Aisha I'm Aisha Roscoe, and you're listening to the Sunday STORY from Up first, where we go beyond the news to bring you one big story.
If you've been listening to NPR's reporting on Gaza over the past year and a half, there's a name you've likely heard, NPR's producer in Gaza, Anas Bhabha.
With Anas Baba in Khan Younis, Gaza.
That was NPR producer Anas Bhabha.
ANAS Bhabha Anas is one of the only Palestinian journalists in Gaza working full time for an American news organization.
He's from Gaza City and he's been NPR's eyes and ears on the ground.
He sends dispatches from hospitals, displacement camps.
And bomb sites, dust everywhere, the powder of the guns and explosions all over the earth.
Wherever you put your eye to the horizon, it's the same destruction everywhere.
Annas does all of this with little more than a cell phone.
He works closely with a team of NPR journalists who've been covering this war from outside of Gaza.
Israel has banned international journalists from independent access to Gaza since Hamas deadly attack on October 7, 2023.
On January 19 of this year, a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas went into effect.
The ceasefire permitted Palestinians to return to the north of Gaza.
And today we are returning hundreds of thousands of people, literally hundreds of thousands, thousands of people.
Anas Baba was one of them.
Nothing.
Still the same.
Gonna keep reporting here.
Justine Yan is a producer for the Sunday Story.