Veteran War Reporter Arwa Damon on ‘Perpetual Fear’ Inside Gaza, Israel’s War, And the Demise of Foreign Coverage

Arwa Damon, a veteran foreign correspondent who has spent decades reporting from wars across the globe recently returned from a trip inside Gaza. She said it was unlike any place she has covered before.

“I’ve been to Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Libya, Syria, you name it. And there is something different about Gaza,” she said. “It’s the complete and total, sheer and utter psychological obliteration on a mass scale. You don’t see life, in the sense of life within a person.”

Damon, who until 2022 served as senior international correspondent for CNN, went inside Gaza on a humanitarian mission with her nonprofit INARA. She spoke about the harrowing experience in an extensive interview on this week’s episode of Press Club.

Damon decided to become a foreign correspondent in the wake of 9/11. She was working at a Turkish textile company in New York City at the time, and soon quit her job and traveled to Iraq, where she started reporting on the new war as a freelancer. Eventually, she was hired by CNN, starting at the network’s Baghdad bureau. She would go on to cover war across the Middle East and North Africa, most notably the Syrian Civil War and the rise of ISIS. She won an Emmy — one of three — for her on-the-ground coverage of the battle of Mosul in Iraq, where she came under fire from ISIS militants.

I called up Damon in Urla, Turkey to talk about her career covering war, what she saw on her recent trip to Gaza, why this war has been so dangerous for reporters, what a potential invasion of Rafah means, and why she believes the suffering in Gaza is different from anything else she’s covered.

Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Aidan McLaughlin: You had a piece in CNN this week about your recent visit to Gaza, where your nonprofit is working with children affected by the war. What are you trying to do with these kinds of trips?

Arwa Damon: For me it’s more about getting a real sense of what it feels like on the ground. And then doing basic assessments to see where it is that we can plug ourselves into. We’re a very, very small organism, but we’re also niche in the sense of of what we do. And we really do try to look at everything and what other organizations are doing, and then plug in areas where we sense that there are gaps.

But of course, with Gaza, the gaps are everywhere. Everything is needed. So you just literally try to raise as much money as you can and then spend it on on anything from distributing diapers to running mental health activities for the kids and whatnot. Obviously the work on the ground itself is being done by our Gazan staff. But I think it’s really important for others to also get in and get a really good sense of what it’s genuinely like in there. Because that allows us from a humanitarian perspective to be more adept and better capable to build real programs that are going to benefit that people as opposed to trying to dictate what should be happening from the outside, which we don’t do.

It’s very hard for the world to have an idea of what daily life is like in Gaza without actually going there. Could you tell us a little bit about what things are like there now?

There’s this perpetual fear and anxiety that exists within each person every single day. You’re constantly reminded of what you’ve lost and what you still could potentially lose. I’ve been to Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Libya, Syria, you name it. And there is something different about Gaza that my colleagues and I were trying to put our finger on — colleagues both in the journalism space and in the humanitarian space. I couldn’t quite figure out what it was until I got there. And that’s when I was really hit by it.

It’s complete and total, sheer and utter psychological obliteration on a mass scale. You don’t see life, in the sense of life within a person. That spark of life that exists in all of our eyes, that energy of life that we all are supposed to be emitting. It’s just gone. It’s gone. People’s eyes are deadened. Their movements are lethargic and mechanical. You really do get an understanding of how it is that the deep intensity of the relentless daily trauma has forced everybody to have to shove all of their emotions down, because they can’t risk any of it coming up. Because if it does they will literally crack. Everyone’s already on the edge of insanity.

As you noted you’ve covered war zones since the invasion of Iraq. You went on to cover Syria, you covered Libya and Afghanistan. What you write in your CNN piece is that the suffering you witnessed in Gaza is different from all of those conflicts. Now, the other wars were no picnic. Syria had Assad, an abject monster. You also had the rise of ISIS there and in Iraq. What about what’s happening in Gaza right now makes it different?

