be told. Even though if this journalist was my friend, I was supposed and I was expected to run it as accurately, as professionally, as honestly as possible. But I don’t think there was any way for us, for me, at least as Mohammed, to be, as the media has been always telling us, you have to be objective enough. To be neutral enough. But I don’t think there was any way to do that because I was part of the story.
I was not detached from what was happening. I was myself a journalist, and so I was a target, and there was no way to be separated from the targeting of journalists. I didn’t have a home to sleep in, so there was no way to strip myself from the story entirely. We were living parts of these challenges that were endured by the people, and I myself and my family were going through the same challenges. And so I think that was some of the nature that helped put some work out there. And I think as I reflect on it right now, there’s always this feeling of, I wish I could do better. Even though my reporting has almost got me killed, but there’s this feeling of guilt. At least I should have told more stories. I should have interviewed more people. I should have spoken with more parents. I should have sat down with more displaced families because the scale and the amount of destruction that was happening, it was so hard to keep up with. It was so hard to keep documenting in real time on a daily basis as you were surviving it. And I think since I left Gaza, my concern and my responsibilities there were to file stories, as many stories as possible, as quickly as possible to just keep the world informed about the real news and what was happening in real time.
But after I left, I think I have been lucky enough to have a little bit of time and space to sit with stories and give it more time and give it more thinking and give it better writing and give it better planning to be able to pull these long stories in a way that do justice or try to do justice for people beyond the breaking news, beyond the news bulletin or the news assignment.
Ghousoon Bisharat
And I would like to continue on this point, on one big piece that you did. It was published in the New Yorker, and it was a comprehensive report on Gaza’s collective trauma. Since we’re talking about trauma and still maybe living it, it seems to be that when we speak about or report on the genocide in Gaza, many of us tend to focus on the number of victims, on the destruction of the physical space, on the lack of or shortage of aid, food, medicine, and we often neglect the mental impact on the individual person or the collective, the group.
So that piece that you published in The New Yorker in August 2025, you touched on the mental health state of the people in Gaza, and it was a really tough piece to read. Could you share what you learned from working on that report? And was it your own trauma that made you work on it?
Mohammed Mhawish
The very first reason that made me realize that I had to do a story that discusses mental health was a very first personal reason. But what I tried in the story to do was I wanted to give voice to those who were in Gaza and still struggling as much as I did, even more than I did, because I knew.
There were entire families and generations and hundreds or thousands of children still going through the same things that Rafiq had gone through and he’s now safe. I think I started thinking about the story long before it was published. And I think I started thinking about what this living through the destruction causes to the mind after a long time of living through the same stories of pain and death and loss and tragedy.
I remember Rafiq asking me, like in the very early days after the bombing of the house, if we were still going to die. The way he asked the question, it was like he was asking for lunch. It was so calm, it was so normal for him. He had no answers, so he wanted just to know if there is going to be anything happening to us, just like what happened a few days earlier. And I started thinking about if this is what Rafiq is experiencing, then there are hundreds, if not thousands, of children his age, going through the same. And so I kept record of testimonies of firsthand accounts of people that I met in Gaza, of parents who told me stories about how their kids are coping, how their young adults are coping with displacement, with losses, with terror, with the sounds of bombardment.
And when I left, I had more time to sit with these stories and be able to put together a narrative that described how immense and how severe the challenges were for people to deal with mental health. I think it was one of the very underreported stories in Gaza at the time, so I had a very difficult time accessing enough information. But what I did have is access to people who were living through the experience themselves, whether it was children, whether it was parents, even remotely. Or what I tried to also platform in the story is the voice of the practitioners, the mental health practitioners, who were, by all means, they were still showing up.
And this was very surprising to me because these practitioners, these mental health professionals, they were themselves going through the same trauma as their patients. They were themselves mourning their loved ones. They were losing people. They were losing family. Some of them lost their homes to strikes in Gaza, and they were displaced in the south. And so I sat online with these practitioners, and they kept telling me stories about how they’re coming about their days, whether on their personal level, how they’re coping themselves with that, or how they’re treating patients and the settings and the places that they kept showing up for these patients.
And so when I started reporting it, I think I wanted to find the people who were trying to treat this from inside, this trauma. I had the chance to be alive and safe, but these people didn’t. And so I wanted to understand, like, really what this destruction does to the mind, the wreckage that it does to the mind, something that we’re not really seeing every day on the footage on TV and social media. And so what I found is something that I really think I still think about it. There is this psychiatrist in Gaza who had the opportunity to leave a few months after on an academic scholarship, I think.
And so the line outside his clinic, and if we’re talking about a clinic, it’s a tent, it’s built up of clothing material and plastic and nylon and all these kind of materials that were available to people in Gaza to construct these makeshift homes and places. These people in line, there were people who haven’t eaten in weeks, these people who have been displaced five, six, seven times, and they had no safety, no place to sleep the night. And they were queuing in the dark even before the sun rose because they needed someone to talk to. And so they were thinking that this could help, and it did very relatively. But I think what I tried also to show in the story is the destruction of this mental health sector in Gaza. These patients, they were not offered any strategic treatment tools, they were not offered any kind of effective treatment because the entire medical sector was collapsing in Gaza, including the mental health sector. It was going through a crisis and it still is. Mental health clinics in Gaza are mostly, all of them, if not totally damaged, they’re partly damaged. And so they’re not functioning anymore.
And I think what stayed with me from these stories of these doctors and these patients are the kids. And I thought the story by talking to these people would help me process, as we said earlier, or navigate the feelings that I had been going through. But it made it worse because I heard stories about kids, for example. There was this one kid, I think she was a girl, 14 years old, who during one of their days in displacement in southern Gaza, she left the building to get something to eat, to just look for something and buy something to eat, and when she returned she found out that the entire building where her family had sheltered had been bombed.
And she was the only survivor of her entire immediate and extended family members. And she was sitting, this practitioner, this psychiatrist told me that she was sitting in front of them just asking for her family back. And he told me this is a story of like hundreds of people were seeing over the past weeks. And so, as much as the story was personal, I wanted to give space for people who were going through even much more difficult and incomprehensible pain and trauma. And they were having a very difficult time just experiencing what an aftermath of trauma is because it was never past, it was never gone, it’s still happening, it’s still ongoing. And I keep touch with these people, even some of them I reported on in the story. And I asked them: How are you feeling? How are you going through the day? And they’re still reporting sometimes the very same answers that: We’re dealing with this feeling of uncertainty. We don’t have permanent housing. We don’t have enough food. At any moment during any day, we could be bombed. So there is this feeling of uncertainty around the day. And I think the story deserves more attention because we’re always focusing on what the missiles and what the bombardment is really causing in the immediate aftermath of physical destruction to buildings and bodies and people and physical landscapes. But we don’t really always, often think about what it really does to the minds of the people living through these destructions. So I really wish that there could be a day, someday soon, where we look at this story and many other stories and remember how they were part of the past. Because as I’m saying, like these people are still going through the same troubles, and I am still, as a reporter, still dealing with these difficult assignments with these difficult stories to tell and to keep putting together, even though I haven’t fully moved on, I haven’t fully healed from what I have experienced.
Ghousoon Bisharat
Muhammad, allow me to take you back to September 2023 when we started working together. That was when I started at +972 Magazine. Unfortunately, we never got the chance to meet face to face, but we started talking back then on the phone every few days to discuss your reports from Gaza. And a week or so before October 7, you wrote an article for 972 Magazine about a new wave of protests at the fence, which lasted a few weeks, but on the day we were planning to publish the piece, suddenly the protest stopped. And the piece was published on September 29, 2023. I remember that while we were putting the final touches on the report, like I remember that you told me that this sudden halt of the protests was very strange. What was strange about it? And what was the atmosphere on the ground in the months leading up to the October 7 attack?
Mohammed Mhawish
I think in late August and through September 2023, young men started going back to the fence east of Gaza City and sometimes in the heart of Gaza City itself. And it was not the Great March of Return. No, I think it was different because the Great March of Return was huge, it was organized. I think we reported on it, but this was different. It was a smaller protest, it was much more spontaneous, I think. And I think the sentiment among people then was calling for rights of opportunity, of employment, because it consisted mostly of young people who had just graduated and [were] coming out of college, I remember.
And then there were photographers, friends of mine, who documented the images of these protests. And that’s why I was struck by the intense anger and the atmosphere around the streets. And when I approached 972 with the story, I was really thinking that there was something to be told around that. And we did eventually, but during the very beginning, I think the idea wasn’t that polarized. It wasn’t really clear about what was really happening. Before the protests people in Gaza were dealing with like before the protest, people in Gaza were dealing with a very difficult economic landscape. The blockade was doing its work by restricting access, by closing all the way in and out of Gaza. But it was this very, on this administrative level in Gaza, people weren’t really hugely satisfied with how government functioned, I think. And at that point, I think in time, Israel shut areas for almost two weeks. I think it was Jewish holidays. And so the army was saying like, we’re not working during these days, but it was hugely impacting the economic landscape in Gaza. And so for some of our audience, I think that’s the crossing that people from Gaza used to go through to work in Israel.
We’re talking about thousands of workers in Gaza who had given a livelihood to Gaza through working in Israel at the time. And so they had permits to work inside, and then that money was one of the last real lifelines in the strip, so closing the crossing made everything worse and made people angrier. And then almost overnight, the protest stopped all of a sudden, even though the crossing was still closed. And I remember on September 27, the protests were already quieter, and we heard news like on the 28th that Israel reopened areas after mediation by Qatar and Egypt. And these young people, these youth organizing the protest, put out a statement saying they were suspending them because mediators had promised things were going to be easier. And my piece, I think, ran the next day, September 29th, right? If I remember correctly. But I think what I was writing about had switched off because protests in Gaza don’t usually end that cleanly. People started to raise some questions about what was really happening. How is this making sense? The economy is still bad. The crossings are still closed and people are fading out.
And what we were dealing with also shortages of basic necessities like electricity was two, three hours every day. Clean water was the same. And so baby formula wasn’t really that available to people. It was a difficult time to get those things. And if you did, it was expensive. And so, for working people, for working families, it wasn’t really easy to get around these circumstances. And so, the wider atmosphere was suffocation. And there was this sense of something might go off, something might happen, but I don’t think anybody knew what it was exactly. People really started talking about the news, but we had every way to think that there is something that’s going to change, but we didn’t know what it really was. And I was there, I lived in Gaza City for like all of my life, and I was really at the heart of everything happening around me. I was close to the sea, I was also close to the eastern part of Gaza City, to the neighborhoods of Ash-Shuja’iyya and Atufah, which neighbored the fence alongside the military bases in there.
And on October 7th, it was a Saturday, it was a weekend in Israel, I think, right? It wasn’t a weekend in Gaza. In Gaza, I think, my sister, she was in college, she was getting ready to go to college, early in the morning, it was six o’clock, so were every other you know, students and people were getting ready to go to work. And we started hearing these rockets surprisingly flying out of Gaza, not onto Gaza. And I remember even texting people and friends on the other side of the border. I texted you to ask what was happening, I texted other people who were also reporting for other places. Just, I wanted to know like, we’re hearing all these explosions up in the air and we’re hearing these rockets, just missiles being fired out of Gaza, but we didn’t know where they were going or where they were landing.
It turned out, as I went outside to just see what was happening, that Hamas had launched this attack on Israel. But it wasn’t really an air offensive as we thought it was. It was a ground operation that we could get a sense of the closer we got to the fence. I couldn’t myself, get very
close because it turned out it was one of the most defining moments and milestones in the lives of millions of people. I picked up the phone to you and to other editors who asked me to freelance and report, although I knew the risk was really huge. My batteries are out. So you asked for, like, a fully fetched report. Could you please do the rest of the work? This is the story. These are the interviews. These are the people. But I don’t have access to secure places or safety to be able to put these as cleanly and as perfectly as I should. And thankful for the team to be able to do that in such a very horrific situation.
If you are still listening to this conversation, you already know the value of our work. By joining us today, you are supporting independent journalism on the ground that stands for justice, equality, and freedom for everyone between the river and the sea.
Head over to 972mag.com/members and find out how to become a member of +972 or make a one off contribution.
Ghousoon Bisharat
Speaking of the risks and the danger, you mentioned before that in December 23, an Israeli airstrike hit your house and you were buried under the rubble. You wrote about this experience for 972. Could you tell us about that day?
Mohammed Mhawish
Yeah, it was December 2023, two months after everything collapsed and happened. It was December 7th, around 7:30 in the morning. But before December 7th, I had been away from home for about a week, reporting. And I remember, I was just moving with fellow colleagues and journalists around the city, and we could sleep wherever and whenever we could and eat whatever we could afford. And I came back that night before on December 6th during the night because I wanted to be with my family and I was tired, I was terrified, and I wanted to check on them and just have a moment of rest and have time to sleep. And I remember Rafiq’s, you know, footsteps. And I remember Rafiq’s footsteps as he approached me when I first entered the house in the hallway. And I remember reaching in the morning for a cup of tea at that time.
On December 6th, I received a call from someone who identified as David. And he introduced himself as someone from the Israeli military. But I didn’t really take the call seriously. He asked me to leave the house because they were bombing the house. And I didn’t really take it seriously because if you’re bombing the house, then, first of all, if I was targeted, like if I’m the targeted person, like why are you asking me to leave? And second of all, he was calling me Habibi, which was a very endearing way of calling your friends in Arabic, right? This person was speaking perfect Arabic, clean Arabic, Gazan Arabic even. And so I thought it was maybe one of the horrible jokes my friends wanted to do. It turned out it was a very serious call that he asked me to leave with my family. There was no way to leave the house. It was a three story building. We had family who had been sheltering in the house with us, neighbors and people who had come to seek shelter in the house after they’ve left and they’ve escaped the military offensive, the ground operation of the Israeli military in eastern Gaza.
So it was almost 30 people in the house, and so I didn’t tell anybody about the call because again, I didn’t believe that there is something that’s going to happen. I thought it was an attempt to shut down my reporting and to silence me and to just scare me. And I was scared and I thought, I will stop reporting for the next week or so. Next morning, 7:30 in the morning, there was this instant in a millisecond, this sound I still can’t, I can’t really describe. I’ve tried in writing many times to just put in writing what it really sounded like.
It wasn’t like, you know, it wasn’t like you know anything falling, it was like something like being pushed into the earth. I didn’t really see the ceiling crack, I just felt, remember, the weight of the concrete, and my arms were pinned. It was dark, I couldn’t see anything. I think my ribs were pressed against broken concrete, and I tried to scream for my wife and for my parents, and for Rafiq. Nothing came back, no one returned my calls, no one returned my screams, and then the dust filled my mouth. And then I heard Rafiq very faintly under the rubble. I couldn’t see him, but I heard Baba, which was. I think, on one hand, it was heartbreaking to hear such a sound of your child going through that at the moment. But it was also, I think, all of a sudden, a relief to me that he was still alive. At some point, I passed out. And then a few hours later, I realized the civil defense crews broke through about two hours later.
I think I want to say something about those men and neighbors and women and people who rushed to help with nothing but bare hands. They had almost nothing, right? No heavy machinery, no fuel, and they dug with their hands. Many of them were later killed doing exactly that. When they pulled me out, I remember like light hurt my eyes at the very beginning. The first thing I saw was Rafiq’s face. He was covered in dust and he wasn’t crying. He was past crying. I think they had put him on my arm and I could feel his heart going like a bird. I really remember that. And then at the hospital, they listed fractures in our bodies: fingers, toes, back, ribs, and they kept telling us about how bad it was, but we were very grateful that we’re still alive, and that was really what was important. That was what mattered, I think, at the end.
