2 September 2024
Gaza-based Al Jazeera journalist Youmna El Sayed in the Bo-Kaap, Cape Town, on Sunday, says she had to flee her home base after being displaced six times by the Israeli army. Photo: Matthew Hirsch.
A week after Al Jazeera’s Gaza-based journalist Youmna El Sayed fled to Egypt in December, her five-year-old daughter, Joury, asked her when they would return home.
“I told her the bombs had not stopped,” said El Sayed. “She told me, it’s enough. I’ve rested for a week. I want to go back.”
In the process of fleeing, Joury had to leave her kitten behind, “which broke her heart”, she said.
Her family was displaced six times, El Sayed told GroundUp at an event in the Bo-Kaap during a Southern African tour arranged by Salaam Media.
In October, her husband received a call from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) telling them to evacuate Gaza City. At the time, Al Jazeera condemned the threat to her and her family.
“They [IDF] opened fire after they gave us five minutes to escape and then they levelled the entire building,” she said.
El Sayed said she had to leave Gaza for her children’s sake. “I had no other choice to save their lives except to evacuate. I was privileged that I was able to evacuate, but thousands more were not.”
Awarded The Pimentel Fonseca Civil Journalism Award at the International Festival of Civil Journalism in Italy in April, El Sayed has accused the IDF of deliberately targeting journalists.
“Why would journalism offices get (bombed) from the first week of the war? Why would we, as journalists, be forced to evacuate with everyone else? Why would we get targeted, while we are marked with our press gear?” she asks.
She said international journalists had been denied access to Gaza to expose atrocities committed against Palestinians, but Israel has “lost its bet on the Palestinian journalists”.
She is critical of media coverage of the war. While focusing on the freeing of Israeli hostages, the hundreds of Palestinian civilians killed in the process are barely mentioned, she said. And thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians had been “kidnapped” since October and detained by Israel. She said detainees were tortured and some had died in detention.
She worries about the colleagues, family members and friends she left behind.
Asked what she would say to people who are pro-Israeli, El Sayed said they should go to Gaza and “see for themselves with their own eyes”.
“I want them to put themselves in our shoes and imagine their children to be our children. I’m sure that their whole perspective is going to change after that,” she said.
Official sources record about 42,000 people killed in the war since 7 October, over 40,000 Palestinians and nearly 1,500 Israelis. 116 journalists have been killed. The prestigious medical journal The Lancet published an article in July that warned that the real death toll in Gaza could be several times higher.