Look, every war is horrible, and everyone who has suffered a loss in war feels a similar level of pain. That’s not necessarily the comparison that any of us really talk about. And the horror of having to leave everything you love and you know behind, the emotions that it generates are similar. But it’s something about the relentlessness of the daily traumas being inflicted upon the people in Gaza with such frequency that makes the psychological effect really on the very essence of what makes us human different when it comes to Gaza. It’s the sheer constancy of it. It goes from waking up hungry and having your children be hungry to the drones buzzing overhead that really feel as if they’re taunting everybody with this refrain of, Oh, you think you survived? Just wait. We’re watching you. Your turn is coming. To the reality that there is no real, genuine, safe space there. There’s no access to anything that allows a person to feel like what they were before. Clean shower, proper bathroom, the ability to put your child into a bed, to just lean back against something when you’re not living in a tent. Everything has been so stripped away and eradicated. And then it’s trauma upon trauma upon trauma. You see all these instances where, if a child starts laughing, it all of a sudden gets cut off because either they’ve heard an explosion in the distance or the drones are coming.

One statistic in your piece for CNN really shocked me. It’s from 2022, so before the current war, and it found that 80% of children in Gaza reported feelings of sadness or depression. You said you’re certain that those numbers are at 100% now. What do you think that means for the future of these kids?

It basically means that the health of the Gazan society in the future, as these kids grow up to be adults, is in jeopardy. I was having this horribly morbid thought when I was in Gaza, actually. And it’s a bit of an exaggeration, of course, but I had it, and it was that Israel doesn’t need to kill any more Gazans because they’re basically already dead. Because I felt like I was walking through a sea of people whose souls had been so crushed that they were already dead. And I say that’s an exaggeration because even though that is the way people are feeling right now, that’s not to say that life cannot come back. That’s not to say that they should be somehow discarded. But going back to the issue of mental health and children, if we look at it more broadly speaking, if this sort of trauma does not get addressed, it effectively ends up calcifying within an individual and will impede them from having a healthy, productive life, and it will impede their ability to to interact as they grow and mature into into adulthood. This is where, as much as we talk about the need to physically rebuild Gaza, the need to provide prosthetics and other medical treatment for all of the children who have been injured, we also need to make sure that we don’t lose focus on the need for mental health. Because mental health still to this day always gets relegated as a secondary, nice to deal with, as opposed to need to deal with kind of challenge. And that should not be the case. You cannot build a healthy society moving forward. We cannot talk about giving Gazans a chance to rebuild their life if we don’t also give them the chance, the framework, and provide them with the resources they need to start to rebuild their psychology.

Case in point of what you’re saying there is one child you wrote about, a four year old named Ahmed. I found his story really hard to read, but I think it illustrates what you’re talking about. Tell us about him.

I met Ahmed in a hospital in Egypt. And he was there with his grandfather, and half his head is shaved, and he has this huge zig-zag Frankenstein-esque scar on it. And his little hairs had just started growing back. He had a severe head wound. And Ahmed doesn’t talk. Ahmed stopped talking. His grandfather was saying that he used to talk. Gibberish, whatever a 3 or 4 year old speaks. But then he stopped. He stopped because he and his parents and his sister were fleeing to a shelter when a bomb landed near them, and they all died. Ahmed was presumed to have died as well. His his grandfather didn’t find him until, I think it was like ten days after the strike in a hospital, completely by coincidence. And so no one really knows what Ahmed saw. No one knows if he was knocked out right away, did he hear his parents screaming, what were those ten days in the hospital like for him? Because he doesn’t talk.

What you do see though, is that this can slowly start to get coaxed back with the right kind of intense mental health work. Because over the course of the weeks, he has started to interact a little bit more. He smiles at me when I come in, he gives me a high five, he’ll nod and shake his head. And he’s not the first child I’ve met like that, a child who’s so traumatized that they don’t have words, they don’t have vocabulary anymore. And that’s something that requires years and years and years of mental health work. And we have to be ready for that. I actually also met, and this wasn’t in the article, but I met a girl in that same hospital. She’s about 15 years old, and she couldn’t move. She basically couldn’t really move from her chest down. So she was effectively paralyzed, except there was nothing physically wrong with her. The doctor’s only conclusion is that it is some kind of trauma-related psychological paralysis. With physical therapy she’s getting a lot better now. She can sit up, she can use her arms a lot more, but we’re seeing this trauma manifesting itself in many, many different ways right now.

So many journalists have died in Gaza since the start of this war. The Committee to Protect Journalists says that nearly 100 journalists have been killed. Why do you think that this war has been so dangerous for reporters?

I think there’s multiple reasons for that. It’s also been the most dangerous war for humanitarian workers. And for children. On the one hand, it’s the severity and the intensity of the bombing. On the other hand, the Committee to Protect Journalists and a number of other organizations have looked into a number of strikes that have killed journalists and has basically concluded that it appears to be a deliberate attempt to try to silence the media. This is the most dangerous, the most egregious, in some ways, war that I think we’ve seen of our generation. And I never thought I would say that after having witnessed the war in Iraq and the war in Syria and Afghanistan especially.

Some have argued that Israel is being held to a double standard here; that it is carrying out a just war in a responsible way, and that other countries do not receive the same scrutiny for doing the same thing. One recent example of this was NYU Professor Scott Galloway, who was on MSNBC, and he was referring to those killed in Afghanistan and Iraq by the United States and said, “We weren’t accused of genocide… but Jews are not allowed and Israel is not allowed to prosecute a war. And they are prosecuting a war more humanely than we have done. The ratio of combatants to civilians is lower than it was in Mosul, lower than it was in Japan, lower than it was in Germany. There’s just a different standard for Jews in Israel.” Now, to be clear, Scott Galloway is a marketing professor. He’s not an expert on war. And and I believe he’s wrong on the ratio in Gaza being better than the ratio in Mosul. But either way, that’s a belief about a double standard at play here that is fairly widespread in the United States. What do you make of it, this idea that there is a double standard for Israel and how it’s conducting its war?

I think that’s a bit ridiculous. Look, just dial it back for a second, we the press should have put more scrutiny on the US for some of the strikes it carried out in Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact that it wasn’t is not because there’s a double standard being applied to Israel, it’s because the media didn’t necessarily do its job. There historically has been this culture of — we let people in power get away, quite literally, with murder.

But to go back to the whole civilian to combatant ratio, I mean, that’s just a horrid way to do a calculus. And I do not think it’s correct. If we want to look at comparisons of Gaza and Mosul, for example — and I’m not a marketing professor, I was actually a journalist who was on the ground in Mosul — Israel has killed three times as many civilians over the course of seven months [in Gaza] than the Mosul offensive did over the course of 18 months. Both of these wars were taking place in highly, densely populated urban areas.

The other key difference also in the way that Israel is carrying out its bombing campaign versus, say, the United States, for example, is this idea of: When do you carry out a strike on a target that you’ve been tracking? We know that Israel tracks its targets, as does the US. The US, generally speaking — of course this doesn’t happen all the time — but the US will generally speaking wait for a target to be in a less densely populated area before carrying out the strike, and/or it will use a missile if it is in a very highly populated urban area, that will only bring down the building that the targeted individual is in. The Israelis do the exact opposite of that. They track these targets until they get into their homes, and then they use 1,000 to 2,000 pound bombs. And I think that’s a big difference here that a lot of people aren’t necessarily aware of or taking into consideration.

Speaking of the death toll, some have also questioned it, because the Ministry of Health in Gaza is obviously part of the local government, ostensibly run by Hamas. What do you make of those claims that that number might be inaccurate?

Is that a possibility? Yes of course. Inaccuracy is something that we deal with all the time in the fog of war. But we need to also look at history where in the past the same numbers provided by the same Health Ministry have, once the dust has settled, proven to be very accurate. This is something that the Israelis themselves use, that they will end up using or have, at least in the past, ended up using the same numbers for civilian death tolls that the Ministry of Health had put out. So that’s all I really would have to say on that front.

Now Israel is preparing to invade Rafah, which the U.S. government is strenuously objecting to. But it looks like it’s going to happen anyway. What do you think an invasion of Rafah means for Gaza and this war?