I remember one day before December 7, on December 6, my late teacher and professor Refaat Alareer, if I could point out to this, I had a call with him. He was sheltering with his family in Tel al- Hawa, with his sister in his sister’s apartment and their four children, I think, and so he told me—he knew I was reporting, and he knew I was working as a journalist. And he told me, Muhammad, although our cause is worth dying for, it’s our insistence on living that bothers our enemies the most. I didn’t really understand fully what that meant at the moment, but I realized one day after that he was killed, and then the day after I was targeted. And so I tried to hold on to the little things that made life possible in Gaza and even after leaving Gaza, to make sure we are not as extraordinary as people think we are. We’re not as heroes as people think we are. We’re not as undefeatable as people think we are. We’re not as unbroken. It really bothers me when people label us with these names and these adjectives, with these descriptions of the people of Gaza are extraordinary. They’re going through unimaginable suffering, and they’re still going. No, we’re not going. We’ve been staying put. We’re still trying to make sense of what is being done to us, just like anybody else.
And what we’re really hoping for is for the chance to live as normally and as equally and as peacefully and as calmly as everybody else and to have our rights as human rights. The simplest rights, just like everybody else, take them for granted elsewhere, and so people have been telling me to be grateful for survival, and I am, like, genuinely grateful. Because leaving Gaza during this moment could be a luxury, no doubt. I get that, but it shouldn’t be that. I should be able to leave Gaza when I want, and should be able to go back to Gaza when I want, just like everybody else.
Now, people inside Gaza are just being pressed into accepting a reality that is nothing short of extraordinary. And just because they have adjusted to it doesn’t mean they’re fine with it, right? They’re coping, yes, they’re trying to make sure we’re moving through the day, we’re making it to the evening, but it doesn’t make them any more strong of humans than anybody else. These people are women and children and men who are just dying to get a day of normalcy and quiet and peace, right?
Ghousoon Bisharat
I agree with you, Mohammed. And these are the voices that I also hear on a daily basis from colleagues and friends in Gaza. But I have to say that when it comes to the journalists in Gaza, like you and many of your colleagues, and including reporters for 972, you are heroes. You know very well that Gaza has become the most dangerous place in modern history for journalists and media workers. As of today, I think, more than 250 journalists and media workers were killed by Israeli strikes. You wrote an extremely moving tribute to your friend and colleague, Ismail Al Ghoul, after an airstrike killed him and his cameraman in July 2024. He was working for Al Jazeera.
An investigation that we published on August 2025 uncovered the existence of an Israeli army unit specialized in justifying Israel’s action in Gaza for global media, including trying to establish a connection between the journalists Israel killed and Hamas. How do you respond to the Israeli claims that many Palestinian journalists were linked to Hamas?
Mohammed Mhawish
I think, first of all, if you look at the number of journalists killed in Gaza since October 7th, we have over 200 journalists, right? If you look at Gaza before October 7th, Gaza didn’t have this number of journalists. You know why? Because these people were in their very early 20s. They were just either getting into college or just getting out of college. But the number of people who were killed as journalists, as working journalists during the war, because they picked up the phone and the microphone and the camera after their colleague had been killed, after their friend had been killed, after their crew member had been killed, because they wanted to continue a legacy of storytelling, of documentation, of resisting these claims and these labels of terrorism that are attached to Palestinians, not only journalists, but even Palestinians more broadly and more generally, just because they lived in Gaza, right?
And so, for example, if I could speak specifically, like on the case of Ismail, I knew him. He was a friend of mine. He reported for Al Jazeera. He studied journalism at the Islamic University in Gaza, and he joined Al Jazeera in November 2023. And so he was 27 when he was killed. And so these people, very young people, they had dreams and they had ambitions, and they had wishes and they had plans to be everything but someone who would pay the price with his life to telling a story. I think Ismail became, at the time, the main voice from northern Gaza when almost nobody else was left there.
On July 31st, 2024, he and his cameraman, Rami Arifi, were in their chair car in Gaza City when a strike hit it. And it was many months after I left, because I left in April, and he was killed in July. But I had known him as the person before I left, before he was even a journalist.
He was someone who was very passionate about the job. He was someone who was very passionate about telling the stories of his people, so that one day we could live entirely different lives, things that were different from the bombardment and siege and deprivation that people and his community and his life were subjected to.
