As a CNN War Reporter, Arwa Damon Thought She Had Seen Everything. Then She Went to Gaza - Israel News - Haaretz.com
Just after being impressed by the punk hairdo, the tattoos and the large silver jewelry, you notice that Arwa Damon has eyes that have seen too much. In old photos she looks different, but 18 years of covering wars, especially in the Middle East, have left a mark that's impossible to miss.
As a senior international correspondent for CNN, she covered the war waged by the United States in Iraq from 2003 to 2010, during which she lived in Baghdad. Her next stop was Beirut, from which she reported on how the Arab Spring evolved into a brutal civil war in Syria. In 2016 she entered Mosul, Iraq, with American forces whose mission was to free the city from the grip of ISIS.
Along the way, what she saw led her to found, in 2015, a humanitarian organization, the International Network for Aid, Relief and Assistance, or Inara, which supports children affected by war who need prolonged medical and mental treatment. In 2022, she decided to leave CNN and focus on her humanitarian work.
In addition to its other efforts around the world, Inara operates 13 emergency shelters in Gaza. Damon arrived in the Strip to visit them in April – two days after seven employees of the World Central Kitchen were killed in an Israeli attack. "I needed to go in to understand how bad certain things were," she tells Haaretz in an interview conducted in Cyprus.
After having spent years in some of the most blood-drenched and depressing locales on the planet, Damon was nonetheless surprised by Gaza. "Death, destruction, refugeehood, humanitarian crises – those are the things we're used to accepting as part of the reality of war," she says. "But in Gaza I also saw the death of the human soul. The Gazans are zombies. Death of souls on that scale, psychological wreckage at that level, I've never seen anywhere. At a certain point, I went through Rafah, and the streets were filled with refugee tents, and people, and booths, and there were hardly any vehicles, because there's no fuel, so transportation is via carts and donkeys, and people move between them slowly. It took us two hours to cover a distance that normally would take 10 minutes. And all this time I looked at the faces of the people who were passing by us and I was shocked because they just looked dead."
She describes one encounter that illustrates vividly that psychological death. "A woman told me, 'My son, who's 7, screams every night. I keep being afraid he'll have a fit. He's been like this ever since he saw his sister's head blown up.' I realized that she had seen it too. But her tone of voice didn't change when she told the story. To protect herself, she has to talk about what happened without showing any emotion at all. Because if she allows even a sliver of emotion to enter her voice, she's going to shatter into a million pieces. She seemed to understand what was going through my mind, and she said, 'Yes, I know, but I also have living children who need me.'"
A Palestinian man and his children sit in a destroyed room following an Israeli airstrike in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, last month.Credit: Eyad Al-Baba/AFP
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Born 46 years ago in Boston to a Syrian mother and an American father, Damon has two mother tongues: Arabic and English. "Breakfast at home was labneh with za'atar and blueberry pancakes," she says, evoking the multicultural atmosphere in which she grew up.
Her grandfather was Muhsin al-Barazi, a lawyer and a politician who was briefly prime minister of Syria and was executed in 1949, together with President Husni al-Zaim, during a coup. As leader of the government, he held secret talks with representatives of nascent Israel in an attempt to arrive at a peace agreement. The talks progressed to the point of a decision, a few days before the coup, to hold an open summit meeting. Damon has been doing research on her grandfather for some years, with the aim of writing a book about him.
Her grandmother managed to get the family out of Syria a few years later, and her mother grew up in Morocco. Her parents met when her mother taught French at the American Embassy in the country. Damon's father, a volunteer in Morocco with the U.S. Peace Corps, was one of her students. Together they moved to the United States, where Arwa and her younger sister were born. When she was 6, the family returned to Morocco for her parents' work – both of them are educators.
From the age of 10, she grew up in Turkey, where her parents still live. Arwa attended Skidmore College, in upstate New York. After graduation, in 1999, she worked for a Turkish textile company based in New York. "I sold bathrobes and towels," she says, laughing.
She had no special connection to Syria in her childhood, but says she did feel attached to her Arab identity. "I understood that I was a mixture of cultures, unlike others. It was a mishmash, because home was a mix of American and Arab, but I grew up in Morocco and Turkey, and those cultures also trickled into my psyche. My sister also grew up like that, but I was a lot closer to this part of the world. I would never want to live in the United States, whereas she lives in America. She's the mother of two children, and I have no children."
Damon lives in Istanbul with her three cats. "I didn't want children of my own," she says. "I'm so immersed in what I do, and for children I would have had to make serious adjustments to my life, which I wasn't willing to do. I even hate my cats for making me miss them when I travel. So imagine if it was a child."
September 11, 2001, changed her life, and clarified a few things relating to her identity – and to her role in the world. "Very quickly, dehumanization of the Other began in the United States, and actually half of me is that Other, even if I don't look like the Other usually does. My exterior is very American, but my interior – my 'me' – is quite Arab. My friends who looked like they were Middle Eastern – in other words, they were browner than I was – were harassed a great deal by the police.
"The moment I saw this dehumanization of Arabs, I became more in tune with my interior identity," she continues. "I heard the rhetoric about Arabs and Muslims, and I understood they were talking about me, but without knowing it was about me, because people form their impressions from your exterior appearance. And I noticed that when I try to explain to a Western audience about the Middle East and the Arabs and the Muslims and my community, people listen to me because I look so American. I was able to bridge that gap; it drove me to become a journalist."
Damon sent her CV to all the major American electronic-media networks, but all of them replied that she needed prior experience and suggested that she start in local outlets. After two years, as it became clearer that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was imminent, she felt that it had become truly personal. "It really seared my Arab side to know that America was about to send tanks onto Arab soil on the basis of false intelligence. I didn't buy the American narrative for a minute – that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al-Qaida. The Iraqis didn't like Saddam Hussein, but they certainly didn't want American tanks in their streets. So I was determined to get to Iraq."
Finally she was able to find work as an intern for a production company that was preparing to send teams to Iraq, and helped them obtain visas for the country. "It was like getting Willy Wonka's golden ticket," she says. "No one was able to get them. I spoke with the Iraqi Information Ministry in Arabic and told them that I was half-Syrian, so right off they saw me as one of their own."
She worked in a few temporary jobs that helped her forge ties in the right places, and after half a year in Baghdad, she got in touch with CNN. Like in classic American stories, one day she simply showed up in the cable network's Baghdad bureau and asked if she could have coffee with the editor in charge. "I got a job with a Lebanese company that tried to sell bulletproof vests and portable toilets to the U.S. Army, just so I could return to Iraq for a week," she relates. "And then I knocked on the door of CNN and said, 'Hi, I'm here. You don't know me, so let's have a cup of coffee.' They were flabbergasted. 'What are you doing here?' they asked, and I replied that I was selling toilets down the street. That led to my first job at CNN, as a freelance producer. Afterward I became full-time."
Damon only went on-camera in 2006. Thanks to her knowledge of Arabic, she was able to tell stories from a different angle. "I was in Iraq for seven years, almost uninterruptedly. We had a house in Baghdad where we all lived and worked in the same space – both the local crew and the foreigners. And for a long time, the only way we could get out and get stories was by being embedded with the U.S. Army. While they were carrying out operations or attacks, or searching houses, say, I could hold independent conversations with civilians. And when I spoke with people privately, what went through my mind was: 'If only the rest of the world could be here and hear this.' I felt that I was doing exactly what I should be doing.
Death, destruction, refugees, humanitarian crises – those are the things we're used to accepting as part of the reality of war. But in Gaza I also saw the death of the human soul. Gazans are zombies. Psychological wreckage at that level, I've never seen anywhere.
Arwa Damon
"Those are the moments when you understand how big the disconnect is between this massive war machine, which has lurched out of control, and the American public, which in large measure supported this. To watch the Western media lauding American warplanes that are flying to bomb cities where you know some of the people who live there, made no sense from my point of view."
At the start of Damon's stay in Baghdad, when Saddam Hussein was still in power, the conversations with the local population always took place with two levels of meaning. "At first we had to go everywhere with government 'minders,' and people were careful about what they said. There were also plants. The regime sent its people into the crowd to walk around as though randomly, and then they would approach and start talking to you and feed you the sound bites that the authorities wanted. And then someone would pass by me as I was doing an interview, and all I would hear is a whisper, 'They're lying.'
Destruction in Baghdad, in the early days of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. "Those are the moments when you understand how big the disconnect is between this massive war machine, which has lurched out of control, and the American public."Credit: Reuters
"When I was in Damascus, on a visa from the Syrian government, there was also a British TV crew there. We received permission to do a report in the same neighborhood, at different times. When we were filming there, someone came up to us and started talking to me and telling jokes, and I found myself interviewing him. Two days later I watched the report done by the British network, and I saw that they had interviewed the exact same guy. I realized that he'd been sent by the government."