I mean, it’s over. Right? We’re already seeing it now. There’s been no humanitarian aid going through Rafah or Kerem Shalom for the last 48 hours, the UN is saying it’s going to run out of fuel in the next few hours [Editor’s Note: This interview was recorded on Tuesday]. I know that my charity, INARA, we’ve got stuff stuck on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border. It means that more people are going to die of bombs and disease and hunger. It takes up the suffering to to a level that I can’t quite wrap my mind around at this stage.

The other issue also, if we’re talking more broadly about Israel’s military offensive into Gaza, something on this scale and this kind of an urban environment, has to be planned out. If we look at sort of any other kind of similar battle space — of which there truly are none — but if we look at any that might even remotely be similar, so that would be something like Fallujah 2004 or Mosul 2016. There were always routes for civilians to be able to find space and actually hit an area where there were no bombs and where humanitarian access was 100% guaranteed. That doesn’t exist here. That is really making all the difference. This lack of preparation, this lack of adding a human component to this bombardment that really does seem designated to inflict punishment on the entire population. It is unnecessarily cruel. I could very easily argue that there are a number of other military strategies that Israel could have implemented that would have resulted in the same end stated goal, the eradication of Hamas, without destroying the entire Gaza Strip.

That’s an argument that you hear a lot from Israel, that this was the only way to do this. You’re saying that in your experience covering these wars, that there are other ways to have gone about fighting back against Hamas for October 7th?

Of course there are. Of course there are. There is planning that can be put into place to allow humanitarian aid. Let’s take a real-time example. Let’s say Israel wants to actually designate Mawasi as one of the safe zones. You then allow enough time for humanitarian organizations to be able to set that up as a safe zone, i.e. bring in the tents you need, bring in the portable toilets you need, establish warehouses closer to this particular area, put in whatever it is that that one actually needs to be able to build that. Now, realistically speaking, this is just about impossible in an area like Mawasi, because it’s sand dunes. But you at the very least allow for a basic framework to get put into place.

Let’s even take the scenario right now. You want to invade Rafah and you’re going to tell people to go to Khan Yunis, which is all rubble right now? Hold off for a little bit, bring in a whole bunch of diggers from Israel, clear a bunch of the rubble out, and at least create a little bit of space for tents. Allow aid organizations to shift their warehouses that are right now in the area where everyone has been told to evacuate from. No one really knows if any damage has been done to the aid warehouses, but allow that to get moved up to an area like Khan Yunis as well. Allow for basic infrastructure to get put into place before you tell a population: get out of here right now or you’re going to die. It’s little things like this that can be done along along the way. You don’t necessarily need to drop a 1,000 to 2,000 pound bomb to get a guy in an apartment building. You don’t. We’ve all seen the Israelis use very, very precise missiles and just go into a specific apartment. It’s an impressive thing to watch, the way the missile literally just goes in and hits one apartment.

Here in the United States, there are parallels between now and the reception to the Iraq War, particularly with these protests that we’re seeing on college campuses. As someone who’s covered both wars, do you see any parallels between those dynamics?

The dehumanization. I really thought we might have moved beyond that. It was actually what I saw post-9/11, because I’m Syrian American. Seeing the dehumanization of Muslims and Arabs, and how everyone one all of a sudden got lumped into this “they’re all the enemy” scenario, and the rhetoric that was being used. That’s quite literally what pushed me into journalism back then. I just remember so quickly after October 7th having that same sinking sensation of, it’s going to happen again.

It really seems as if no one learned the lessons of the post-9/11 world or where that dragged us into. That’s not to say that 9/11 wasn’t horrible. Of course it was. Of course it was. Of course it merited a response. That’s not to say October 7th wasn’t horrible. It absolutely, totally was. Of course it merited a response. But in both scenarios, we’re allowing ourselves to be dragged down this cesspool of vitriol and hateful language and polarization and dehumanization and a complete and total, stunning lack of compassion. It’s gutting to watch. It’s gutting. I have that same feeling of dread now as I did post-9/11.

You mentioned the start of your career as a war correspondent. How did that happen?

