My years reporting on Gaza broke me down. Why did it take so long for the world to become outraged?

The Guardian

3 days ago

When I moved to Jerusalem in 2010, the foreign correspondents there offered me some unsettling advice: 'The first year here you'll hate the Israeli government, the second year the Palestinian leadership, by the third you'll hate yourself.' It's best to leave before four, I was told, in the interest of sanity. I nodded along thinking how sadly cynical they were. I would do better than that, I told myself. I did not.
I lasted a little under four years in Israel and Palestine. In that time, I reported on forced displacement and punitive bureaucracy (Israel's occupation is expanded through denied permits, home demolitions and revoked ID cards). I wrote about child killings, war crimes and terrorism (perpetrated by both sides). I tried to explain as best I could the annexation of the West Bank and the collective punishment of two million people in Gaza without using forbidden phrases such as apartheid or war crime. I included the necessary balance of voices and opinions. But still, every report of an atrocity in Palestine was met with highly personal accusations of bias. Editors were often twitchy, readers disengaged.
After two years of this, a grim reality became clear: people did not want to hear about it. By year three, I had started giving up trying to make them listen and the self-loathing arrived. Cynicism among reporters is a useful cipher for the fear, desperation and impotence that news industry norms do not allow them, but it has a dangerous side-effect: it dulls outrage. Without outrage, crimes such as apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide can continue uninterrupted – and they have.
Over a decade later, with Gaza's annihilation playing in my social media feed, I have been finishing my first novel, Vulture, for the past two years. It is the story of a reporter, Sara Byrne, trying to make a name for herself amid a war in Gaza. She is a destructive character steeped in cynicism and self-loathing who emerged, in all her surprising unpleasantness, as I tried to resolve my own experience as a journalist covering Palestine. There were nagging doubts and questions I could not shift, like: why have those of us whose job it was to report the atrocities in Palestine been so spectacularly unable to stop them?
The action in Vulture is fiction but set within the real time frame of the 2012 war in Gaza, which I covered. I was visiting Gaza City when the Hamas leader Ahmed al-Jabari was assassinated. I arrived at the site of his 'liquidation' within an hour, the burned-out frame of his car still smouldering. I noticed the blood splatters reaching the second floor of surrounding buildings in the writing of my first front page. Israel had launched its Operation Pillar of Defence.
Wars were never surprising in Gaza. Since 2006, when the last general election in Palestine paved the way for Hamas to take power and Israel and Egypt to impose their blockade, there has been a regular exchange of rockets fired by Hamas and bombs dropped by the Israeli military. Every few years, Israeli generals declared a military operation to bomb back Hamas infrastructure. Chatting comfortably off the record, retired military people called it 'mowing the grass'.
In the 2009 war – 1,400 Palestinians killed, 11,000 homes destroyed, white phosphorus shells dropped on markets and hospitals – Israel had not let foreign journalists into Gaza. In 2012, they did. Most of us stayed at the Al Deira hotel, eating and sleeping next to one another, reporting and filing the same stories. Uniformed staff brought us coffees and french fries as airstrikes threatened their homes and families.
Every day, we visited bombed homes and I made notes:
smell of cooking gas, kitchen gone
little kids playing in rubble find a beetle
a crying woman tugging at a buried mattress screams
We watched a steady stream of dead and injured arrive at al-Shifa hospital missing limbs and heads, dust-covered children mute and shaking having seen their parents killed. Doctors told us of power and drug shortages. I noted them:
no disposables
anaesthetics running out, can't do surgeries
lots of women and children with amputated limbs, quite clean, bombs do the job for us
We went to the funerals of whole families and spoke to mourners who asked us: 'You see anyone here with a gun?'
After 10 days of Israel's operation – 167 Palestinians killed, 1,500 targets in Gaza hit, 700 families displaced – a truce was declared. The particular camaraderie you form with your Palestinian colleagues under airstrikes is severed abruptly when they drop you off at the Israeli border; you are thrilled to be driving back to normality, but they are unable to. You'll see them again when the next flare-up in violence brings you back.
But when the next war came in 2014, I was already home in London, an editor on the Guardian foreign desk: 50 days of fighting, 2,104 Palestinians killed, 10,000 wounded. News audiences, we heard, were tuning out. The fighting ended, and I left the foreign desk to return to reporting. People looked at me warily when I brought up Palestine again. Was I a weird zealot? Or worse, an activist? I was neither, but outside of activist circles, the 'political complexity' of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict left little appetite for anything other than its most violent escalations or worst humanitarian catastrophes. Cynicism, it turns out, is better company than outrage.
So I stopped talking about what I knew was going on over there – the daily humiliations of occupation in the West Bank, the threat of settler terrorism backed by an occupation force, the extraordinary trauma of living a day in Gaza – until I sat down to start work on a novel in 2015 and Palestine poured out. I was drawn straight back to the Al Deira hotel, reimagined as The Beach. I found myself telling this huge, indigestible tragedy in small, messy, blackly funny, heartbreaking, angry human stories. It was a relief, describing freely the Gaza I knew.
By 7 October 2023, I had left the Guardian. I watched news of the Hamas terror attack devastated and sickened, then gripped with cold dread for what would follow in Gaza. Like anyone who had covered the place for any length of time, I had seen what was coming rehearsed for decades. Those nagging questions became urgent: had I done everything I could to warn this was coming? No. Did that make me complicit? Maybe.
Israel has not allowed foreign press into Gaza for this war. Our understanding of what is happening there comes from the Palestinian journalists living it and they are being killed in extraordinary numbers (176, a 10% mortality rate), their newsrooms obliterated along with their families and homes. The ones who remain are starving. Their reporting is not balanced, it is personal and outraged.
A year before Israeli forces killed him on 24 March, local journalist Hossam Shabat told his 175,000 X followers: 'The biggest problem is not Western journalists being unable to enter, but the fact that Western media doesn't respect and value Palestinian journalists … No one knows Gaza like we do, and no one understands the complexity of the situation like we do. If you care about what's happening in Gaza, you should amplify Palestinian voices.' His message stung deeply. It clarified the discomfort I had felt as an unnecessary interlocutor between western readers and Gaza's tragedy, raising more questions about my work there.
Western journalists reporting from Palestine did not stop the atrocities because we believed that was not our job, we were there to bear witness. Maintaining our impartiality is crucial if we are to be trusted. But were we not also meant to hold power to account? If we had condemned the US and Europe-backed power we knew was perpetrating these atrocities with the conviction and outrage they deserved, would 60,000 people still have been killed in 21 months?
As Vulture lands on bookshelves in the US, UN experts have confirmed that famine is under way in the Gaza Strip. Starving people are being gunned down at food distribution sites. Its hospitals have been bombed, doctors and their families killed. The electricity has been cut off. Our Palestinian colleagues are being murdered in staggering numbers and western journalists say it is not on them to name the genocide. Yet fiction writers do. In the interest of balance, the BBC has decided not to air its documentary about doctors in Gaza. Until this week, when even Donald Trump was forced to acknowledge 'real starvation', a friend working in television news told me a new verb had emerged: to Gaza a story, meaning to downgrade its editorial importance.
Finally, it seems the forbidden words are being named – genocide, famine, statehood – and our leaders may act to do something about them. But our outrage has come much too late. Why did we wait? Our wary silence abetted the tragedy in Gaza. Our cynicism allowed for the defining horror of a generation.
Vulture by Phoebe Greenwood is out 12 August 2025 on Europa Editions