: [POST-PUBLICATION CLARIFICATION: The casualty figure of 85 Palestinian journalists cited in this piece comes from the Committee to Protect Journalists. Israel has disputed that number arguing that some of those included in the count were not journalists and many were simply caught up in the war but not killed while actually working as journalists.]
KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:
Hey. I'm Kelly McEvers, and this is EMBEDDED from NPR. And just a quick warning - in today's episode, we'll be talking about violence and death. You will also hear recordings from Gaza which have sounds of bombing and shooting.
In our last episode, I talked to Daniel Estrin, NPR's Jerusalem correspondent. He's the main person covering the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Leila Fadel, who hosts Morning Edition at NPR, has been reporting on the conflict, too.
I actually met Leila back in 2010. I had just arrived in Iraq. She had been reporting on the war there for years. She was later based in Cairo and did incredible coverage of the Arab Spring from there. So she is someone who has spent many years covering the Middle East. And after the October 7 attack that was led by Hamas, when the Israeli government says more than 1,200 people were killed, Leila went to Israel to talk to survivors of the attack. Her reporting there was really powerful. You should check it out. You can find it on the NPR website.
And today, we're going to talk to Leila about Gaza. We are now five months into Israel's retaliation for October 7. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed. Eighty-five percent of Gaza's population has been forcibly displaced. On today's episode, we're going to talk about two stories Leila has been following. One is almost like a diary - a Palestinian student who sends Leila voice memos. The other is about a Palestinian American family who was visiting Gaza when the bombardment started and got stuck in the war.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MCEVERS: Coming up after the break, voice memos from Gaza.
Hey, Leila.
LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: Hey, Kelly.
MCEVERS: So the Israeli government does not allow international journalists to report in Gaza,
FADEL: Right.
MCEVERS: And for Palestinian journalists reporting there, it's incredibly dangerous. More than 85 Palestinian journalists have been killed since October 7. But still, you've been finding ways to tell people's stories from Gaza.
FADEL: Yeah.
MCEVERS: One of them is a young woman. Her name is Shaimaa Ahmed. She was 20 years old when she first started sending you voice messages over WhatsApp. That was in October, at the beginning of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSIONS)
SHAIMAA AHMED: Hello, Leila. As you hear, the situation now may not be the best situation to record anything ever. But when I have service, hopefully these messages will get to you.
MCEVERS: You've been documenting her experience over the last several months. Can you just tell me a little bit more about her?
FADEL: Yeah. I mean, the way I found Shaimaa was I was trying to find people in Gaza during the very first blackout. The telecommunications company had been struck. Cellphone lines were down, and all of a sudden, we had lost contact with Gaza. And through a nonprofit, I was connected to Shaimaa. And when people were able to communicate again, Shaimaa and I started talking. I would send her texts asking her what life was like before, what she was going through, what she was eating, how she was surviving, and she would talk to me about life.
AHMED: The neighborhood I used to live in is in Shuja'iyya. It is a place that is very close to the borders of Gaza. It is a very beautiful neighborhood.
FADEL: She would record voice memos into her phone whenever something came to her, whenever something was happening around her, something occurred to her, and then I would receive them in batches whenever she got a moment of service. And at the end of October, she sends me this first batch of messages, and she talked a lot about her life before October 7, the beautiful rose garden in her grandmother's house, the room - she had just redecorated, saved up money with her sister and redecorated - in their home with the help of their uncles, who are carpenters. She talked about her university.
AHMED: To put it simply, I really loved university. I loved the library. I befriended one of the librarians who was very kind to me and always gave me book recommendations, and I'd always give them some of my book recommendations. We just had an amazing relationship, and he also helped me in a lot of things.
FADEL: What a beautiful nerd, I thought, when she was describing how much she loved her professors, and she loved science, and she loved the projects she was working on. She said, me and the other students thought we were going to change the world with these projects. Maybe we wouldn't, but that was what we thought.