In 2012, during the civil war in Syria, Damon entered the country without governmental authorization, in order to cover the rebels in the city of Homs. That reporting assignment almost cost her her life. "I entered a neighborhood called Baba Amr – the first in Homs that wasn't under government control. It was under total siege. There was one exit point, via sewage tunnels that you had to crawl through for two hours. It was like entering the rabbit hole in 'Alice in Wonderland.'"
You weren't afraid?
"Yes, all the time. If a journalist tells you they're not afraid of being in war zones, they're either lying or they're [unaware of being] in a very dangerous situation. You have to live with a certain level of fear because you need to respect the risk and the potential danger. When you stop respecting the risk you have placed yourself in, very bad things happen. Fear must not be allowed to paralyze you, but you have to carry it with you. It's what will keep you alive."
Damon spent several days in the besieged neighborhood, and at a certain point her colleague, the veteran London Sunday Times correspondent Marie Colvin, also showed up.
Were you friends?
"Apparently she used to say that we were friends, but next to her I was like a bedazzled puppy dog. In her presence I became a blithering idiot, as can happen when you meet people you admire."
Damon stayed at a rebel media center together with Colvin and other journalists. A day earlier, the venue had been shelled by the Syrian army. "A few days later, a heads-up arrived saying that Assad's soldiers were about to burst into the neighborhood, so they asked us to leave. Half the local journalists also got ready to leave, so they could go on living and tell the story, and half stayed behind in order to go on broadcasting from there until the last minute of their lives. Those young people, all of them in their 20s, took their leave from one another. And then we all crawled through the tunnel and got out."
The late London Sunday Times correspondent Marie Colvin. "In her presence I became a blithering idiot."Credit: Ivor Prickett/Sunday Times/AP
Marie Colvin and her photographer decided to go back in. "I spoke with CNN by phone and told them that I wanted to go back, and I got into an insane argument with my bosses. They told me: 'Don't push your luck.'"
The next day the media center took direct hits. Colvin and the French photographer Rémi Ochlik were killed, together with the Syrian journalists and activists. "All those people died so that it would be possible to see what was happening in Syria, from inside, but none of that changed a thing in terms of the world's behavior regarding that war and regarding other wars in the region."
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Throughout her career, Damon has focused on the human story. "I very much believe in telling the big picture through the small, emotional story," she says. "Everything we do is driven by emotion, whether positive or negative. All decisions made by every leader, commander or manager are driven by emotion. It might be greed or revenge or envy or generosity or the desire to do good or the desire for change. If we continue failing to understand our emotional, private and collective history, we will never succeed in breaking those circles. So, 90 percent of my career has been spent talking with people."
In 2016 Damon entered Mosul – which was under ISIS control – together with the Iraqi army. From there she broadcast a report about a random family that gave shelter to the unit she was with when they encountered an ambush. Even as the fiercest battles raged, the head of the family made tea and fried eggs for everyone from what looked like their last provisions. He did it, Damon says, "because after all, we were his guests. Those are important moments. They compel us to focus not on bombs and bullets, but on the spirit of generosity that can prevail in every situation."
But even the positive stories she was able to tell didn't make her feel that she was causing sufficient change. "I was in despair. You put your heart and soul into it, into journalism, into telling these stories, and you want to see that something is starting to move in a positive direction, and it doesn't happen. Everyone just becomes more polarized. After Syria, in 2013, I couldn't breathe. I was in a terrible, dark place. I felt like I was at the bottom of the pit and trying to crawl back to the top, but that I was continually being buried underground."
She was smoking two packs of cigarettes and drinking a bottle of whiskey a day at the time, and had lost the ability to cry. "I was a cliché of a war zone correspondent." After her good friend Peter Kassig, a humanitarian relief worker, was abducted by ISIS, and it was clear that it was only a matter of time before he would be decapitated, she felt like she was going off the deep end. "I don't carry myself in the world the way I used to," she says. "Every little story, every person I met, took a small piece out of me. It stayed with them, and they stay with me."
Peter Kassig, Damon's good friend, who was abducted and decapitated by ISIS.Credit: Courtesy the Kassig family/via AP
Conventional therapy didn't help. What finally pulled her out of the pit was the EMDR method (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing: the patient moves their eyes in a certain way while processing traumatic memories). She then decided to establish Inara. "I had a lot of anger in me toward the world, and toward myself for not having been able to change things – that maybe if I had told the story properly, things would have changed, and if that didn't happen it meant I had failed. I asked myself what else I could do, besides bearing witness to events. Journalism wasn't enough for me anymore, because I saw that it didn't move the needle. In Inara, I was able to channel my distress into taking action."
Inara assists in emergency situations and also constructs long-term programs for medical and rehabilitation treatment for children. "We take cases of children who have complex injuries that will require many years of treatment. Other organizations don't usually commit to that. After five years, if the child's face is still one big scar, or if their hand is disabled, most organizations won't continue the therapy. These are known as 'cold injuries.' We take the cases that no one else wants."
Why did you decide to focus on children?
"I met a lot of children in war zones who didn't get adequate treatment. In 2007, I did a report about a boy named Youssif, from Iraq. When he was 5, masked men had doused him with gasoline and set him on fire while he was playing outside his home. His father went from ministry to ministry and from organization to organization trying to find help for him, and they all turned him down. Somehow, he got in touch with CNN. "The first time I saw Youssif, his face was like a hardened mask of scar tissue. He couldn't open his mouth wide enough for even a teaspoon. His hands were scarred, too, from having tried to douse the flames on his face. We told his father that the only thing we could do for him was to tell his son's story, and he consented."
You put your heart and soul into it, into journalism, into telling these stories, and you want to see that something is starting to move in a positive direction, and it doesn't happen. Everyone just becomes more polarized.
Arwa Damon
The story was broadcast in a period when American viewers no longer wanted to hear about the war in Iraq, Damon notes. But even so, the report went viral. "So many people wanted to help that boy. My email in-box was bursting with offers, and CNN kept getting phone calls. Finally, an American aid organization offered to bring him to the United States for treatment. The best day of my life was when I called his parents and told them that their son would get help and that they were going to America."
Damon remained in touch with the family, which received asylum in the United States, and interviewed Youssif again seven years later. By then speaking fluent English, he said he had no memory of the horrific attack. "His formative experience was no longer the appalling, violent event and the abandonment he endured, but the generosity of strangers, the way people mobilized around him and how his new school supported him and his classmates were able to communicate with him," Damon says. "We succeeded in changing the life story of one child. Sometimes people look at war injuries and say, 'Well, his life is done with anyway, we can forget about him.' But, it's not so."
Arwa Damon. "I still harbor a naïve belief that if you do enough small things, maybe one of the people you touch will be able to do something bigger."Credit: Fadi Ali
That's one story that had a good ending thanks to rich and generous Americans, but it doesn't really change the big picture. I really can connect with what you said about the feeling of helplessness. How do you find the energy to keep going?
"It's hard. Am I optimistic about humanity? No. But I don't know any other way to live my life."
What story do you tell yourself? You don't seem to be a religious person.
"I still harbor a naïve belief that if you do enough small things, maybe one of the people you touch will be able to do something bigger. Because when you help a child, you are actually helping a family, and when you help a family, you're helping a community. Maybe if we help someone at the darkest moment of their life, it will lead to something bigger and better. And maybe I'm simply doomed to fight losing battles all my life."
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An array of tattoos covers Damon, many of them denoting her ties with Eastern cultures, both ancient and present-day. Her arms are tattooed with black bracelets – meant to signify mourning for friends who died. There's a tattoo of a coin from 15th-century Yemen, bearing a likeness of Queen Arwa, another depicting a lion and a snake-dragon from the gates of the Temple of Ishtar in Babylon, and there's one of a Turkish amulet against the evil eye.
"I had a sequence of really bad luck," she says, "so I had the evil eye tattooed on me because I was certain that someone was sticking pins into a voodoo doll of me." In the Middle East she goes about with long sleeves, concealing the tattoos.
The name of her organization is also tattooed on her wrist, in Arabic, in which the word inara means "ray of light." "I tattooed the name before I founded the organization, so that if I were ever to despair and give up the attempts to establish it, I would have a perpetual reminder of my failure," she explains.
