“The Eyes of Gaza”: Journalist Plestia Alaqad on Surviving Gaza Genocide
Plestia Alaqad is publishing her diaries from Gaza: “A dystopian world”
by LEX McMENAMIN
The Eyes of Gaza: A Diary of Resilience IMAGE/Dawn
The 23-year-old journalist tells Teen Vogue about her new book, The Eyes of Gaza: A Diary of Resilience.
Plestia Alaqad Zooms me from Beirut, Lebanon, tweaking her black curls and throwing on her jean jacket — after all, “this is for Teen Vogue,” she grins — as we settle in for our conversation. The journalist and author, 23, has a sunny disposition, belying what we are there to discuss: Her first book, The Eyes of Gaza: A Diary of Resilience. The diary entries document the 45 days she spent reporting in her native Gaza on the ground as Israeli forces began their invasion after the October 7 Hamas attack.
“When I was reading my diaries again and again, it was super triggering, because I’m reading real things that happened,” Alaqad recalled of the book’s editing process. In that 45 day stretch, the then-21 year old Alaqad moves from couch to couch, one temporary shelter to another, struggling to keep track of friends and family while unable to take in the horrors she documented on her phone. “Every time I read it, I just feel disbelief, like, is this real? Did I really live that? Are there still thousands of people in Gaza living that?”
Two years later, after relocating to Australia for safety, she’s promoting the book as the death toll still rises, and the starvation campaign that a United Nations-backed initiative called “man-made famine” in August 2025 continues. While the confirmed death toll hovers above 66,000, the number is likely far, far higher; in 2024, there were estimates placing the total anywhere from 80,000 to a projected 335,000 deaths. In recent months, Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, where Alaqad is now based, have increased.
Nonetheless, she continues using her platform to say much of what she’s been saying for the last two years, posting to her over 4 million Instagram followers to share stories of some of the youth included in her book, who struggle to access medical care amid the continued onslaught in Gaza. But even that, said Alaqad, feels compromised, limited, in the face of what it’s in response to.
“It feels like I’m living in two worlds. There’s a world where Palestinians are getting killed, and there is you behind the screen, trying to figure out a way to report on it without getting shadowbanned and with actually reaching people,” said Alaqad. “It often feels like it’s a dystopian world that we live in, and the only thing that is real is Gaza and what’s happening there.”
Teen Vogue: Your book is composed of diary entries particularly from the time before, and then the 45 days after, October 7th. What is it like to be talking about this book right now?
Plestia Alaqad: I can’t believe that it’s almost — [she pauses] no, it’s not almost, it’s actually two years. Okay, I can’t believe that it’s been two years of this ongoing genocide. When I was reporting in Gaza for 45 days, these 45 days felt like 45 years. And now it’s 200 days feeling like 200 years for the people who are actually still on the ground facing bombing, displacement and starvation, which is being used as a method by Israel. Israel is literally ethnically cleansing people in Gaza, and we’re watching a genocide unfold live on TV.TV: As we speak in September 2025, a United Nations commission has found that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. You use the word throughout the book. In fact, you write on October 18th, 2023: “Today, the ‘war’ ended. This isn’t an Aggression any more; it’s a Genocide.”
PA: I find it so cowardly that people — until now — are calling it a conflict. English is my second language, so correct me if I’m wrong, but what I learned in school is [that] a conflict is when, for example, my classmate is sitting next to me and we’re fighting over a pencil. That’s a conflict. But when you’re ethnically cleansing a whole nation, a nation killing them, starving them, that’s clearly a genocide, not a conflict.
I don’t understand why the media is shying away from calling things what they are. And it’s not only about the term conflict or genocide. It’s even the term, calling it the Israel-Hamas war. If it was “Israel-Hamas war,” then why are kids and babies, women and elderly people and men getting killed and starved? These terms that they’re using, it’s really misleading.TV: In the book, that was just after a hospital was bombed.
PA: I was super ashamed of myself when I was happy that the hospital got bombed in Gaza two years ago. But the only reason I was happy was because I thought, oh, a hospital being bombed means the world will go insane. How is that possible? The genocide will end. But turns out, that’s only the beginning.TV: You mention Mohammed El-Kurd in the book, who earlier this year released his own book about the concept of a Palestinian “perfect victim.” It’s a phrase that comes up in The Eyes of Gaza, as well.
PA: After everything we’ve lived and experienced, and after everything we’re still seeing, the world still has the audacity to expect [Palestinians] to be the perfect victim.
By the way, there are many interviews that I did and it actually didn’t air; and there are some interviews that I did with parts of what I said was being cut off; and there are some interviews that I did where the interviewer asked me questions that I didn’t want to answer, because they were super irrelevant. I’m here to talk about us and what’s happening. I’m here to talk about the stories of my people.TV: After leaving Gaza, you went to Australia, and then enrolled in a journalism masters program, where you received the Shireen Abu Akleh Scholarship, named for the Palestinian journalist killed by the IDF in 2022. What was it like returning to school after being on the ground?
PA: In class, everyone has different experiences: some people have two years’ working experience, some people don’t have working experience. Then there’s you, who has experience reporting in a genocide. That’s something no one in class has experience in but me, but I wish I didn’t have experience in [it, either].
It feels a bit weird sitting in a classroom right now knowing that Israel bombed and [has even recently bombed] classrooms in Gaza, universities and schools, making education a target. Israel is afraid of Palestinian brains. Israel is afraid of Palestinians graduating, taking their diplomas. Because education is power. That’s why Israel is bombing universities and schools, to make us uneducated people.TV: In your entries, you note the student protests here in the US, in solidarity with Palestine.
PA: Seeing everything that the students have been doing, honestly, brought us so much hope, and it felt like these students are the ones who will actually make change.
When you say you’re from Palestine, the person in front of you usually hears Pakistan, because they’ve never heard of Palestine, and they don’t know Palestine existed on maps. So now we went from people thinking Palestine is Pakistan, to people knowing where Palestine is on the map, and people knowing Gaza, Deir al-Balah, Khan Younis, and actually knowing places in Gaza.
There was a building [at Columbia] they [named] after Hind Rajab, the young child that Israel shot [at] with [a reported] 335 bullets. This is history. This is change. I’m glad the world now knows about us and about our struggle, but I wish to live in a world where the world didn’t need to know us or about our struggles — or for this book not to even be written in the first place.
TV: We’re seeing protesters targeted by the US government for supporting Palestine, even being dragged into the Trump administration’s deportation goals. Do you feel like your speech is freer, now that you’re out of Gaza? Has anything changed for you?
Teen Vogue for more