Lama Abu Jamous, 9 years old, is undoubtedly the youngest apprentice journalist in the Gaza Strip. Her videos posted on social networks, in which she relates with a certain confidence and in front of the camera her daily life and that of the inhabitants of Gaza, their anxieties and their hopes, are viewed several hundred thousand times on her Instagram and TikTok accounts.

Microphone in hand, bulletproof vest with the "press" logo and blue helmet screwed onto his head, Lama Abu Jamous, helped by his uncle, himself a journalist, has become the voice of the children of Gaza.

“If only the world could do something to stop this war,” the little girl says in one of her videos, shot at child height with her phone from the town of Rafah, in the south of the Palestinian territory, where s 1.5 million Gazans are crowded into it. Like his family, the majority of them are displaced people who fled the ground offensive and Israeli bombings.

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The response of Benjamin Netanyahu's government to the October 7 attacks perpetrated in Israel by Hamas and its allies left more than 32,330 dead according to the Palestinian Islamist movement's health ministry. Faced with a desperate humanitarian situation, James Elder, spokesperson for Unicef, described the territory in December as "the most dangerous place in the world for a child".

Lama Abu Jamous' vocation as a journalist took shape on December 9, the date of his first video on the conflict, posted from Khan Younes, where his family, who lived in Gaza City, was initially displaced.

In a few weeks, the sounding board of social networks gave a global echo to her testimony and offered international notoriety to “the youngest Palestinian reporter”.

A rare testimony

Lama Abu Jamous finds himself invited to speak in several international media, including the American channel CNN, while foreign journalists are still refused free access to Palestinian territory and their Gazan colleagues pay a heavy price.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an association based in New York, at least 95 journalists, including 90 Palestinians, have been killed since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas.

Hence the attention given to the stories and videos of Lama Abu Jamous, published during Internet outages. In addition to street scenes documenting the living conditions of Gazans, which she comments on herself, she interviews members of her family, local journalists such as Wael Al-Dahdouh, famous journalist from the Al Jazeera channel, with whom she collaborates , or even children injured in hospitals.

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In another online video, Lama Abu Jamous is seen visiting the rubble of the building where the family apartment was located, before fleeing to southern Gaza.

On March 25, in the last publication on her Instagram account, she announced, with a certain anger in her voice, that her aunt, her uncle and their children were killed in a bombing.

“My message to the world is that despite the pain there is hope, I hope that the war will end,” she concludes, regretting as in most of her videos, “the time when life was beautiful ".

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