‘My job is just to exist’: The Palestinian reporter on surviving Gaza, media fatigue and starting fresh

The last time I sat down to eat with Plestia Alaqad, we were interrupted by diners from three different tables in the restaurant asking if they could take selfies with her.

This is not how Palestinian refugees are normally received. But then most Palestinian refugees don’t have millions of followers on Instagram.

“I’m super-grateful for people’s love and support,” she tells me, “and I’m glad using my platform I was able to raise awareness about what’s happening in Palestine and show the world Gaza through my eyes. Yet sometimes I feel misunderstood.

“I met one person who said something she thought was a compliment: ‘I only followed what’s happening in Gaza when you were there, once you made it out and were safe I stopped following the news’.

“I was there reporting about a real-time genocide happening to my people. I’m not an actress starring in a drama series that when they drop me from season two you stop watching.”

The 45 days of reporting to which Alaqad refers began after Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel in which about 1200 people were killed and 251 hostages taken. Her Gaza reporting ended with her family’s flight to Egypt and ultimately Melbourne in late 2023, and is documented in her book The Eyes of Gaza, published at a time when Gaza was front-page news around the world.

How does it feel to know Gazans are still being killed while much of the media caravan has moved on?

“We live in a trend-driven world, whether we like it or not,” she says. “Even people getting killed is a trend … I think it’s Israel’s tactic to make the genocide last long enough so people would feel desensitised. But media plays a role by choosing what they want to show.

“Unfortunately, a lot is happening in the world at the same time … something more extreme [than being killed] needs to happen to us for the world to keep their attention on Palestine.”

(In September last year a United Nations Commission of Inquiry found Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Israel called the assessment “scandalous” and “fake”. The International Court of Justice is yet to rule on a case brought by South Africa that alleged Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.)

Alaqad cites an incident during Israel’s 2014 bombardment of Gaza in which four children from the Bakr family were killed while playing on the beach. It wouldn’t be news in 2026, she says.

It was witnessed by multiple international journalists, many of them staying at the nearby Deira Hotel to cover the conflict, including Pulitzer-winning New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks. (Israeli authorities declared it a “tragic accident” and found no one culpable.)

In the current conflict, foreign media have been denied access to Gaza and the burden of bearing witness has fallen on Palestinian journalists like Alaqad, hundreds of whom have paid with their lives to bring the world images and reportage.

I ask her what she says to people who question whether those slain are really journalists – an issue that resurfaced in July when the international Committee to Protect Journalists revised a number of cases in its Gaza death toll – and when there is debate here about whether Gazan refugees like her family are adequately screened before entering Australia.

“People see you as a journalist once your political views are aligned with theirs,” she says. “They’re not judging it based on whether he or she studied journalism.”

Alaqad recalls being linked to Hamas without any evidence by the Jerusalem Post newspaper while she was reporting from Gaza, something she dismissed but which alarmed her family when the article circulated in Arabic. Such attempts to link journalists to the Islamist movement are feared by Gazans as a prelude to assassination by Israel’s military.

When it comes to screening, travelling on a Palestinian Authority passport has taught Alaqad – as she put it in her book – that “the world is big, yet there’s no space for me in it”.

“The world is afraid of you as a refugee … but at the same time they’re not afraid of the genocide that creates refugees in the first place.”

“Whenever I see privileged people on TikTok choosing to go somewhere new to start fresh, everyone online will be praising them … ‘you’re so adventurous girl, good job!’. But when a Palestinian is forcibly displaced and leaves their country for obvious safety reasons, that’s not seen as brave.

“Why do we always have to prove to the world that we’re human enough, that I am a journalist enough?” she asks.

We are not in danger of being interrupted by Plestia fans today. It is the last set breakfast of the winter for Rahaf Al Khatib, who has closed her café Beit Siti for a couple of months to relaunch with a spring menu and a community space. Though one passing family, seeing us eating inside, try the door and have to be politely let down.

Who can blame them? Because my family are from Jerusalem, or al-Quds (“the holy”) in Arabic, I want to say that the qudsiyeh – hummus topped with stewed fava beans – is my favourite, but the galayet bandoora, a simple but luscious dish of sautéed tomatoes, is even better. The brined goat’s cheese and stuffed baby eggplants spark an animated conversation about sourcing and preparation between Plestia and Rahaf, two Palestinians down under.

Alaqad has been back in Melbourne visiting family and is set to return to Beirut to resume her studies. She won the scholarship named after slain Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh to study at the American University of Beirut in 2024. Alaqad arrived in the city just 10 days before Israel began a major offensive on Lebanon.

