As the number of Palestinian deaths in Gaza climbs to 20,000 while the number of Israeli soldiers killed in fighting grows, it is becoming harder every day for the two sides of the bloody conflict to see the humanity in the other, says Sheren Falah Saab, who is covering the Gazan side of the conflict for Haaretz.
Falah Saab tells Haaretz Weekly host Allison Kaplan Sommer about the difficulties of covering a war when you can’t be on the ground, and the individual human stories among the thousands of Gazan victims of the war she has chosen to bring to the world through her journalism.
“In the end, they are human beings and Hamas didn’t ask Gazans if they wanted to go to war or not,” says Falah Saab, as she discusses the challenges of being an Arab citizen of Israel writing in Hebrew to Israeli readers at a time when speaking of death in Gaza “is taboo.” She has personally lost friends on both sides of the conflict.
While Hamas “does really use people as human shields,” Falah Saab adds that “on the other hand, the Israeli army says that it targets terrorists, not civilians. But we know that the air force has dropped bombs on places that were declared safe zones – and there’s no safe place for people in Gaza.” Some of them, she says, have reached such a point of desperation that even when they know their homes will be targeted, they “simply stay there and accept death” instead of fleeing to an overcrowded refugee tent camp.
“They feel they have nothing to lose,” she explains. “They have lost their families, their relatives, their work, their normal life. They have nothing to lose, so they just prefer to die in their homes and not to lose their dignity. It’s a very complicated situation, and I think people who aren’t familiar with the Gaza Strip and the way that people there think can’t really understand their decision.”