AHMED: And we had this goal that once we graduate, we have to at least put together a computer that we connected on our own. That was just something we had to do at some point.
MCEVERS: And what's that sound in the background?
FADEL: That's the drones. That's the constant soundtrack of this war - Israeli drones in the sky. So many of her voice notes came in with sounds like that and sounds that were much worse.
(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSIONS)
AHMED: My cousin just went out this morning, and he saw the troops from a distance, and he told us how they looked. They've shot people who were headed from the north to the south. And it's really dangerous to move right now. And the bombs are just getting closer and louder.
FADEL: So when I was messaging with her, she was still in the north of Gaza, when the Israeli military had told civilians to move south because Israel said anybody left in the city would be treated as a combatant. And this mass displacement had happened that the world was watching with extreme concern, people getting killed by the Israeli military on that path, people walking carrying everything they had. But Shaimaa and her family, they had nowhere to go. So they didn't make the move. And the war is just escalating around her.
AHMED: Today, six tons of bombs, six rockets - each weighed one ton - were bombed on a single residential square. And those bombs were U.S. made.
FADEL: She knows she's talking to an American journalist. She knows she's talking to an American audience.
AHMED: It's really hard to see that people are aiding this violence, and it's really just so hard to live through. Oh my, God.
(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSION)
AHMED: That is all I have to say.
FADEL: I mean, I don't know if 20-year-old Shaimaa knows if each of those bombs was a ton, and I don't know if she knows if those specific bombs or missiles were U.S. made. But her point was, there is a sizable amount of military aid, weapons and support coming from the U.S. And she's asking why at a time people are questioning what many see as a disproportionate response to the attack on October 7. And there are questions about whether war crimes are being committed with the level of civilians that are being killed, the fact that Israel isn't letting food and water and fuel and electricity into the strip, the number of children that are killed, buried, the number of people under the rubble. All of this is coming across in those first batches of messages that she's sending me. And then on October 31, around 3 p.m., Shaimaa goes silent.
MCEVERS: So at that point in the conflict, the Israeli military had basically ordered half the population of northern Gaza to evacuate and head south, as you said, and families would pack like, 10, 12 people into a car, you know, navigate these bombed-out roads. So did she join that big move south?
FADEL: I mean, I didn't know anything. I didn't know if they had made that move. Frankly, I wasn't sure she was alive at all. And then finally, one morning, she resurfaced, and I got a voice memo from her.
AHMED: Hello, Leila. How are you? I hope you're doing well. Thank you so much for sending all the messages to confirm that I'm still OK and for sending me news and updates. Thank you so much.
FADEL: The temporary cease-fire at the end of November, in which there was a hostage exchange deal and there were several days without attacks, had gone into effect. And so there weren't the sound of bombs. There weren't the sound of drones. But you could hear that she was getting tired.
AHMED: If I wanted to explain what was going on the past few weeks, it's really hard to. It's like, I feel like big parts of my life, bits of my life have been fading away as every day passed.
FADEL: At this point, she's moved a little further south to Nuseirat. She was staying in a three-bedroom apartment with close to a hundred people in it.
AHMED: Every corner had people sitting, kids screaming and crying and people talking - noisy 24/7. It's crazy.
FADEL: And there were only two toilets for a hundred people.
AHMED: And that's just the worst thing for me. I hate not being able to use the toilet properly, not being able to wash myself properly and being smelly. I just hate that. And I'm clean freak. That's how I am, usually.
FADEL: Can you imagine not just not having running water, but nowhere to clean yourself, to clean yourself up as a woman who has a period? She also, in those moments, would tell me the things that she was dreaming about.
AHMED: Every night as I go to sleep, my dream is just me in my room with my sister, watching a TV show with a bowl full of food and chicken that we haven't eaten for the longest time ever, you know, just relaxing with my family after having had a bath and, you know, having dived in a bathtub full of hot, boiling water. That is just a dream that I really wish could come true.
FADEL: There's so much that's in there - right? - the unsaid there - the food that can't come in - so she's not eating - the hot bath, the hot shower - all things you can't have in this moment.
MCEVERS: So you were getting these messages from Shaimaa during the temporary cease-fire, which lasted about a week and then ended on December 1. And we know that Nuseirat, the area where she was, was hit pretty hard after that. Were you able to get in touch with her?
FADEL: So at this point, I - as soon as I heard hostilities had resumed, that the bombardments - the Israeli bombardments - had started again, I messaged her saying, are you OK? Are there any attacks in your neighborhood? Is there any fighting? And she sent me a long message that started with, yes, it's true.
AHMED: It is continuous.
(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSIONS)
AHMED: It seems like we might have to evacuate again.
(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSIONS)
AHMED: But I don't think we're moving this time because we've had enough.
(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSIONS)
AHMED: Seriously, we've had enough. That's it. We have no place to go. It's packed everywhere. We're either going to die being shot or hungry. So, you know, it's better to die where we are.
FADEL: And then I didn't hear from her again. And I kept thinking, OK, when is she going to get in touch? How do I get in touch with her? What's happened? And then finally, at the beginning of February, a new batch of voice memos.
AHMED: We're about to move.
(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSIONS)
AHMED: I'm by the window just to record this. My parents are running around. My uncles and aunts are....
FADEL: They're from the weeks that she wasn't in touch with me. She was recording for the day that she got cell data and was able to send them. And remember, she's not a journalist. She's documenting what she's going through for the world as she's going through it. The first one describes a day in early January where she's being displaced again.
AHMED: It's already been 90 days...
(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSIONS)
AHMED: ...Of war. It's not something easy...
(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSIONS)
AHMED: Ah. It's not something easy to handle. I have no idea if this is ever going to get to you because the place we're about to move to...
(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSIONS)
AHMED: ...The place we're about to move to this time would be a complete isolation.
FADEL: She was on her way to the camps in Deir al-Balah, which is a refugee camp in central Gaza. And remember, really much of Gaza are refugee camps from 1948 when Israel was created and when Palestinians describe what they call the Nakba, the catastrophe, their mass displacement - hundreds of thousands of people forcibly, sometimes violently displaced. And Deir al-Balah was a place that became a refugee camp in 1948 that started with tents, became hardened apartment buildings, and now is back to tents. So the historical echoes are everywhere, in everything, she says that day.
(SOUNDBITE OF DRONES HUMMING OVERHEAD)
AHMED: Right now, we're walking around. I just wanted to record. We're basically running away. And just as a note - please, please, please, please.
(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSIONS)
AHMED: God. This is the seventh place we're evacuating to, or the eighth? I seriously lost count.
MCEVERS: This is the seventh place we're evacuating to, she's saying, or the eighth. She doesn't even know.
FADEL: She doesn't even know. That's how many times. That's how many times. And around her, everybody's walking, too.
AHMED: Like, as I'm walking, nobody's laughing. Everybody has a grim face on after they have been kicked out of their houses, kicked out of everywhere they could evacuate to, ended up on the streets in camps.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Non-English language spoken).
AHMED: Hopefully, this is over, and people in Gaza get payback for what they've experienced and what they've lost. And nothing, nothing can ever pay back what we've seen and the horrors we've been through.
MCEVERS: Wow. Her voice sounds so different from those first voice memos she sent you.
FADEL: Yeah. I mean, it's changed. It's hardened, Kelly. That's when I get afraid because when people are in so much pain, going through so much trauma, they do want revenge. I remember that after October 7, I was talking to a young man from the Kibbutz Be'eri who told me, I don't care what happens to the people of Gaza. Shoot them all. And it wasn't because he's a bad person. He was a traumatized, angry, scared person who was hurt because about a hundred people in his community were killed. And now listening to Shaimaa, and she's talking about payback, and that's the cycle. You know, you're hearing it happen because people are human.
MCEVERS: Yeah.