The short version of the story is I was in New York. I was working for a Turkish textile company, which is basically a fancy way of saying I sold bathrobes and towels. Mind you, I know nothing about bathrobes or textiles. I was there when 9/11 happened, and that’s what pushed me to be like, I’m need to become a journalist and I need to start explaining people to each other. Because I am both of these worlds. I’m so deeply entrenched into my American and my Arab identity, and I’ve grown up that way in my entire life. But then, of course, no one’s going to hire the new girl who has zero experience.

So I ended up getting an internship with one small production house, and I made a bunch of contacts with the Iraqi Ministry of Information under Saddam Hussein, because I was translating for them on all their phone calls. And then they were like, “oh, we’ll give you a visa.” Which was kind of like, wow, that’s like Willy Wonka’s golden ticket back then in the day. Then I found another outfit that had been trying to get visas to Iraq and convince them to take me with them. I did a few stints with them, and then CNN still wouldn’t hire me. I ended up taking a gig with a Lebanese company that was selling toilets, like porta johns, and flak jackets to the US military. I rocked up at CNN’s door and was like, yeah, I’ve been emailing with you guys, let’s have a cup of coffee because I really want to work for you. It worked.

You freelanced for a while right before moving to CNN. What was it like reporting from a war zone without a whole team or network behind you? I imagine that’s daunting.

Well, I was freelancing, but I always had a team. We were always at least a team of three. I was basically the fixer-producer as the Arabic speaker initially. Which was hilarious when I first went into Baghdad, because the Iraqi accent is very different to the Syrian Arabic that I grew up on. So there was many a night when I would run around the hotel being like, “is there anyone here who can translate Iraqi Arabic into Syrian Arabic for me?” And hoping that my correspondent didn’t notice. He did, but you catch on pretty quick and it all worked out in the end. Then I started freelancing with CNN in 2004, but we nicknamed that perma-lance, so you’re a permanent freelancer, until I got officially hired in 2006.

We’re in an era now where war reporting is increasingly seen as a luxury that even the major players are a little reluctant to pay for. CNN, which still has a great international footprint, made its name covering the Gulf War. But a lot of other outlets have limited their footprint internationally. What do you think about the future of war reporting? Are you optimistic that the media will still continue to make sure there are journalists in these places delivering reporting from the ground? Or do you think that there’s a big problem here with the media cutting back on its coverage?

There’s a broader problem with the media cutting back on coverage generally speaking. To take the conversation back to Gaza for a second, I think it’s going to be quite interesting to see where things move forward in the journalism space and what happens now that other areas have seen what you can do when you control your own story. Gaza right now is the first time that Gazans’ story is not being controlled by the Western media, for the Western audience. They’re able to tell their own story in their own words.

Media outlets are going to have to figure out a way to continue to incorporate activist journalists in the way that it started back in Syria’s days, but now obviously has significantly been amplified with Gaza into the more mainstream reporting styles that we tend to all have. It would be quite interesting, actually, to see if there ends up being the space for more training moving forward for people who are on the ground, local from there, as opposed to this parachute-in journalism that we all do, myself included. To ensure continuation of the story.

Because the problem that you face is we allow the spotlight to move away too quickly. The media outlets send in their big guns, they do like the big splashy stuff. But then the story’s not over. And then the repercussions and the ripple out effects of whatever has happened don’t get properly covered. And you reach a point in time where it’s like, well, how did this happen? Case in point is ISIS. Everyone was taken by surprise that ISIS emerged. No, I’m sorry. The fact that the world was surprised by the emergence of ISIS is because we as journalists failed, or rather I should say, a lot of our outlets failed because those of us who were on the ground in Iraq and Syria at the time were screaming up and down that something bad was happening.

You left CNN in 2022 after a number of years there. What made you leave?

So here’s the deal. The nonprofit work is all volunteer.

Got it.

I left CNN because I really reached a point where I wanted to try different forms of storytelling. There comes a point in your life where you can either stay with what is comfortable or you can go with where your gut is telling you to go. And I had this ridiculous opportunity to shoot a documentary. It’s called Seize the Summit. And the more I thought about it and I was sitting there and I was like, well, you can either stay with what’s comfortable or you can take this huge, massive, insane, crazy risk. And then I was like, I would rather take the risk because I’m more scared of living with a what if and a regret than I am of taking a risk and and failing. I just went for it.

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