“When I went to schools and saw displaced families in tents, it helped me understand what had happened to the Palestinian people as well … I wasn’t just surviving [any more], I was processing what happened in Gaza while trying to understand what’s happening in Lebanon.”

She sought out the displaced in Beirut’s southern suburbs and the country’s south. In one Instagram clip from the southern port of Sidon, Lebanese children show her what they took with them when forced to flee.

But her attitude to such interactions has shifted. “When I went to schools in Beirut, I posted saying that I don’t want to be there as a journalist because I don’t believe that journalism has the power to change the world any more, but I do believe that being kind to children specifically has the power to change the way they see the world.”

In one encounter a girl asked if Alaqad could braid her hair. “I’m not the best hairdresser,” she laughs. “But kids were happy and that’s all that matters.”

Many members of Alaqad’s family are still living in Gaza after multiple displacements.

“Usually when you start a conversation with anyone you ask ‘how are you?’,” she says. “In Gaza, we don’t dare to ask this ... I let them lead the conversation. The other day my uncle joked that at this point [in the northern summer] we’re not afraid of bombs, we’re afraid of flies [carrying disease]. This dark comedy has become normal.”

She points out that in the confinement of Gaza, “having time to label your feelings is a privilege”, recalling a day she left the family home to find a place to “cry in peace”, but even on the roof of her uncle’s house – since destroyed by Israeli bombing – people were to be found cooking due to the lack of gas. “Do I have to throw myself off the roof to find privacy?” she wondered.

Talking about return is never an idle matter for Palestinians, so I hesitate before raising it.

“I know I will return … my concern is I will go back to a Gaza I don’t know,” Alaqad says. “I lived there my whole life, I walked in its streets endless times, yet when my friends who are still in Gaza post pictures, I don’t recognise the streets any more.

“That’s why I love the sea … it gives me a sense of direction, a sense of reassurance that home will be rebuilt … I lived in Tel al-Hawa, which is in ruins, but you can still see the sea.”

After the Lebanon war in the 1980s, many who called Beirut home went through similar emotions. When Alaqad told journalist Mehdi Hasan last year that she strangely felt a safety in Gaza she did not elsewhere, I was reminded of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s line that “our siege [in Beirut under Israeli bombardment] is an oasis in a perishing world”.

“I don’t think about what my life will be like there,” Alaqad says. “I worry about what life is right now in Gaza. Will people be compensated? What about the hundreds of thousands who lost their jobs?

“I believe in the power of education, but some universities have resumed online in a place where students don’t have internet or a laptop ... they don’t have food, shelter, water.

“My cousin in grade 6 or 7 is going to school in a tent. There are three-year-olds in Gaza who think a tent is a normal home, as they never knew a home.”

The university which Alaqad attended as an undergraduate, Eastern Mediterranean in Turkish-occupied Cyprus, is now offering a media scholarship to Gazan students in her name. I do a double take when she tells me she will soon be “launching my brand” with a line of diaries. But then The Eyes of Gaza began its life as her personal journal.

“The brand is called neýa, which means intention,” she says. “I always think of social media, doomscrolling, how we don’t have any original thoughts any more but are always looking at other people’s reviews and commentary.

“Journalling is a place where there aren’t editors over your head telling you what you’re allowed to write, if this or that word is acceptable,” she says, rolling her eyes mischievously at the editor she’s eating with. “I hope neýa reminds people to slow down and write things, rather than typing.”

I’m always amazed at the ability of Plestia, who has lived through so much loss and destruction, to put me on the spot like this and make me laugh. I also wonder how she can be a student and still have so many other projects.

I ask if she knows the poet Maya Angelou, and she tells me Gazans study her work at school. I say she reminds me of And Still I Rise, in which Angelou writes: “Did you want to see me broken?/Bowed head and lowered eyes?/Shoulders falling down like teardrops/Weakened by my soulful cries?”

She is defiant about being active – and happy. But she is equally firm about where she doesn’t want to go. She interviews ordinary people and not political figures: “People try and reduce our cause to Hamas and the [Palestinian] Authority … we’re past that now.”

On the possibility of appearing on a panel with supporters of Israel, she is adamant: “I don’t put myself in a position where I have to debate whether I have the right to exist as a Palestinian or not.

“We passed the point of dialogue the minute Israel started … burning people alive and bombing funerals. All of that can’t be happening back home while I’m sitting on a panel in a country where I have to produce all this documentation just to enter.

“My job is just to exist, not to prove that I need to exist.”

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