Bisan Owda: The unyielding voice in journalism’s darkest hour

There are few voices as critical and courageous this year as Bisan Owda’s. The 25-year-old Palestinian journalist has become the most followed reporter on the ground in Gaza, delivering the gut-wrenching, indisputable truths from a region silenced by blockade and devastation. Armed only with her iPhone and an unrelenting resolve to document her surroundings, Bisan’s reports for Al Jazeera and her social media dispatches have garnered global attention to the unforeseen horrors of forced displacement, starvation and a death toll now exceeding 44,000 people. With foreign journalists banned from Gaza, Bisan has valiantly tended the silence with her incisive and harrowingly personal updates. Her daily Instagram stories offer a searing window of survival under siege, humanising the realities that mainstream media evades. Speaking truth in the face of incomprehensible destruction, Bisan’s presence in the Dazed 100 is unquestionable. 

Born and raised in Beit Hanoun, Gaza, Bisan is no stranger to the cyclical violence imposed upon her homeland by the Israeli colonial regime. Yet this year, the scale of desolation has reached unfathomable levels. Bisan has reported Israel’s killing of children in airstrikes, hospitals overwhelmed with casualties and the obliteration of entire neighbourhoods – including her own. Bisan’s childhood home and office were reduced to rubble, along with 80% of Gaza’s infrastructure. Even as they decimated Bisan’s film equipment, her sense of purpose remained intact, and she ensured we saw everything foreign correspondents were barred from seeing, every senseless atrocity that Western media worked to deny, justify or deflect. As they turned Palestinian lives into numerical abstractions, their struggles and ambitions collapsed into collateral jargon, Bisan made sure we saw the real price of their indolence.

When Israel bombed her home to dust, driving her family to seek refuge in Al-Shifa hospital, she made sure we saw. When the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) laid siege to the hospital, forcing her family to once again evacuate south to Khan Yunis, she made sure we saw. During the exodus, when the road was littered with martyrs and families carrying the bodies of their loved ones, when the injured were dying due to lack of medical care, she made sure we saw. When in February, 112 Palestinians were deliberately shot and killed in the ‘Flour Massacre’ as they ran toward aid trucks to receive help, she made sure we saw. Her immediate, firsthand accounts of the war crimes offer a stinging lucidity that no satellite image, no empty official statement and no patronising media distortion can impugn. 

Bisan is among the few journalists still alive and documenting the genocide in Gaza. This year has been named the deadliest for journalists in this century, with the IOF having killed over 130 journalists and media workers since October of 2023, making over 70% of journalists murdered globally Palestinian – a staggering figure that strips bare the price of telling the truth in Palestine. Though she has lost family, colleagues and dear friends at eye-watering pace – grief she shared with her growing followers, who bore witness to the unprocessable weight of her pain – she is steadfastly ensuring that this systematic slaughter is the most documented in history, as she remains in the strip, living out of a make-shift tent,

In August, Bisan’s programme It’s Bisan from Gaza and I’m still Alive was nominated for an Emmy award in the category of ‘Outstanding Hard News Feature Story’. The documentary had also won the Peabody Awards along with the Edward R. Murrow Awards just before. Such Western totems of prestige indeed fall flat these days, complicit as part of a larger system intent on invalidating Palestinian humanity. Yet this award carried weight, offering a spot to Bisan in a space that generally excludes othered voices. Titans of the entertainment industry only underscored this reality when over 150 prominent producers, writers and actors signed a letter demanding her nomination be rescinded – citing the depressingly predictable accusation of Bisan’s alleged ties to terrorism. When the National Academy for Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) refused to retract the nomination – and Bisan won – it became clear that such transparent obfuscations to delegitimise Palestinian existence are no longer being entertained.

Before the ruthless onslaught of airstrikes following 7 October, she clung tightly to the fragile normalcy of Gaza, capturing it through a tender lens known only to those who call the enclave home – the lapis stretch of its sea, the ancient loomings of its citrus orchards and radiant warmth of its people – all as a culture vlogger. But Zionism is cruel and indiscriminate, and her posts celebrating Gaza’s vibrance became suffused with the unrelenting, infernal daily reality of genocide.

The cruel absurdity of such senseless killings has rendered adjectives like ‘resilient’ feel maddeningly hollow – words born of necessity in circumstances no one should ever have endured. Yet there is no other term to describe the Gazan people, and Bisan in particular. For Bisan to have suffered through all that she did, to record it daily and call it her duty amidst the unthinkable, is a strength beyond imagination to those untouched by the spectre of annihilation. But day after day, Bisan continues to show up, continues to post and her followers hold their breath as she names the day – a morbid ledger of atrocities that is somehow still enabled, more than just permitted.

The world has an unequivocal obligation to listen to Bisan Owda – not just because she is brave, but because she is necessary. Necessary to grasping the human cost of war, to unravelling the distortative lens through which the media skews its narratives, and to honouring those who have paid the ultimate price to ensure the truth is seen. If nothing else comes of this insurmountable suffering, it is the irrefutable truth that journalists like Bisan illuminate in the darkness. Against every effort to eradicate Palestinian resolve, Bisan epitomises living proof that it cannot be extinguished.