Now, Ismail was detained from Ashifa Hospital as well in March, if I’m not mistaken in March 2024, during an Israeli military operation and raid to Ashifa Hospital, and he was let go by the military.
Now, if you were a member of Hamas, you would never be let go, if you were detained by the military. Never. If they had even the slightest doubt or suspicion or any kind of information that you were somehow connected or associated with any kind of military activity in Gaza. If you get detained, you’re never released. Ismail was let go a few days after he was detained by the military simply because they knew he was only a journalist. But he was not detained because he belonged to Hamas. He was detained because he was a journalist. And that’s what he told his friends after he left, after he was let go. The interrogation and the questioning were always about his work, about the stories he was doing. And when he was killed, he was killed because of the very same thing. I find it very hard to believe that these journalists had in any way, like Ismail and others, like friends of mine, these accusations of being terrorists, being like military activists, I find it really absurd on the personal level. Professionally, as a journalist, we could verify that these people were not part of any military group, and I think 972 was part of the leading newsrooms to publish these intensive and in-depth reports to say, this is the strategic, like this is the means by which the Israeli military targets people.
And it is by no means to target only Hamas. It was facilitated to target a huge number of civilians, journalists, medical professionals, government employees. And so there is this assumption that everybody who was working in Gaza, everybody who had a job in Gaza was just because Hamas ran Gaza doesn’t mean every thousands of employees belonged to Hamas as this military group. It is absurd. And by the way, the Israeli military knows this. But they did not want testimony to get out. They did not want journalism to be done. And by the way, I think I’ve said this before, you don’t kill a journalist if you think they’re doing a bad job.
You don’t suppress a people because they’re weak. You don’t drop a thousand ton bomb on the roof of the car of a journalist because they were doing a bad job. And so, what these people did was basically confronting the military narrative that Gaza was a place that had to be killed, targeted, and burned, and etc. Because they believed in life and they believed that people deserved to live and people deserved to have their stories told and people deserved to have their voices heard by the world, especially at a time that international media was not allowed in Gaza by the Israeli military. So hundreds of journalists and even thousands of journalists had tried to enter Gaza since October 7th. But the very, very few number of journalists who were allowed in were accompanied by the military, permitted only to visit certain places and then they were forced out. They were not free to operate and do their jobs as independently, as freely as they wanted. But what Palestinians did is that they did the job as it was supposed to be done. And that’s what bothered. And so, being a journalist, I don’t think it justifies getting killed.
Being a Palestinian doesn’t justify being killed. Being someone from Gaza doesn’t justify, or the accusations that you’re associated or involved in any military or terrorist activity. Journalists did their job because they wanted to be journalists, and so if you’re targeting a building with 30 people, 50 people, only because you’re claiming to be targeting a specific person in there, doesn’t mean that these 50 people are collateral damage or they had to die. And that’s what really scares Palestinians the most, what really scares journalists the most is that you could be in proximity to somebody who is deemed a threat to Israel or deemed to be a militant to Israel or deemed to be someone who should be targeted to Israel when you don’t know.
And you just happen to be in the zone when the strike falls, and then there you are, paying your life by mistake to a strike that was never intended to take it. And so we have seen also footage like live footage of journalists being targeted, live streamed footage. This Israeli strike that targeted Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunus. It was a number of journalists and first responders attending to a strike that had struck earlier. And the cameras and the people that were there, they were basically people working with the Associated Press, the American newsroom, the AFP, Reuters. They were not military people. And the newsrooms and the organizations with which they worked, they acknowledged that. They said, “We had these people working, and these cameras were ours, and these reporters were ours, and these people worked with us.” But the claim that was said, it was because they were military people. And so you have this kind of really absurd narrative, but at the end of the day, what matters is that people look at it and I think like the truth is always there, but it’s hard to say it. It’s really challenging to say it. It’s very risky to say it. But Palestinian journalists in Gaza did that. They said that, and they are still doing that. We have still people in Gaza doing the job.
Ghousoon Bisharat
Mohammed, one of the most beautiful pieces we published on 972 in the last three years was your article titled “Bearing Witness to Gaza as a Place of Life,” where you reviewed and interviewed the three editors of a book called Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture. In this piece, you remind readers that Gaza was not just a war zone, but a community of culture, families, and dreams. What is the one thing you want the world to remember about Gaza?
Mohammed Mhawish
That Gaza was a place before it was a war. It had people, two million people who were full of life despite the extraordinary odds, despite the challenges. I think people woke up every day facing the worst version of the same challenges, but they insisted on creating life, on getting married, on going to college and study and make friends and try to travel when it was permitted. And they aspired to have something beyond war and beyond tragedy and beyond the losses that defined our lives. Even till today, I think people still dream of that reality and still dream of, like, still have hope that Gaza could someday become free and peaceful and a place where people could just enjoy life and be normal again. Most people outside Gaza meet Gaza through explosions and through headlines. But I think as someone who lived there my entire life, I think they could probably name a hospital or a refugee camp because it was bombed, so that’s how Gaza enters the news. But I think Gaza is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world for thousands of years, right?
It was a crossroads between Egypt and the Levant. Empires and histories passed through Gaza. It was as beautiful as it was. It was trying to be beautiful all the time, despite the blockade, despite the restrictions and limitations of life in there. And so, what I loved, I think, about Daybreak in Gaza is that it was just this book that documented war, yes, but its editors and its writers put together these stories out of ordinary people’s lives, right? And their memories. And so, when I interviewed the three of them, the editors, I think what came through was how much Gaza was full of culture and life and hope, despite everything.
And hope, hope, despite everything. People who built universities, libraries, bookshops, coffee places. As a coffee person, I was so, I think I was in this place, at least in Gaza City, where people, I don’t know if you know this, but Gazans, particularly people in Gaza City, we’re so coffee lovers. All right? Coffee all the time, coffee all day long. And I was one of these people. And we had plenty of good places that everybody, like every time an international team or a foreign person came through to visit, to do whatever work they were on, we would show them at least two or three of these coffee places. It had the sea. And so, as someone who was brought up very, very closely to the sea, I think I was lucky enough to be like to have grown in that environment, very close to the beach, very close to a way of living, of experiencing workers’ life, fishermen going about their boats every day.
Even when the sea was full of Israeli military boats and Navy ships that were imposing a naval blockade. Because fishermen were only allowed to fish within six nautical miles. But they still did it anyway. They still rode the sea every morning and came back with full nets back in the evening. And so these people insisted on living and insisted on creating a life even when it was impossible, even when it was very hard to think beyond the day.
I still think about Gaza, that place, the pre-October 7th place, and I still think about Gaza like right now. I think about college, for example. I studied English literature in Gaza, and one of my teachers, Refaat Alareer, he was one of the leading forces in my life that shaped the person I am as a writer and as a journalist and as someone who’s passionate about literature and writing and reading poetry.
I still think about my classmates. Some of them were killed and some of them like they had to leave and survive and they are now in exile. And some of them are still there. But we’re still as people, I think we’re very hopeful. As journalists, we try to be very realistic, but we’re still hoping that someday soon Gaza could be back again.
Ghousoon Bisharat
This is perhaps a good note to end on. Thank you, Mohammed, for your time. And for sharing your experience and thoughts with me and with our listeners. All the articles mentioned in this conversation will be in the episode’s description. Thank you again, Mohammed.
Mohammed Mhawish
Thank you so much, Ghousoon. Thank you for having me and thank you for always giving platform to journalists and reporters like me and others, and whether from Gaza and outside, to just be always trying to do the stories right and tell all those stories that it would be impossible to tell without your platform and without your assistance.
Thank you.
Ghousoon Bisharat
Thank you.
Ghousoon Bisharat
That’s it from the +972 podcast. Thank you for listening.
But before you go, make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us a review. It really helps new listeners find the show.
Visit 972mag.com for in depth reporting, analysis, and opinions from the ground in Israel Palestine.
And do not forget to download the +972 App and subscribe to our newsletters.
Now, more than ever, independent media is essential. Please visit 972mag.com and click Support Us to become a member or make a one-time donation.
Every contribution helps us continue to bring you reports and analysis from the ground, truthfully, critically, and without compromise.
