For a journalist in Gaza, leaving can mean saving your children’s lives. It can also mean losing your livelihood and discovering that the news organizations that depended on your reporting no longer have a place for you.
After three years of covering the genocide, many of my colleagues have found ways to leave with their families. Some have been evacuated through the World Health Organization. Others have secured places at universities in Europe and Britain. Many remain in Gaza, continuing to report.
For those who escape, safety is only the beginning of another struggle.
My friend Ahmad – he prefers to be anonymous for his safety- is one of them. We worked together for more than seven years in newsrooms, at local newspapers, and out in the field. He is married and has three children. In December 2025, he left Gaza for Europe, where an organization welcomed him and helped him apply for asylum.
He had hoped that leaving would offer his family more than survival: a home, work, and a future for his children. Instead, he found himself waiting for asylum procedures to move forward, without the income he had earned reporting from Gaza.
We speak regularly. At first, our conversations revolved around the shock of encountering ordinary life after everything he had endured. His children, too, needed time to understand a world where sleep was not interrupted by airstrikes, where waking up did not mean another day of war and killing.
Gradually, another struggle began to dominate our conversations.
Ahmad tells me that the publications he had worked for abandoned him once he left Gaza. As he tried to secure shelter and stability for his family, he could no longer follow events with the same intensity. And when he tried to continue reporting, he found that many outlets were unwilling to commission work from him because he was no longer there.
After months of navigating the asylum process, he says his family of five now receives just €450 a month from the host country.
“If we were to live decently, this would barely cover two weeks,” he tells me.
There are still the needs of three children, his wife, and himself to meet. There is still a life to rebuild.
Sometimes, his frustration turns into a deeper fear. He wonders whether the departure of so many journalists is leaving Gaza without the people who carried its voices to the world. He feels that he and others have been pushed out of the place they reported from, only to be driven from their profession once they reached safety.
I remind him that leaving Gaza does not erase our relationship with it. We are part of its society. We know its streets, its families, its rhythms of life. We have lived the suffering we write about. Our relationships do not disappear at a border, and neither does our ability to listen, report, and explain.
Through the people we remain in contact with, we can continue to tell Gaza’s stories.
But Ahmad’s answer is painfully practical: many editors want someone on the ground.
When I describe my own experience, he tells me he almost envies me. I understand why.
I think about that whenever Ahmad and I speak. My experience shows what continued support can make possible. His shows what happens when a journalist reaches safety and finds that the work sustaining his family has disappeared.
I cannot separate the support I have received from the work I continue to do. I carry it with me whenever I speak to someone in Gaza, whenever I sit down to write about the lives of my family, friends, and people whose suffering continues.
I write with the closeness of someone who still belongs there. Exile has changed where I live; it has not ended my responsibility to the people I report on.
I wish Ahmad and the many journalists facing the same uncertainty had that support too.
They should not have to choose between keeping their children safe and continuing the work to which they have given so much. And reaching safety should not mean that the world no longer wants to hear them.
