The hardest part is the moral arithmetic that never adds up: Do you film a mother crying over her child, or do you wrap them in a blanket first? Do you record the names of the fallen for the world to know, or do you carry away the dead because there is no one else? Each choice leaves you with a bruise of guilt. Then there is duty: We do it because silence benefits the powerful and punishes the weak; because we stubbornly refuse to allow lives to be erased, Bisan told Novi Magazin in a written interview at her request, given that the Israeli military uses signals to track the locations of journalists, many of whom have been killed, and because of poor network connections in Gaza.
Is your family autochtone to Beit Hanoun or refugees from 1948?
My family is from Beit Hanoun, I was born and raised there. We are not refugees from 1948, but autochthonous to this town. Beit Hanoun has always been home, where my childhood was shaped, where my parents and grandparents lived, where every street carries memory. Growing up there meant living with both the beauty and the burdens of Gaza: olive trees and lively markets, but also the weight of siege and the shadow of incursions. When I speak about Gaza, it is from the soil I have walked on since childhood, from a community whose voices are too often unheard. I do not just document life here I live it. That rootedness gives me both the responsibility and the strength to tell our stories as someone who carries them personally, not second-hand.
Can you tell us about your educational background?
I studied Business Administration and English at university. At the time, I didn’t yet imagine I would become a journalist whose words and images reached the world. I chose those fields because they felt practical and empowering: business taught me structure and problem-solving, while English opened doors to communication beyond Gaza. I wanted these tools to build something meaningful, something that connected me to the wider world. Alongside academics, I carried other passions. Basketball gave me resilience, teamwork, and discipline. Astronomy made me look at the sky and imagine life beyond the limits we felt in Gaza. Poetry and storytelling, at first a hobby, gradually revealed themselves as a calling. My education didn’t stop in the classroom. I sought out training in debate, advocacy, and digital media because I wanted to express ideas clearly and confidently. At that stage, I wasn’t yet documenting Gaza’s suffering, but I was already learning how stories shape perceptions, and how communication could become a bridge between us and the world. Those years planted the seeds that later grew into my work as a storyteller and journalist.
What was the thematic focus and the aim of your work prior to the October 2023?
Before the war, my camera and my pen looked for what many people assume cannot survive under occupation: ordinary beauty, stubborn joy, and memory. My work was a quiet form of resistance. I wanted to highlight the ordinary things that make us human, the smell of bread at dawn, the way an old woman folds her prayer scarf, the laughter of children who find games in dust. I made films about villages and recipes told like stories, women who sew life into torn cloth, and elders who carry history in the lines of their faces. I called it Hakawatia reviving the old Arab practice of storytelling because stories are armor against erasure. The aim was twofold. First, inward: to nourish pride and continuity among Palestinians, especially youth, so occupation could not steal identity. Second, outward: to open a human window for the world. I wanted outsiders to feel the texture of our lives not only our suffering, but our music, food, and rituals so empathy could grow beyond headlines. I tried to be both a mirror and a window, a mirror so Palestinians could recognize themselves with pride, and a window so others could see us as fully a people.
Your work is at the grass roots level, however can you tell us about your work with international organisations?
Yes, my work begins in the street, but sometimes, a partnership with an international organisation is the only way a story from Gaza can reach thousands of people abroad. For example, I was invited to join UN Women’s Youth Gender Innovation Agora. I contributed ideas and content to that forum that centered young Palestinian women’s experiences, bringing lived experience and storytelling practice to international gender discussions, and I used their digital channels to amplify local campaigns. The United Nations Population Fund cooperation was focused on raising awareness about reproductive health, women’s needs in crisis, and the specific vulnerabilities facing girls and pregnant women in Gaza. As an EU Goodwill ambassador, I helped connect Palestinian local youth projects to European networks, raising issues like job access, skills development, and climate resilience, and carry their concrete requests into policy conversation. My collaboration with Al Jazeera+ turned my daily videos “It’s Bisan from Gaza, and I’m Still Alive” into a structured documentary series that reached a global audience, when foreign press access was limited. The series made frontline testimony visible for viewers who otherwise only saw headlines. AJ+ offered editorial and distribution resources; I supplied the voice, the filming on the ground, and the eyewitness material. I also worked with regional broadcasters, e.g. Roya TV and Easy Languages, an educational platform, to place Palestinian Arabic and culture at the centre of media projects.
Another major part of my work has been training young people, especially women, on how to use phones and cameras ethically, how to document with consent, and how to protect dignity in storytelling.
In 2024, Bisan Owda was awarded: the Peabody Award (news category); the Edward R. Murrow Award (news series); the Emmy Award (news and documentary); Amnesti International Australia‘s Human Rights Defender Award with Palestinian journalists Anas Al-Sharif, Plestia Alaqad and Ahmed Shihab-Eldin. In her acceptance speech for the Peabody Award, Owda dedicated her award to people worldwide protesting in support of Palestine and called for: “An end to the genocide, a ceasefire, and a free Palestine”.
Israel has barred foreign reporters from Gaza. Since October 2023, approximately 245 Palestinian journalists in Gaza have been killed by the Israeli military, most intentionally targeted, the largest number of journalists deaths in an armed conflict since WW1. What is it like loosing colleagues and working knowing that you are a target?
