Covering the war in Gaza also means living it

Laura Wagner

For 17 months and counting, Anas Baba’s life has revolved around only two things: reporting from Gaza as an NPR producer, and staying alive.

Scrape together enough canned lentils for a meal; interview a father about the death of his malnourished son. Avoid getting hit by Israeli fire; report on the baby sisters whose limbs were blown off a day after being vaccinated against polio. Find an internet connection reliable enough to tell his NPR colleagues he’s okay; interview a social media influencer whose parents were killed in an Israeli hostage rescue operation.

The 31-year-old Gaza native, who spoke to The Washington Post from Gaza City in early February, lives to work and works to live.

“I never stopped for a single day. NPR encouraged me to take days off and I said, ‘I cannot.’ If you give me a day off, you leave me just with my brain, and then I think about all the horror and misery,” he said. “So, no stops.”

Baba is one of few journalists working full-time with a U.S. news organization to remain in Gaza, where more than 48,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Palestinian authorities and United Nations agen cies, such as the World Health Organization, since Israel launched an unprecedented military offensive on the occupied land after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel which killed 1,200 people.

As star news anchors from the United States flocked to the relative safety of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, many journalists working for Western media companies evacuated from Gaza as Israel’s attacks intensified. Others, such as Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah from Lebanon, were killed by Israel, a strike that press freedom and human rights groups have classified as murder. At least 162 Palestinian journalists have been killed since the start of Israel’s military assault on Gaza, and dozens more have been injured or arrested, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit that tracks repression worldwide. In the deadliest period for journalists in decades, Baba stayed. He remains dedicated to covering Gaza for a world that can take his reporting but can’t ensure his safety.

“I try to show every single person that telling his own story - it’s not going to help - but at least we need to share the truth, tell the world what happened here,” he said.

Baba was raised with this idea of bearing witness. His father, Mohammed Abed, is a veteran photojournalist and Baba “grew up with a camera in my lap,” recalling fighting between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces near Rafah, the southern Gaza city where he lived with his large extended family. When he was 10, he began accompanying his father in the field, carrying his cameras and learning how to work with subjects, find camera angles and stay safe.

At 18, Baba began working as a freelance photojournalist, while earning bachelor’s degrees in journalism and English literature from Al-Azhar University in Gaza City. He went on to work for organizations including Agence France-Presse, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal and NPR. Notably, a photo he shot of rockets suspended in the air between Gaza and Israel in 2021 became a defining image of the conflict.

NPR hired him full-time in 2024 as a producer, and he has worked exclusively for the organization since then, filing audio reports under his own byline and collaborating closely with NPR’s international team of reporters and editors based in the region. Many other Palestinian journalists remain in Gaza, working for regional media outlets or as freelancers for international outlets, such as well-known photojournalists Majdi Fathi and Ali Jadallah - but Baba’s position is unique. Americans hear his measured voice on the radio, reaching them over wailing sirens, scratchy phone lines and the sobs of the living - and they connect with him.

In January, the NPR Mideast reporting team won the Dupont-Columbia Award which honors outstanding public service reporting.

While accepting the award, NPR’s Israel correspondent Daniel Estrin said they aimed to “bring our listeners into the hospital or into the killing field to listen to somebody else’s pain knowing that many listeners would bristle, but when you hear that quivering voice hitting your ear, it’s like they’re speaking directly to you. Some listeners have written and told us that those voices move them to see things differently.”

Estrin told The Post that Baba “is absolutely essential to our coverage.”

In early November 2023, NPR and other media organizations helped evacuate Baba’s mother and siblings out of Gaza to Egypt. From there, other friends helped them secure European visas, and they moved to Belgium. Baba said his father, Abed, left Gaza for Egypt because of the ongoing effects of an injury he sustained in 2018 while in the field - an Israeli sniper shot him in the leg while he was covering the Great March of Return, a series of demonstrations held weekly near the Gaza-Israel border, during which protesters demanded the end of the Israeli blockade and the right of return for refugees. Baba said his father is now working with the AFP office in Egypt, where he coordinates the organization’s stringers in the Gaza Strip.

Not needing to worry about the safety of his family, Baba said, was “the only thing that helped me report on all this.”

Even so, he tried to limit contact with his family outside of Gaza.

“To be honest, I wasn’t loving the idea of checking in with them and talking to them too much because I was always believing that I could die at any minute,” he said. “I don’t want them to be attached to me, to feel such a loss.”

Baba, like other Gazans, has been repeatedly displaced while covering the war during the last year and a half. After evacuating from Gaza City to the south of the Gaza Strip, he lived in a cramped four-story home with 210 members of his extended family in Rafah, which at the time was the only major city without a significant presence of Israeli ground troops.

“Every person had one single pita bread per day,” he said. “Seventeen people slept in one room.”

Baba recounted his movements after that. In December 2023, he put cooking oil in a 1989 Mercedes and drove to the city of Khan Younis during a major Israeli offensive to report on the overwhelmed Nasser Medical Complex, where bodies filled the hallways and a doctor was afraid to leave his patients on mechanical ventilators because the generators powering the hospital kept going out.

He then returned to Rafah and reported on the limited amount of humanitarian aid reaching desperate refugees, and on Israeli airstrikes that killed 14 members of one family. Baba also told stories of resilience, such as the baker in Rafah who made cakes for Palestinians whose lives had been upended by violence.

“We Gazans love life. People are pushing themselves to hope,” the baker, Ibrahim Abu Hani, told Baba. “Because there are no other options.”

But Abu Hani, Baba and almost a million other Palestinians were forced to flee when Israel invaded Rafah. Baba moved around - living at different points with family members at his aunt’s house in Bureij and a rented home in Al-Zawaideh - and in June went to the Nuseirat refugee camp, where he reported on an Israeli hostage rescue mission that extracted four hostages and killed at least 274 Palestinians. Baba was among a few journalists to enter the site in the immediate aftermath of the operation, which involved intense airstrikes in civilian areas.

“It was one of the things that I’ll never forget in my life. Children, adults, all of them turned into pieces,” he told The Post. “I couldn’t even sleep for four days after this.”

It was difficult for Baba to process what he saw as the world celebrating the hostage rescue. To him, the massacred Palestinians had become a footnote.

“It’s not only the bombs that can kill you,” he said. “Sometimes, once the world itself turns their back, that can kill you more and more.”

Baba said that “without naming anyone,” he does see bias in Western news media’s coverage of Israelis and Palestinians. But he’s less interested in debates over terminology, such as whether to use “genocide” to describe the acts Israel has committed in Gaza, than he is in reporting what he is seeing in as much detail as possible.

“Multiple times I have found fragments of bombs, and we [say] it there on NPR that we found fragments of bombs that are U.S.-made. We don’t hide anything,” he said. “We don’t use ‘genocide’ … but we use ‘mass killings,’ we sometimes use ‘massacres.’ We leave the rest for the audience.”

“It’s all about the quality of the reporting,” he said, describing going to a hospital’s morgue to count the dead to be certain of a casualty number. “The truth and the facts.”

The dogged accumulation of interviews and firsthand details can help tell a story when language itself falls short. Baba said he and his NPR colleague Aya Batrawy spent more than two months gathering reporting for a single, vivid story about the raid and closure of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza after a series of Israeli attacks.

In a news media environment where everything is aggressively contested and multiple well-resourced pro-Israel interest groups seek to accuse Palestinian journalists of bias to pressure news organizations to cut ties with them, a focus on facts, numbers and testimonies is not only good journalism, but a strategic necessity.

As Estrin said, “This is a very, very sensitive place to be a journalist, and you face multiple pressures from your society, from governments, from campaigns trying to discredit coverage.”

“My job helping to oversee NPR’s coverage has been to make sure that … it’s collaborative and it’s fact-based,” he said.

