Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Gaza Journalist Honored by Women’s Group

She is one of the most remarkable public figures in Gaza, and now her work is being acknowledged with a prestigious accolade.

Journalist Asma Al-Ghoul has worked in the media for a decade, writing about life under Hamas rule as she sees it — and also doling out a fair bit of criticism to the rival Fatah movement that rules the West Bank. The International Women’s Media Foundation has announced that she is one of the four winners of its Courage in Journalism award, which will be presented in New York and Los Angeles in October.

Al-Ghoul, 30, writes for the Ramallah-based newspaper Al-Ayyam, which is sometimes banned in Gaza, and she stopped updating her blog earlier this year, without explaining why. In 2007 she published an Arabic-language article strongly criticizing her uncle, who is a senior military figure in Hamas. In response to the piece, “Dear Uncle, Is This the Homeland We Want?,” her uncle reportedly threatened to kill her..

One of the few women in Gaza who doesn’t cover her hair, her personal as well as her professional conduct sometimes gets her in to trouble. In 2009 Hamas police reprimanded her for going to the beach in a mixed group, and reportedly beating men she was with.

Explaining the decision to honor her, the International Women’s Media Foundation wrote: “[A]l-Ghoul regularly receives death threats against her own life and that of her young son. She has been beaten by Hamas security forces while covering popular protests and went through a period of sleeping in her office for fear of being killed on her way home.”

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.