Amira Hass

Israeli journalist Amira Hass joined Haaretz, Israel’s oldest newspaper, in 1989 and has been the paper’s correspondent for the Occupied Territories since 1993. The daughter of two Holocaust survivors, Hass is the only child of a Sarajevo-born Sephardic Jewish mother, who survived nine months in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and a Romanian-born Jewish father. Born in Jerusalem in 1956, Hass was educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she studied the history of Nazism and the European Left’s relation to the Holocaust. Her book Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land under Siege (Holt, 2000) is an account of the three-year period during which she lived in Palestinian enclave of Gaza. Her other books include Reporting from Ramallah: An Israeli Journalist in an Occupied Land (Semiotext(e)/Active Agents, 2003) and Diary of Bergen-Belsen: 1944–1945 (Haymarket Books, 2009). Hass has been the recipient of several awards, including the World Press Freedom Hero award from the International Press Institute, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation, the Reporters Without Borders Prize for Press Freedom, the Golden Dove of Peace Prize awarded by the Rome-based organization Archivio Disarmo, the Bruno Kreisky Human Rights Award, and the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize.