“It’s so quiet here, all I can hear is my thoughts,” Plestia Alaqad says as we begin our walk through a suburban park on a cold, overcast afternoon in Melbourne’s suburbs.
After we exchange greetings (“At least it’s not raining”), she makes it clear she doesn’t want me to publish our exact location. Almost two years have passed since she fled Gaza with her mother, sister and grandmother, fearing that her role as a journalist could put their lives in danger. That fear still lingers.
But on the drive in, the ordinariness of it all is striking. There are rows and rows of identical houses in estates mostly built in the 1990s and 2000s. In the sprawling grasslands nearby, excavators are hungrily carving up space for new developments. There’s a playground, an oval, a leisure centre.
It’s a stark contrast to Alaqad’s life in Gaza, where she documented her experience under siege during the first 45 days of the war after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack. Her diaries from that time have since formed her book, The Eyes of Gaza.
Alaqad tells me it’s usually busier at dusk, when she often comes to walk and watch the sky turn orange, pink and purple. Today, though, the sun is struggling to cut through the heavy grey.
“When I came to Australia, I realised how small Gaza is. I always knew it was 365 square kilometres but I never understood what that meant until I came here. Australia is huge,” she says.
Alaqad says she’s also come to see how “limited” her life had been. Most days she was either at home, next door at her grandparents’ place or at her friend Dana’s house, also a neighbour. On Thursdays, they’d go to the beach and to the same cafe.
“Once you entered, people knew your order,” she says.
But the memories are hard to hold on to now.
“You’re remembering a version of Gaza that is no longer there,” Alaqad says. “But my favourite thing about it is the sea. It’s always there; you can always go to the sea. No matter what’s happening, there will always be waves. It reminds you that everything will pass, even if it isn’t easy.”
The sentiment is incredibly poetic, which is hardly surprising given Alaqad took up poetry, alongside journalling, when she was younger. Last year, she performed at Bankstown Poetry Slam in Sydney, drawing a crowd of more than 2,000 people.
But her delivery today is so matter-of-fact she barely breaks her brisk walking pace. She says even before the conflict, Gaza was subject to regular power cuts that made it impossible to stay indoors on hot, summer days.
“That’s why, in summer, the sea was always crowded with people. People eating watermelons, hanging out with their families, having conversations, swimming. It reminds you that there is life. That Palestinians want to live. Whether the circumstances are allowing them or not,” Alaqad says.
But she admits she wasn’t a huge fan of swimming herself. “The sea was really salty,” she says. “I liked sitting in the sun.”
I tell her I avoid getting my hair wet at the beach as I dislike the feeling. She starts laughing, admitting she’s “exactly the same”; her hair, she says, isn’t cooperating today either. Using her iPhone as a mirror, she tucks a curl behind her ear, smooths her part and adjusts her keffiyeh (it is custom-made, with her name embroidered in Arabic in red). The entire exchange reminds me that she’s 23.
The levity, though, is short-lived. As we walk, a pattern repeats: she will laugh, then – almost as if the laughter jolts her – she returns to the subject at hand.
“Before the genocide, I knew life was limited. You couldn’t travel whenever you wanted – borders opened and closed. We weren’t living the best life,” Alaqad says. She’s still laughing but shaking her head, almost in disbelief at what she’s about to say. “Then after the genocide, I began longing for the previous days that weren’t even perfect or normal.”
She thinks back to 6 October, a day before the Hamas attack into Israel. Alaqad and her friends were up on a rooftop, looking over a city skyline that has since been decimated.
“We had our laptops with us, we were sitting there talking, planning, applying for jobs, for master’s [degrees]. The next day, we woke up to a different reality,” she says.
She says she immediately began filming and sharing the Israeli bombardment on social media, and as she did, her follower count grew: from 4,000 before the war to more than 4 million today. Alaqad studied new media and journalism at university, so she says she saw herself reporting one day. But not like this.
“I didn’t expect that early on in my career I would be reporting and living a genocide,” she says. She was 21 and her previous experience consisted of working at a marketing agency and conducting media training.
There was no question, though, that she would do it. “I can’t just stand there and watch what’s happening,” she says.
Alaqad says without Palestinian voices there would be no record of what has been happening, given no international journalists have been allowed into Gaza unless they embed with the Israeli military.
“People need to appreciate the reason we’re seeing the news in the first place is Palestinian journalists. They themselves are getting killed, starved, and they’re being specifically targeted,” she says.
Since our walk, 28-year-old Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif was killed in a targeted airstrike alongside four of his colleagues: correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh and cameramen Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa. A later strike at al-Nasser hospital killed a further five journalists. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 192 journalists have been killed in Gaza since 7 October 2023.
She says the journalism industry in Gaza is close-knit. She never once felt underestimated – not for her age, her gender or her experience.
“On the contrary, because I was a young journalist, I felt like all other journalists were older than me and supporting me, guiding me, giving me advice,” Alaqad says.
Everyone had their own expertise, she explains: hers was reporting in English. She mainly worked alongside a journalist named Hatem, whose speciality was social media and video editing, and another, Mohamed, “an expert when it comes to the field”. “He’s who you want to be with if you hear a bomb go off, he’ll tell you where to go,” she says.
She says even when she was reporting on the first days of the conflict, it was hard to secure food, flour, fuel and other items. “I thought October and November 2023 were the worst days of my life. But now as I’m watching it’s only getting worse somehow,” Alaqad says.
With the help of an uncle in Melbourne, Alaqad and her family fled to Egypt, and then to Australia on emergency humanitarian visas in November 2023. While she grew up with the news on TV, she never saw anything about Australia.
“All I really knew about Australia was the animals,” she says. Bugs, spiders, kangaroos. Warm weather. Beaches. But that’s hardly Melbourne.
“When I came here, I was like, oh my god, I don’t like the weather,” she says. “But my friend told me don’t worry, the weather changes every five minutes in Melbourne, so you’ll definitely like something.”
She’s already across the Sydney-Melbourne rivalry, the coffee culture and Australians’ “obsession” with running, though she’s struggled to get used to how early cafes, restaurants and stores close. “Everyone is in bed by 8pm,” she laughs.
Alaqad has spent much of her time in Australia working on her book and doing the accompanied press; she takes up as many opportunities to talk about Gaza as she can. She says it’s strange, living in “two worlds”: one here, in Australia, and another, online, watching the social media feeds of friends, family and colleagues in Gaza. She admits it is hard to sleep.
Does she try to switch off? “No,” she says. She doesn’t elaborate until I ask. “This is real life for some people, and they don’t have the privilege of just turning the TV off.”
Even her studies she describes as akin to a duty. By the time this piece is published, Alaqad will be in Lebanon, completing her master’s in media studies at the American University of Beirut, where she was awarded a scholarship last year.
By now, we’re just walking in circles around the car park. She says her mind always returns to the generation of children born into the war she says won’t know the taste of fruit, won’t know what its like to spend a day at the beach, who “don’t hear the sound of birds, they hear drones”.
She asks, how would we know what these kids could have become if they’d been given the chance? “Musicians, writers, poets?
“They always taught us to dream big,” she says, with an exasperated laugh. “But no matter how big you dream, the occupation is bigger than you.”
The Eyes of Gaza by Plestia Alaqad is out now through Macmillan
