At am on October 7, , when air raid sirens began blasting across Israel, a broadcast journalist named Chen Liberman was asleep next to her partner, Adam Shinar, a professor of constitutional law, in their apartment in Tel Aviv.
Sitting in the darkβreinforced concrete walls dampened the sound; the children, aged three and five, continued to sleepβthey learned from their newsfeeds that rockets had been fired from Gaza, part of a barrage falling across the country. News has always been a national obsession in Israel, which perhaps makes sense for a tiny country where war is frequent and proximate and everyone knows someone in the army. Broadcast journalists and commentators, including Liberman, are household names.
Politicians and generals regularly appear on air, and their arguments spill out into public debate on social media. But her frustration was quickly subsumed by horror. At that point I was just glad to be with my kids. Horrifying videos circulated online: of bodies lying in the streets, of hostages being dragged into Gaza, of executions at close range. In TV studios, presenters took calls live on air from families barricaded in their bomb shelters, pleading for help.
In one, a woman reported in a frantic whisper that she could hear terrorists breaking into her home. For many, help would never arrive. By the end of the massacre, civilians and security personnel had been murdered. Another were taken hostage. The country was stricken. Then Liberman turned around and returned to Tel Aviv.
She took a camera to a nearby hospital to meet a cancer patient named Liora Argamani, whose daughter Noa had been taken hostage by Hamas. In addition to reporting on the struggles of hostage families, Liberman made her case on panel discussions that Netanyahu should agree to exchange Palestinian prisoners for hostages right awayβthat the full force of a military campaign should wait.
