Israel-Gaza War: A Conversation with Amira Hass

Announced by the University of Pittsburgh

On Saturday, October 7 Hamas militants launched the most devastating attack on Israel since the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. This attack elicited an Israeli response that has led to mass civilian casualties in Gaza. Power, Electricity, Water, and Medicine have been blocked from entering Gaza, a territory which has been under blockade for 16 years. This historic moment will be discussed by Amira Hass, a Haaretz correspondent in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Amira Hass is the Haaretz correspondent for the Occupied Territories. Born in Jerusalem in 1956, Hass was educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she studied the history of Nazism and the European Left’s relation to the Holocaust. Her book Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land under Siege is an account of the three-year period during which she lived in Palestinian enclave of Gaza. Her other books include Reporting from Ramallah: An Israeli Journalist in an Occupied Land and Diary of Bergen-Belsen: 1944–1945. Hass has been the recipient of several awards, including the World Press Freedom Hero award from the International Press Institute, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation, the Reporters Without Borders Prize for Press Freedom, and the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize. Hass joined Haaretz in 1989 and has been in her current position since 1993.