Inara was founded in 2015, while Damon was still working at CNN. "I never promised anyone help or money in exchange for a story or an interview – that's a red line for me," she says. "But once my journalistic role was over, in some cases I went back to people and said, 'I have an organization that might be able to get treatment for your child.' When I visited refugee camps, I brought a suitcase filled with painkillers, aspirin, wet wipes. When I crossed the border into Syria, I had cash in my pocket to give to people. I was doing that even before I established Inara. We have a commitment to the people whose story we tell."
Damon left CNN in June 2022 to concentrate on her humanitarian work and to explore new ways of telling stories. "I wanted to speak to the mainstream, to a broader audience than CNN's viewers. I like the model of 'The Kite Runner.' The book and the film taught people more about Afghanistan than all the [news] reports from there combined. I wanted to do something similar to that, and I got an opportunity to shoot a documentary film, and that gave me the push I needed to leave CNN. Because CNN was home; I was 'Arwa Damon of CNN.' It wasn't clear to me who I would be when those three letters would disappear from my name."
The film she made, "Seize the Summit," released earlier this year and currently screening at festivals and other small venues, connects the humanitarian work with her journalistic background. It's about four young people who meet in order to climb Mount Kilimanjaro together. All four are war survivors: from Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine. One of them is in a wheelchair.
A Syrian boy plays between destroyed buildings in the old city of Homs, Syria, in February 2016. "When I crossed the border into Syria, I had cash in my pocket to give to people," says Damon.Credit: Hassan Ammar/AP
Inara operated initially in Lebanon alone, mainly with Syrian refugees, before it expanded into Turkey, where Syrians and Iraqis were treated, and then into Ukraine after the war broke out there in 2022. The plan was to move additionally into Gaza and Afghanistan. And then October 7 happened.
Over the years, Damon had visited the Gaza Strip three times, while Hamas was in control there. The recent visit, her fourth, she says, was the most frightening experience of her career, even more than sneaking into Syria or covering the battles against ISIS in Mosul. "When you enter a war zone there is a certain level of fear, especially the first time, when you don't yet know the dynamics of the place. But after some time, fear lodges in your stomach and settles in. This time, in Gaza, I couldn't calm that fear. I felt it in my chest all the time. I couldn't organize my thoughts around the fact that I was afraid of a country which is friendly to my country."
What exactly were you afraid of?
"When you're a humanitarian organization, you inform all the combatant sides that you intend to carry out a certain activity in the place, and you try to obtain guarantees for your safety. That process, known as 'deconfliction,' never worked especially well in Gaza. You can receive a permit to travel from Rafah to a certain place, but then you get stopped at some checkpoint. But World Central Kitchen always enjoyed the best channel of communication with the Israeli side. They carried out numerous humanitarian operations to northern Gaza and were successful in moving their supplies. They were the most successful example of obtaining a level of movement in Gaza. The attack on their convoy [on April 1, 2024], two days before I arrived in Gaza, frightened the humanitarian community very much. They took three missiles, one after another. So I was afraid. Rightly so."
Weren't you frightened of Hamas?
"No. I didn't see them anywhere, and I am not a target for Hamas. The areas where there were military confrontations in the streets are not the places I'd intended to be."
The European Hospital, near Khan Yunis, which she visited, she relates, had become a tent camp, every centimeter of which was being exploited. "The sidewalks and the lawns, everything is covered with tents, with a small stream of sewage flowing between them, and in the middle of all that, a boy is skating with pink rollerblades. Inside the hospital, people are cooking, children are scampering about. A girl who'd been wounded in the legs is sitting on a bed, with the biggest smile I've ever seen. And she says to me, 'You're dressed really cool.' That was such a normal thing for a teenager to say. I seize on those small moments of life and human generosity."
Even without the danger from shelling or missiles, it's very difficult for humanitarian organizations to operate in Gaza at the moment. "In the zones that are designated humanitarian, the conditions are inhuman. There is no sanitation. In the best case, in United Nations zones, 600 people use one toilet. There are no showers, there's no clean water and there's not enough food, so people eat one meal a day. In a tent city like that, with every step you take, a cloud of flies rises."
Until May 5, when Israel's incursion into Rafah began, she notes, "at least there wasn't a shortage of flour in Rafah. Certain items would suddenly appear in the market at reasonable prices. But now everything has disappeared. Overall, the entry point for the humanitarian organizations was Rafah. And now that crossing is shut."
