Amira Hass

Amira Hass is the Haaretz correspondent for the Occupied Territories. Born in Jerusalem in 1956, Hass joined Haaretz in 1989, and has been in her current position since 1993. As the correspondent for the territories, she spent three years living in Gaza, which served for the basis for her widely acclaimed book, Drinking the Sea at Gaza. She has lived in the West Bank city of Ramallah since 1997.

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. Hass was born in Jerusalem, and was educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she studied the history of Nazism and the European Left’s relation to the Holocaust. Early in her career, she traveled widely and worked in several different jobs.

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 Archivo Disarmo, the Bruno Kreisky Human Rights Award, and the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize.