Justine Yan
Appearances
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
Aya made phone call after phone call to doctors, rescue crews, and aid workers on the ground, trying to verify the basic facts. And while doing that, she'd also call on us.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
In the South, Anas was displaced again and again. He lived in his car. That's where he slept at night.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
He was always hungry. Anas has lost almost 70 pounds since the start of the war. And there were days he couldn't eat because of what he saw. The repetition of bombing, evacuation, and bombing again.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
Anas has often been among the first to arrive at the scene of a bombing. Several times, he's tried to save someone's life. After one airstrike in Al-Buraj, central Gaza, Anas found a group of people trying to rescue women and children trapped in a building that had just been bombed.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
So he joined it. Someone passed him a young woman. She was semi-conscious and couldn't breathe. He carried her out of the building.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
There's no footage of this moment because Anas had put down his phone. He wasn't reporting anymore. It took more than 15 months for the bombs to stop. The day the ceasefire went into effect, January 19, 2025, it was also Anas' birthday. He turned 31. About a week later, Anas set out on the coastal road towards Gaza City. It was a seven-mile walk north.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
He was surrounded by thousands of other Palestinians, also heading home. Eya Batraoui called him.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
Reunions were happening all along the road. People who'd stayed in the north during the war were meeting people who'd been displaced to the south. Ana spoke to a woman who hadn't seen her son in 16 months. He left as a boy, she said, and now I meet him as a man.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
As he and the crowds got closer to Gaza City, Eya reminded him to take in the moment.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
When Anas finally returned to his house, it was not as he remembered it. He found the shattered lock, the empty kitchen, the unexploded artillery shell. But there were some signs of his former life, like his garden.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
It all gave Anas an almost irrational hope.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
Did you really think that they would be there?
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
And so, Anas went from room to room, letting the house welcome him home.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
Anas's family is now in Europe, seeking asylum. But so far, they haven't received it. They're not classified as refugees. So they're in limbo, waiting.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
In the first days of being home, Ana started settling back in. He wanted to fix his house. There was a lot to do. That leak on the roof, those windows without glass, damage to the walls. He went to the market and bought some materials.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
Anas and his neighbors even made plans for rebuilding the neighborhood.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
Then, just a week after Palestinians were allowed to return to Gaza City, President Trump gave a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
There was no reason, Trump said, for Palestinians to stay in Gaza.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
Anas put his own plan to rebuild his house on pause.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
It's been cold in Gaza City. Ana sees people, often children, searching the rubble for firewood.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
Then he heard a knock on the door. It was his neighbor.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
The neighbor asked if Anas could spare any wood.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
And so instead of rebuilding, for now, Anas will keep taking the doors down from his house. For himself and for his neighbors.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
I started calling Anas Baba after the ceasefire went into effect, and he was home in Gaza City. The only place he could find with a good internet connection was a cemetery next to a hospital that had generators. So that's where he'd sit to talk with me about what he'd been through during this war and how home had been an idea that sustained him for 15 months.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
He said he wasn't sure what he'd find. But as he walked down the street, reality sunk in.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
He walked past a community kitchen.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
And another building that had housed 20 families.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
And in a way, it was. Unlike so many other houses, his was still standing. Anas' house is at the end of a small street. It's four stories high, with concrete verandas on the top three floors. He said his father designed it to look like an Italian villa. Anas lived here with his mother and father, his sister and two of his younger brothers.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
They all evacuated Gaza early in the war, and he hasn't seen them in almost a year. So when he walked up to the front door of his house, he was alone. He reached for the keys in his pocket, but there was nothing left to unlock.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
All of the windows had been shattered by bombs. There were gaping holes in the walls. And on the third floor, he found an unexploded artillery shell. Ana surveyed the damage, the broken glass and piles of rubble. The kitchen was totally empty.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
Anas is used to being in reporter mode.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
This is Aya Batraoui, NPR's correspondent in Dubai. She's been working closely with Anas since the start of the war.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
Aya has covered the Middle East for more than 15 years. After Hamas's attack on October 7th, her editors in Washington called her and asked her to fly to Israel to join the NPR team there. Ea got on a plane to Tel Aviv the next morning, and she got her assignment. From day one, I was told, call Gaza.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
In the chaos of that first week, Anas and Ea collaborated on several stories. Anas would upload recordings and videos he'd gathered on the ground, and Ea would write the stories for the radio, including this one.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
This was some of the last reporting Aya got from Anas in Gaza City before he had to evacuate.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
Ayo went on the radio again and again, trying to describe what was happening.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
Anas documented every step of that journey.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
Sending dispatches to his colleagues in Israel.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
There were multiple communications blackouts during the war.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
Just as Eya depended on Anas' reporting, Anas depended on Eya to help him see the bigger picture. So that meant, sometimes, Anas took big risks, like moving closer to the Israeli border to connect to their cell towers.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
Eya and the rest of the team worried about Anas' safety. When there were bombings in an area Anas was thought to be in, Someone would reach out, just to ask. Are you okay? Is it near you? And Anas would respond as soon as he could. He was alive, and he had recordings for them. Most mornings, Anas told me, he woke up at 4 a.m. and began scrolling through updates.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
What had happened while he was asleep.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
One thing he always did was try to name the victims.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
And he shared the grief of survivors.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
It all felt impossible for Aya Batraoui, too. After a few weeks in Israel, she went home to Dubai. From there, she continued to work with Anas to tell stories from Gaza. And that was a different sort of challenge.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
After the break, how Eya covered the war from afar, while Anas only got closer and closer.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
We're back with a Sunday story. I'm Justine Yan. For Dubai-based correspondent Aya Batraoui, as the war dragged on, it got harder to make sense of what was happening.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
Everywhere she looked, there were images of atrocities. Men, women, children, injured and killed.
Up First from NPR
A Palestinian Reporter Returns Home to Gaza City
Everywhere she went, everything she did, she thought of Gaza. Her own life, outside the frame of the war, felt unfair.