Even when the Israeli army allows the transfer of humanitarian equipment and aid, or merchandise, a large part of the supplies doesn't make it in for various reasons. "A humanitarian organization packs hygienic kits that contain nail clippers, and a whole truck will be sent back because of that. We ask for an up-to-date list of what is not allowed to be brought into Gaza at the moment, and neither the Israel Defense Forces nor COGAT [Israel's civil administration in the territories] provide it. So you play a guessing game of what's allowed and what's forbidden to send in.
People have had it with being cannon fodder for Hamas, and collateral damage for Israel. That doesn't mean they accept the occupation. But they also don't like hearing [that] it's alright for Gaza to be sacrificed on the altar of the Palestinian struggle.
Arwa Damon
"The Egyptians," she continues, "prepared a list of products that were rejected by Israel time after time, as if to say: 'Don't bother sending this.' But it's not something official. It includes items such as solar panels, wheelchairs, insulin syringes, sleeping bags. There was also a shipment of toys that was sent back. After the equipment enters Rafah, there's a whole logistics of distribution, which requires a warehouse, trucks, fuel and permits. It's difficult to shift the logistics operation of a humanitarian organization, but we had to move all of that in one night, because of the entry into Rafah, and the whole operation was relocated to Deir al-Balah."
A dramatic difference from other war zones, Damon observes, is the fact that the Gazans are unable to leave the Strip. Whereas most war zones have some sort of escape route, even if it's dangerous, in Gaza the civilians are imprisoned within the inferno, unless they're seriously wounded and need to be evacuated for medical purposes, or they have a great deal of money. And at present, even that doesn't help.
"There are people who are exploiting the war to make money," Damon notes. "There are two travel companies in Egypt that are dominating the exit-visa market from Gaza. Even before the war, a high price – $600 – was demanded for handling the paperwork needed by those who wanted to leave. The current price is $5,000 – at one stage it stood at $10,000. In any event, now no one is getting a permit to leave. There are 2,000 people on the waiting list of urgent medical cases."
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Damon has very little good to say about the way the war is being covered by international media organizations. "I think it was [CNN's] Christiane Amanpour who said that our task is not to be neutral but to be truthful. And we are failing in many ways. Very few media bodies today are providing viewers or readers with a sufficiently broad view. The Western press isn't casting enough doubt on what the governments of Israel and the United States are saying. The Arab press, for its part, is failing in the same way: They don't ask their interviewees critical questions about key points. At the start of the Israeli assault on Gaza, if you watched CNN, it looked like nothing was going on in Gaza; and if you watched the Arab media after October 7, it looked as though October 7 never happened."
Her recommendation: Don't trust the officials on either side. "From my experience with the American government, I know that every administration will try to hide what it did until you shove the evidence in its face. In Baghdad, we had many cases where the U.S. government or military would issue a press communiqué stating, 'We killed 10 armed militiamen,' but a guy who worked with us and was at the site had photos showing that it was actually a group of children who were scrounging for food in garbage heaps [who were killed]. So the government had to correct itself and apologize."
Palestinians react to an Israeli strike at a refugee camp in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, May 27, 2024.Credit: Jehad Alshrafi,AP
Isn't it difficult to be critical of the American government from within an American media outlet?
"As a journalist, I don't belong to any country, and there is no nation that's above criticism. You do a disservice to the public if you see something amiss and don't point it out. That is forsaking our duty as journalists and as citizens of the world. America's mistakes in Iraq were obvious from the day the first tank entered. You could argue that the invasion of Afghanistan was justified, because the Taliban were giving Al-Qaida shelter there. But the moment the United States went into Iraq, it moved from being a war on terrorism to a war on Islam. And now we're somewhat in the same place, because it looks as though Israel is not fighting only Hamas but also the Gazans [in general]."
Did you have to be cautious in your coverage so that military sources would go on talking to you?
"They constantly called to complain about our coverage, but we stuck to our guns. In the early years in Iraq, we went into the field together with the combat units in the course of the fighting. We were with the soldiers in the field for weeks, slept with them, ate with them. In one of the tough battles, on the Iraq-Syria border, the Americans hit a house with 17 civilians inside. I arrived on the scene when the last body was being pulled out. It was a boy of 11. I did a report on that. The soldiers I was with weren't pleased. The commander told me, 'Listen, we're not happy you did that report, but it was fair.'"