FADEL: And, you know, I've met people who say, I know that I've been hurt. But they're opposed to this level of the Israeli government retaliation. For example, I met a person whose brother was killed in the October 7 attack who said, I know my brother's killed, but this bombardment won't make me safer. If you go kill Palestinian civilians, it won't make me safer. We have to solve it in a different way. But that is not the common reaction of a person who's been through something like this.
MCEVERS: What about Shaimaa? How is she doing? Is she OK?
FADEL: Physically, she's OK. You know, she hasn't been hurt so far. She's lost her grandmother, her two uncles, professors, friends. She knows her university is gone. Her neighborhood on the border with southern Israel, Shuja'iyya, is gone. Her house is gone. She's in this refugee camp, and she's living a life that you shouldn't be living in 2024 - no gas. People are cooking over an open fire. They're constantly looking for food, for water.
And a reminder here, this is a man-made humanitarian disaster. You know, we're just a few months in, and people are on the brink of famine. The U.N. just put out a report saying 10 children in Gaza have died from starvation or dehydration, including a baby that we reported about here on NPR.
Shaimaa said the camp is really crowded. It's cold. People are sleeping in poorly insulated tents, and she and everyone there are digging out their own toilets in the ground.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FADEL: And I think the hardest message was when she sent me a message asking me, like, do you know about people who would sponsor students from Gaza? - because I need to go somewhere else.
AHMED: It's pretty hard to see a future here, especially not being able to get access to education. I'm so passionate about learning. It's just what defines me, in some ways.
FADEL: Recently, she said she's even abandoned that. They're just finding a way to get out of Gaza, and that could cost a lot of money to try to get on that list to cross into Egypt.
AHMED: Although, if Gaza was the same as it used to be, I would never. All the people I love are here. All my friends are here. But at the same time, it's the only choice I have, basically.
FADEL: She's realizing there's no future for her in this place that she described with such love in those early days, and probably would still describe with love, but she knows there's nothing to go back to.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MCEVERS: After the break, Leila will talk about how this conflict is affecting one Palestinian family who lives here in the U.S.
OK. We are back with NPR's Leila Fadel. During this conflict, Leila, you've also been reporting on Palestinians who live outside of Gaza. You spent time staying in touch with a couple, Wafaa Abuzayda and Abood Okal. They have a 2-year-old son. They live in Massachusetts, but they were actually visiting Gaza when the bombardment started. So how did you meet them?
FADEL: Yeah. I mean, at first, it was - you know, we were doing a lot of stories about Israeli Americans and other dual nationals who were feeling unsafe in Israel, and they wanted to get home. And there were all these efforts to help people get out of Israel. And so I started to wonder about - what about dual nationals in Gaza? What about Americans in Gaza? What is being done to help them? And that's how I ended up getting in touch with Wafaa and Abood through a colleague here at NPR.
And they hadn't been to Gaza, where their family lives, in years. And they had wanted the family to meet Yousef, their baby. So Wafaa and Abood took a quick vacation. Well, they thought it was going to be a quick vacation. And then they find themselves with their child in Gaza when the war breaks out.
WAFAA ABUZAYDA: You know what's the hardest feeling? The hardest feeling ever is to hide your fear and show the opposite just to keep my son positive and full of energy because he doesn't understand anything. He thinks this is a fireworks. OK, Mommy, clap, clap. This is a fireworks. But sometimes, he will - when - he will jump. Like, he will, like, be, like, scared and freaking out if I'm not next to him.
FADEL: This is the first time I ever spoke to Wafaa, and this was after them, for days and days, trying to get help calling the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, calling the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, being told really nothing, getting no information. There was no way to get out. The borders are sealed. Remember, nothing is coming in or out - not just people, but anything else - not fuel, not food, nothing. And so they start going public. They start talking to the press because they don't know what else to do.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ABUZAYDA: Nobody's helping. Everybody's talking to us, but nobody's helping.