It feels like living inside a wound that never closes. Every day, I hear the voices of colleagues and friend journalists who carried their cameras like lanterns into the darkest nights, only to have their light extinguished too soon. Not only Maryam, Muhammad, Hussam, or Muath but hundreds since October 2023. Too many. Too fast. Too cruel. Each of them left home knowing the risks, yet they chose to pick up their cameras, pens, and microphones. They chose truth over silence, even when silence could have meant survival. Each night I whisper to Allah: Ya Allah, grant them Jannah. Accept their sacrifice as testimony of truth. And then I pray for us, the living: Ya Allah, give us strength to keep walking the path they paved with their blood. Do not let us crumble under the weight of their absence. There is fear, because I know I am just as much a target. And there is duty, because if we stop, their deaths will echo into silence. And silence is what oppression feeds on. So I keep going -with trembling hands, with tired eyes, with a heart that feels too heavy some days. My deepest hope is that you will not turn away. That you will not let our pain become background noise. That you will remember the faces, the names, the children, the mothers, the fathers the ordinary lives struggling under extraordinary cruelty. Your support matters. Your attention matters. When the world sees and listens, silence breaks, and even small acts of solidarity become light. Please, stand with us. Do not turn away from the innocent.
In 2015, you were seen at a celebration of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an armed group designated terrorist by much of the West, which participated, along side Hamas, in the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 which is condemned due to its indiscriminate targeting of civilians. Are you a member of this group or any similar group today?
I am not and have never been a member of the PFLP, any armed organization or militant group. I have never taken up arms and reject any form of attack on civilians. As an independent journalist, my loyalty is to the people whose lives I try to record and protect with my voice. In Gaza, public life is complicated: political movements, charities, unions, and cultural groups sometimes share the same streets on the same days. A photograph of a person at a public rally is not proof of membership in an organization. When this issue resurfaced during the discussion around an international award, the organisation running the prize looked into the claim. They reported they were unable to corroborate the allegation that I was a member of an armed group. Al Jazeera, which has worked with me, also called the charges baseless. These lines of accusation are used to discredit, intimidate, and, dangerously, to justify harm against Palestinians who simply bear witness and inform the world. All my work is public: none of it praises groups that harm civilians or incites to violence. I will always be open to legitimate scrutiny, always stand against violence and against the erasure of innocent life.
Israel accuses Gaza journalists of being Hamas operatives. How true are these accusations, including in the case of Anas Al Sharif?
Naming a reporter a militant is not only a political statement, it paints a target on their back. The Israeli military publicly accused Anas al-Sharif of directing an armed cell. Shortly after, he was killed in an Israeli strike. International bodies, press-freedom organisations and U.N. experts condemned the attack and warned that accusations of „Gaza journalists are Hamas operatives“ were being used in ways that imperil journalists and restrict the ability of the press to work. Many said Israel has not made publicly available the kind of corroborating evidence that would satisfy independent observers. The current war has been the deadliest on record for journalists in modern conflicts: hundreds of media workers have been killed, and many more threatened, detained or forced into silence. The Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders and others have attributed, in part, the danger to an environment where accusations and “guilt by association” are used in lieu of transparent investigations. Fear, impunity, and the erosion of independent reporting are the result of a state labelling a reporter a combatant without clear verifiable proof.
What is the most difficult in your work currently: fear of being killed, living in the midst of starvation and death around you every day, or trying to survive?
They are not three separate burdens they are one storm that breaks over you every single day. Fear of being killed is real and constant. You learn the geometry of danger: where glass falls, how windows shatter, how a second strike can turn rescuers into victims. Hunger and death are not distant headlines, they are up close, informal and intimate. „Surviving“, an ordinary verb becomes extraordinary work. It means learning how to collect water when the taps have stopped, how to keep a phone charged when the power dies, how to bury a friend and then return to write the story of their life. Surviving is stacking priorities: feed the children, photograph the evidence, help the woman with the broken ankle, send a clip to an editor, pray, sleep for an hour. What is hardest is the moral arithmetic that never adds up: Do you film the mother crying over her child or do you wrap the blanket around them first? Do you record the name of the fallen so the world knows, or do you carry the dead away because there is nobody else? Each choice leaves you with a bruise of guilt. Then there is duty: We do this because silence benefits the powerful and punishes the weak; because we stubbornly refuse to let lives be wiped away, we carry the faces of those lost into the record, because they are all more than statistics. Every night, when my eyes can barely stay open, I pray: Ya Allah, give us strength to bear witness, do not let our work be in vain.
When a cease-fire comes about, what is the first thing you will do?
The first thing I’ll do is run to my family and hold them. Then, I’ll visit the graves, some of people I couldn’t help. That will be the hardest part. I‘ll assist people get back on their feet. There will be grief and work to do at the same time.
When a cease-fire comes, will you work to improve relations between Palestinians and Israelis?
I will work for improved relations. However, building bridges means concrete rights: equal protection under the law, an end to the blockade, the right to move freely, restitution for dispossession, and honest accountability for crimes against civilians. It means safe streets for Palestinian children and Israelis alike, not one people’s security guaranteed at the cost of the other’s freedom. It means truth-telling: public records, named victims, and independent investigations. The work of repair includes survivor-centred truth and reconciliation processes that listen first to victims; joint projects on water, health and education that solve everyday needs; cultural and youth exchanges that humanise “the other”; economic cooperation that does not exploit but rebuilds communities; and shared memorials that refuse to let suffering be erased. I will refuse normalisation that asks us to forget or to sacrifice justice for a false calm. Yes to cooperation grounded in rights, truth, and justice. Anything less is not reconciliation; it is a postponement of the real work we must do together.
What is your dream?
My dream is to make films about morning light on olive trees, about the slow ritual of baking bread, about neighbours sharing tea. Insha’Allah, that day will come when our children wake to the gently lapping of the sea, to school bells, to nothing that sounds like fear.