On Israeli television there's almost no coverage of what's happening in Gaza.
"Part of our responsibility as journalists is to help people understand one another. Unfortunately, frequently, when things are emotionally charged, we neglect that role."
So you didn't feel that your task as a journalist was to boost the morale and the unity of your country's citizens, to help them stay united?
"No. War is ugly and repulsive, there are no victors. As long as we refuse to understand what war does to the human psyche, and how it affects the development of those who are hurt by it, we will never be capable of breaking the vicious circles we are caught up in. As long as we do not understand one another on a human basis, we will never be able to stop being so violent."
There is one thing Damon is convinced of, and it is one of the most potent of her conclusions from visiting Gaza: Hamas is no longer in control of the territory or the population. "Hamas is finished. You don't see Hamas in the streets of Gaza. The only place I saw armed people on the Gaza side was next to the border, in order to prevent civilians from running to the Rafah crossing and breaching it. But in no other place in Gaza do you see Hamas. There is no policing force. There are no people with rifles in the streets, because it's clear that as soon as you walk around with a rifle, or with something that looks like a rifle, a bomb will fall on your head. So Hamas exists, but it's very weak."
Because Hamas is not felt on the ground, it's also easier for people to talk about the organization freely. The Gazans, Damon relates, shared with her their reservations about the organization that has ruled them since 2007. "The people I spoke with said that they had never liked Hamas from the outset, and at the moment they are totally fed up with the organization. They are simply longing to breathe for a moment. They want to eat, to drink, for the schools to be rebuilt. They don't care at the moment who rules in Gaza. No one asked them if they are willing to die for any sort of big project. They have absolutely no control over their lives.
"People have had it with being cannon fodder for Hamas, and collateral damage for Israel. That doesn't mean they accept the occupation. But they also don't like hearing Palestinians who aren't residents of Gaza who think it's alright for Gaza to be sacrificed on the altar of the Palestinian struggle. A good friend of mine, who is a journalist from Gaza, said to me that when she hears other Palestinians say that, 'it hurts me more than the Israeli bombs. We are everyone's garbage.'"
The fact that Hamas is finished, Damon says, doesn't mean that the organization has played all its cards. "Of course they're still holding captives, and they can still fire missiles. But we are at a stage at which, if things are done as they should be, it could end. ISIS lost control in Mosul months before the last battle was fought. From a body that held ground, they became an entity that could only stage small surprise attacks, and then disappear. That is significantly different from holding territory and controlling it. Can Hamas mount attacks on Israeli soldiers? Definitely. But that doesn't mean they're strong. An entity that can fire a few missiles here and there is not an entity that is capable of ruling a territory and a population of 2.2 million people."
What entity do you think could replace Hamas when the war does end?
"There will need to be a force there that is acceptable to the Palestinians, which Hamas will have to accept, and which will be acceptable to the Israelis. We will need to look for a type of peacekeeping force in which Arab states will have to participate, at least for a period, for the stage of Gaza's physical rehabilitation. At the moment, the only thing that is somehow holding together what remains of the social fabric is the moral code of the people themselves. And that moral code is crumbling as despair and want grow. Hamas' absence also means that there is no police force and no law enforcement. And the hungrier and more desperate people become, the more dangerous the situation is. So, some sort of policing is needed to enforce the law, which will enable humanitarian organizations to enter so that rehabilitation can begin."
From what you've seen elsewhere, do you have any idea how it will end?
"The level of destruction in such a short period in Gaza, and the psychological devastation suffered by the population, cannot be compared to any other place. It won't be easy to set it right, but it's possible. It's not too late to save Gaza. We can expect 20 or 50 hard years, but they needn't lead to something awful. Long-term thinking is needed. What's not acceptable is a scenario in which the war ends tomorrow, but in five years people will still be living in shipping containers and not have access to normal toilets.
"If I had a magic wand, I would want to bring back the [Israeli] captives, arrive at an agreement in which Hamas lays down its arms and bring into Gaza external forces to keep the peace. And then the borders can be made open to all the humanitarian and medical aid that it's possible to bring in, to clear away the rubble, to establish medical facilities and provide long-term treatment for people with complex injuries.
"And then the two sides need to understand how to teach their history, to teach the pain without teaching hatred. There is true fear on both sides, and each side must acknowledge the pain of the other. Maybe these are unrealistic expectations now, but at some stage they have to happen."