WAN-IFRA Women in News has launched a new round of SIRI Gaza, bringing together 30 freelance women journalists to document human stories of families, children, health, education and culture under conflict.
By Imran Malik | Media Industry & World Affairs Desk | MediaBites.com.pk
While the world debates Gaza through the language of military strategy, casualty counts, and geopolitical positioning, thirty women journalists inside the territory are doing something different. They are documenting the human stories that statistics cannot capture: the daily realities of families navigating displacement, children attempting to continue their education, women sustaining communities under extraordinary pressure, and cultural life persisting in the spaces between crises.
WAN-IFRA Women in News (WIN) has launched a new round of its SIRI Gaza initiative, now entering its third consecutive year, in partnership with the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate and with support from the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ).
Thirty Voices. Sixty Stories.
This round brings together 30 freelance women journalists from Gaza, each of whom will produce two written or visual stories covering the lived experiences of Gaza’s population across health, education, economy, culture, and community.
The reporting will go beyond conflict coverage to spotlight personal stories and community-led initiatives that illuminate how people continue to navigate immense challenges, finding dignity, resilience, and humanity in circumstances that most of the world can only imagine from a distance.
The program launched with training sessions led by WIN Palestine Manager Shuruq As’ad and trainer Mohamed Abu Shahma, covering storytelling techniques, gender balance in content production, principles of public-interest journalism, and the use of artificial intelligence in modern reporting.
Each participant will also receive individual mentorship throughout the grant period, providing structured professional development support alongside the editorial guidance needed to produce compelling, rigorous journalism from one of the world’s most difficult reporting environments.
Why Women Journalists in Gaza Matter
The SIRI Gaza initiative reflects a recognition that is not always stated explicitly but deserves to be: women journalists in conflict zones do not simply cover the same stories as their male counterparts from a different perspective. They access stories that would otherwise remain untold.
Women in Gaza speak to other women. They enter domestic spaces. They understand the gendered dimensions of displacement, healthcare access, educational disruption, and economic collapse in ways that reporting from outside those spaces cannot fully capture.
The 30 journalists participating in this round bring not just professional training but also lived experience of the conditions they cover. They are not observers of Gaza’s humanitarian reality. They are part of it, choosing to document it with journalistic rigor and public-interest commitment under conditions that most journalists in the world will never face.
WAN-IFRA WIN’s Broader Mission
The SIRI Gaza initiative is part of WAN-IFRA Women in News’s broader global mission to support, develop, and amplify women journalists and media leaders worldwide.
The program’s partnership structure, combining WIN’s editorial expertise, the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate’s local knowledge and institutional access, and the IFJ’s international press freedom framework, reflects the kind of collaborative approach that makes sustained journalism support in conflict environments possible.
The stories produced by these 30 women will matter. Journalism that begins with the human being, rather than the political calculation, always does.
— Imran Malik | Media Industry and World Affairs Desk | MediaBites.com.pk | SharjahNews.ae
