A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
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Who is NPR's reporter in Gaza?
I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and you're listening to The Sunday Story from Up First, where we go beyond the news to bring you one big story. If you've been listening to NPR's reporting on Gaza over the past year and a half, there's a name you've likely heard. NPR's producer in Gaza, Anas Baba. With Anas Baba in Khan Yunus, Gaza. That was NPR producer Anas Baba. Anas Baba. Anas is one of the only Palestinian journalists in Gaza working full-time for an American news organization. He's from Gaza City, and he's been NPR's eyes and ears on the ground. He sends dispatches from hospitals, displacement camps, and bomb sites.
Dust everywhere. The powder of the guns and the explosions all over the air. Wherever you put your eye to the horizon, it's the same. Destruction everywhere.
Anas does all of this with little more than a cell phone. He works closely with a team of NPR journalists who've been covering this war from outside of Gaza. Israel has banned international journalists from independent access to Gaza since Hamas's deadly attack on October 7, 2023. On January 19th of this year, a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas went into effect. The ceasefire permitted Palestinians to return to the north of Gaza.
And today, we are returning. Hundreds of thousands of people, literally hundreds of thousands of people.
Anas Baba was one of them.
Nothing is still the same. I'm going to keep reporting here.
Justine Yan is a producer for The Sunday Story. She's been keeping in touch with Anas since he returned to Gaza City in late January to try and understand what it's like to be a reporter covering the war while also living through it. Justine takes up the story after the break. Stay with us.
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I started calling Anas Baba after the ceasefire went into effect, and he was home in Gaza City. The only place he could find with a good internet connection was a cemetery next to a hospital that had generators. So that's where he'd sit to talk with me about what he'd been through during this war and how home had been an idea that sustained him for 15 months.
I was always fantasizing how it was going to be the first moment that I'm going to see my old neighborhood again.
He said he wasn't sure what he'd find. But as he walked down the street, reality sunk in.
The mosque of my neighborhood, it was totally flat into the ground.
He walked past a community kitchen.
And it was flat into the ground.
And another building that had housed 20 families.
It was flat into the ground. I kept walking and trying to tell myself that my house is okay. I do believe that my house is going to be okay.
And in a way, it was. Unlike so many other houses, his was still standing. Anas' house is at the end of a small street. It's four stories high, with concrete verandas on the top three floors. He said his father designed it to look like an Italian villa. Anas lived here with his mother and father, his sister and two of his younger brothers.
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