Five months of bombing from the back seat of a white Peugeot. At 25, Huda Emad Hegazi, a Spanish-Palestinian born in Linares, Jaén, is a war correspondent without pretending to be. After living in the south of Spain for eighteen years, he traveled to Gaza to visit his family in 2016 and his fate changed: that year, the Egyptian Government blocked the Rafah crossing, and Emad, with dual nationality, had of staying in the land of his roots to study English Philology in Gaza.
At first she worked as a translator for the oenagé Metges del Món, but immediately combined work with journalism, her great passion. In October, when Israeli bombs fell from the sky and borders were closed to the international press, Emad became the voice of war for Iranian, Venezuelan and Colombian media. “She had been a one-time collaborator, but she had no experience covering a conflict, let alone one of this magnitude. In the first week, my house was destroyed and I had to leave my family to work.” Since then, she has been covering the war alone, away from her mother, sister, 21, and younger brother, 9, who are still in Gaza City. “It’s hard to cover a war and even more so far from your people. There are communications cuts, I spend a week without hearing anything about them and it’s desperate.” Since her father’s international transfers from Spain were cut, she is the one who now maintains hers. “I send money, but it’s hard. People eat the grain that used to be fed to the cattle, grind it and make bread. Prices have skyrocketed: a kilo of bread costs 20 euros, and a kilo of flour, 18 euros”.
With no possible shelter and constantly on the move – for weeks he has been reporting from Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip – Emad has made an old white Peugeot his home. “I’ve been sleeping in the company car for five months. It is used by a team during the day and at night it is my shelter. Every day is the same. I wake up in the vehicle, find some coffee and cheese bread for breakfast, if there is any, and go to the place they bombed the night before. Then I work doing live broadcasts for the television stations until half past twelve at night and I go back to sleep in the car. If I can, I shower once a week.”
Despite his youth and sweet tone of voice, Emad’s words pack a punch: “I live the same suffering as the rest. I work 24 hours a day, seven days a week and it’s exhausting, but like any Gazan I live in fear that a bomb will fall on me, my family will be killed or I’ll starve because there’s no food. Israel has turned Gaza into a ghost land. Every day I see destruction, ruins, devastation… You wake up with new numbers of dead and wounded. It affects physically and psychologically… The population can’t take it anymore”.
After less than half a year, Emad has lost friends from the university and has been horrified by the image of bodies mangled by the bombings or the wounded piled up in hospitals. He has also become a journalist. “I’m passionate about journalism and, although you don’t get used to seeing so much death, it’s what I’ve always wanted to do. My family is proud of me because even though I’m still a little girl, not everyone can handle this pressure, let alone alone. Here, most journalists are men and people admire that a young girl like me is able to do this job.”
