Five months of bombing from the back seat of a white Peugeot. At 25 years old, the Spanish-Palestinian Huda Emad Hegazi, born in Linares, Jaén, is a war correspondent without intending to.
After living 18 years in the south of Spain, he traveled to Gaza to visit his family in 2016 and his destiny changed: that year the Egyptian government closed the Rafá crossing, and Emad, with dual nationality, had to stay in the land of his roots to study English philology in Gaza.
At first she worked as a translator for the NGO Médicos del Mundo, but she soon combined that work with journalism, her passion. In October, when Israeli bombs rained from the sky and the borders were closed to the international press, Emad became a voice of the war for Iranian, Venezuelan and Colombian media.
“I had been a punctual collaborator, but I had no experience covering a conflict, especially of this magnitude. The first week my house was destroyed and I had to separate from my family to work.” Since then she has been covering the war alone, far from her mother, her sister, 21, and her little brother, 9, who remain in Gaza City.
“It is hard to cover a war and even more so away from your people. There are communications outages, I spend a week without hearing anything about them and it is exasperating.” Since her father's international transfers from Spain were cut off, she now supports her own.
“I send money, but it's hard. People eat the grain that they previously gave to cattle, crush it and make bread. Prices have skyrocketed: a kilo of bread costs 20 euros and flour costs 18 euros.”
With no possible shelter and constantly on the move – for weeks he has been reporting from Rafá, 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. A team uses it during the day and at night it is my refuge. Every day is the same. I wake up in the vehicle, look for coffee and bread and cheese for breakfast, and go to the place that was bombed the night before. Then I work doing live shows for television until half past eleven at night and I return to sleep in the car. If I can, I shower once a week.”
Despite his youth and a sweet tone of voice, Emad's words are punches: “I live the same suffering as the rest. I work 24 hours a day, seven days a week and it is exhausting, but like any Gazan I live in fear that a bomb will fall on me, my family will be killed or I will go hungry because there is no food. Israel has turned Gaza into a ghost land. Every day I see destruction, ruins, debris... You wake up with new figures of deaths and injuries. It affects on a physical and psychological level... The population can't take it anymore."
In less than half a year, Emad has lost friends from university and has been horrified by the image of bodies torn apart by bombings or with the wounded crowded into hospitals. He has also become a journalist.
“I am passionate about journalism and although you don't get used to seeing so much death, it is what I have always wanted to do. My family is proud of me because, although I am still a girl, not everyone can withstand this pressure, especially alone. The majority of journalists here are men and people admire that a young girl like me is capable of doing this job.”