FADEL: I think of this all the time. I think about it all the time - about her on our airwaves, talking to millions of Americans.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ABUZAYDA: Please, please save us.
MCEVERS: What happened next? Like, how did they get out?
FADEL: Yeah. So for 29 days, they were trapped in Gaza. And then one day, Abood said to me that their names showed up on the list of people that are approved by Israel and Egypt to leave via the Rafah crossing, the border between the south of Gaza and of Egypt. And they got out. They got out. They went to Egypt and finally got back to Massachusetts, and then I got to talk to them again at home with Yousef safe.
Is this Yousef?
ABUZAYDA: This is Yousef. Yousef?
FADEL: Hi, Yousef. Yousef, hi.
I - so I asked her, like, how he was doing 'cause he - I know he's too little to understand, but I always am curious about how little kids like that internalize such trauma.
Does he know he's safe?
ABUZAYDA: I don't know if he knows that or not, but I think...
YOUSEF: Ah.
ABUZAYDA: ...He knows we're back home because he started to go around all his favorite places at the house and his room, and I think he knows we're back.
MCEVERS: And what about Wafaa and Abood? How are they doing?
FADEL: I mean, even the decision to leave was very hard for them 'cause they had left their parents at that point behind and other extended family - siblings. And so they had a lot of survivor's guilt. Like, why am I OK? How come I got to cross the gate?
ABOOD OKAL: I think we were supposed to be extremely happy when we crossed into Egypt, yet I think Wafaa and I, for the first two hours of that drive, were just in tears because you look back, and you think about the people you left behind. Even those family members that you were not close with or you didn't know, you became extremely close with 'cause you were facing moments where you thought you all were going to die together. So I think when Wafaa and I got to Cairo, we both had the same feeling. We took showers back to back, and we both cried in the shower because we haven't taken a shower for weeks, and we know our parents still can't take a shower.
MCEVERS: What does he know about his family now? How are they? Are they OK?
FADEL: At this point, when I spoke to Wafaa and Abood, Wafaa was checking on her family constantly. They had gotten out of Gaza just after her, and so she knew that they were safe. Abood's parents were refusing to leave because the siblings were still there and their grandkids, but they did just get out. Abood said, though, he can't always get in touch with his family that's still there, his siblings, because of the comms blackouts. And he says, in some ways, being on the outside - it's harder because you're not there to know that they're safe, and so you're just guessing like the rest of the world.
OKAL: We hear of bombings in ex-neighborhood, and you try to reach out to the people that you - live in that neighborhood, and the calls won't go through, and then there's no way for you to confirm.
FADEL: So he's not even sure how many family members they've lost.
MCEVERS: How many American citizens are still in Gaza? Do we know?
FADEL: It's really unclear at this point. When I was speaking to Wafaa and Abood at the beginning of all this, there were hundreds. We know that there are still Americans in Gaza, and there were a lot of people, Wafaa and Abood included, that felt that the American administration did not take the same type of care for American citizens in Gaza that they did for citizens in other places.
And the question was raised, do American lives have less value in one place than they do in another? Publicly, the administration says no. We work hard to get American citizens out no matter what. But a couple families sued the Biden administration over all of this. They said the government just didn't do what it was supposed to do. They didn't try hard enough to get U.S. citizens and relatives of U.S. citizens stuck in Gaza out of danger.
MCEVERS: What about Wafaa? Like, how has this experience affected her? Or how does she talk about it?
FADEL: I mean, when I spoke to them, I felt like they were still shellshocked.
ABUZAYDA: I feel, right now - I don't want to leave the house. I feel like I want to stay here. I feel safe here.
FADEL: I think they were still struggling to express what they've been through.
ABUZAYDA: A lot of people - they were asking, like, would you like to go back to Gaza or Palestine? For now, I don't have an answer, but I don't know if I'm going to go back with Yousef again to Gaza 'cause every moment, every moment, I imagined Yousef under one of the houses or in the hospital or dying or - I don't know. I think, with Yousef, it's hard to do it again.