For the most part, Baba said, he operated as “a lonely wolf,” traveling from place to place by himself or sometimes with an assistant. But in the evenings, he would congregate with other journalists, almost all of whom worked for Arabic-language outlets.

“We gathered around together to think about one thing: What we are going to have for food,” Baba said. “With all of this horror, these devastating images that you’re documenting, you lose the sense of appetite. It’s like it’s eating you from inside your brain. But once you gather with all of the other journalists, you start to think, ‘Oh, we didn’t have anything in our stomach for the past 15, 16 hours.’”

The reporters would pitch in what they had: canned fava beans, canned meat, rice.

“We threw it together to encourage ourselves to eat something,” he said. “At the end of the day, we got to be humans.”

“It’s unfathomable, the kind of conditions that he’s had to report under,” Estrin said. “And he never complains, he never boils over with frustration or anger. He always says, ‘What’s most important is the story.’”

Journalists in Gaza live under the same hellish conditions as other Palestinian civilians: Israeli violence, famine, lack of shelter, depleted channels of communication, psychological distress - general chaos and lawlessness. But they also face an additional risk because of their line of work.

“You can see every day your colleagues being targeted,” Baba said. “Just imagine, I’m driving my car that has a press sign in it, people are running away from it thinking that it could be a moving missile magnet from the Israelis. When I park my car in front of a house, the house owner runs to me and he tells me, please do not park your car here. You are a journalist, you could kill us all.”

Though Israeli authorities have claimed they do not target media workers, press freedom and human right groups have condemned Israel’s killing of journalists and classified multiple killings as targeted. In open letters, NPR and other news organizations have called for the protection of reporters. NPR has also worked behind the scenes to ensure Baba’s safety.

“NPR has repeatedly lobbied officials at the highest levels about maintaining the safety of our staff during the conflict. The Israeli military was made aware of our Gaza producer’s location, as has been the practice of US news outlets during Gaza wars,” NPR’s chief international editor, Didrik Schanche told The Post in a statement. “NPR works with a staff of journalists from both Israel and Gaza. We have been dedicated to keeping them safe and giving them the support they need to keep telling the story every single day of everyone swept up in this conflict.”

Baba said he feels empowered by NPR’s support and praised the team’s coverage.

“Our team is a tribe of journalists,” he said. “We are Jews, we are Palestinians, we are Israelis, we are Egyptians, most of us working together with each other in harmony. … Like a beehive. Nonstop working on the clock.”

But Baba’s daily reality and that of his colleagues can be strikingly different. “I asked NPR on day 250 to stop asking me the question, ‘How are you today?’ Because I’m out of all answers, literally I don’t know what to say,” he said. “So they stopped.”

Shortly after Israel and Hamas reached an initial ceasefire agreement in January, the Foreign Press Association called on Israel to allow foreign journalists to enter Gaza, but there has been no progress. Baba, meanwhile, has been busy covering the effects of the fragile agreement and refugees’ return to the north of the Strip: “A human chain that moves on top of the rubble and destructed roads. … It’s the first time that I’ve seen the people of Gaza with smiles on their faces.”

He was also living the return himself, finding that his family’s home on the outskirts of Gaza City was miraculously still standing. “There are three artillery shells causing much damage but it’s habitable,” he said. “That for me was a relief. I was like, ‘Wow, I’m going to live under a roof for the first time in 16 months.’”

But there’s no such thing as back to normal.

He said he had to burn some of his most precious books, including “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine” by Rashid Khalidi, and his favorite novel, “A Game of Thrones,” to keep a fire going so he could boil water.

“We do have a saying here in Gaza,” Baba said. “The real war is not during the war. The real war is after the war.”

Meanwhile, as ever, he’s working. In a recent radio report - which aired before Israel reimposed the siege on Gaza, blocking the delivery of all fuel and aid and pitching Gazans back into deprivation during the holy month of Ramadan - he described the joy of finding an intact bottle of his cologne in the damaged home, then how he used an ax to chop up a wooden door from his home to make a fire to cook eggs.

“It’s something you are forced to live.”