FADEL: You know, something I was thinking about is they would sleep all on top of each other in Gaza so that if something happened, they would die all three. As Wafaa put it, not one, not two - all three.
MCEVERS: Listening to their story, I just can't help but think about how Palestinians from Gaza will never really be able to go back to the place they knew. I mean, what do you think will be their relationship to this place in the future?
FADEL: Yeah. I mean, I think about Yousef, right? Like, Yousef had never been to his parents' homeland before, and the first time he goes, it was war. And it's not even the original ancestral home because Wafaa and Abood's parents and grandparents were displaced from where they really are from. And Abood and Wafaa grew up with multiple incidents of either violence or war or encounters with Israeli soldiers. Gaza had several conflicts that were considered extremely deadly before what we're seeing now.
And so I thought about the generations and generations of pain, you know, decade after decade of living under occupation and the dehumanizing thing that it does to everybody involved, because the security of everyone in this strip of land is intrinsically linked. And if you live through something like what we're seeing right now, where - according to the Gaza Health Ministry - more than 12,000 children have been killed, so they don't have a future. What is the future for the civilians - the young people, the children - who do survive?
MCEVERS: I mean, this makes me think about Shaimaa. When's the last time you heard from her?
FADEL: About a week ago, she posted a video to her Instagram from the refugee camp she's living in. So I knew she was still alive, and she's sent me messages since. At this point, she doesn't know if she'll be able to get out of Gaza, and if she stays, she's not sure what her future will look like. You can hear her wondering about that in lots of the voice memos she sent me over the last five months.
AHMED: You know, we're craving everything. We miss our life so bad. We miss our home so bad. We miss Gaza that we knew so bad because now everything we know is gone. And when we see the pictures and we see our memories and all the nice times we spent together, it feels like these times didn't exist in the first place. And even after this is over, we're going to go back to destruction - total and complete destruction - because it's just full of rubble on rubble and that is all.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FADEL: Does that mean permanent displacement for people like Shaimaa? That's what they're asking. That's what they're wondering. Is there a possible peaceful solution with these decades and decades of pain and trauma and cycles of violence? All those questions are in my head right now about the children of Gaza, about the children of Israelis, about the children of Palestinians.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MCEVERS: Leila, thank you so much.
FADEL: Thank you.
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MCEVERS: If you want to hear more about this conflict, go check out the latest episode from our friends at Throughline, who are looking at the rise of the right wing in Israeli politics.
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SARA YAEL HIRSCHHORN: Netanyahu essentially finds himself in a bind. So he looks towards parties to his right and decides the kind of government that he wants to form is an ultranationalist and ultra-orthodox coalition.
MCEVERS: How do we get here? Listen to Throughline wherever you get your podcasts.
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MCEVERS: This episode was edited by Luis Trelles and produced by Ariana Gharib Lee, with help from Abby Wendle. It was mastered by James Willetts and fact-checked by Jane Gilvin. The EMBEDDED team also includes Rhaina Cohen, Dan Girma, Adelina Lancianese, Alison MacAdam and Nic Neves. Liana Simstrom is our supervising producer. Katie Simon is our supervising editor, and Irene Noguchi is the executive producer of the Enterprise Storytelling Unit, our home at NPR.
Thanks to our managing editor of standards and practices, Tony Cavin, and Johannes Doerge for legal support. Special thanks also to Erika Aguilar, Anas Baba, Nina Kravinsky, Taylor Haney, Arezou Rezvani and Majd Al-Waheidi and to our friends at NPR's international desk - James Hider and Didi Schanche.
And a big thanks to our EMBEDDED+ supporters. EMBEDDED is where we do ambitious long-form journalism at NPR, and EMBEDDED+ helps us keep that work going. Supporters also get to listen to every EMBEDDED series sponsor-free, including the next one coming up in this feed in just a few weeks. Find out more at plus.npr.org/embedded or find the EMBEDDED channel in Apple. And thanks.
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