By Mike Joseph
4 November 2025 – After that we can rebuild everything
Since before 7 October 2023, Gaza journalist Sami Abu Salem has reported and shared his world with us – his work, his family life and his dreams. Now, after surviving two years of genocide, in this remarkable interview filmed in late October 2025, Sami explores his devastated world, sharing deeper insights. He speaks eloquently of matters great and small, from his surviving belief in coexistence with Israel, to the intimate care of his 90-year-old mother. By bringing together such apparently unconnected themes, he reveals both the challenge and the necessity of holding on to values and humanity, amongst the ruins and hatred.
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Part 1 War is not only rockets
In Part One of this interview with Gaza journalist Sami Abu Salem, recorded in the uncertain weeks after the October 2025 ceasefire, Sami shows how little has changed for the people of Gaza. “We are not living now, we are just surviving”.
Part 2 If I am wounded, I will travel
Sami Abu Salem movingly reveals how as father of four children, he is now challenged by years of bombing, starvation and dislocation. He struggles to pass on his humane ideals of education, resilience and coexistence: “When you take good care of your kids, it is resistance”. But how can his children see purpose in anything, when they cannot expect to survive? “Study hard? Then we will die”.
Part 3 Journalism – This is a national duty and Rebuilding even our dreams
Journalism is not just a job for Sami, but rather his duty to tell the world what is happening to his people. But what should we ask our government to do, after recognising Palestine? Sami spells it out: “Let law be implemented. Strengthen the ceasefire. More food aid. Rebuild hospitals, schools. Get rid of hatred. And help us rebuild our dreams”.
Part 4 Lost my dignity because of hunger
Sami’s lifelong dream is to return to his ancestral lands, where he will live in coexistence with Israel. But in this painfully personal narrative, he explains how “I cannot think of coexistence or democracy while I am hungry, while my kids are hungry, while I am losing my dignity.”
Part 5 After that we can rebuild everything
Sami mourns the way that war and genocide dehumanise the victims. He insists that recovery must start by rediscovering our human values.
He encounters one of the harsh realities of Gaza: bodies of Palestinians captured earlier by Israel, now returned, but reduced to anonymous flesh. Despite facing such inhumanity, he somehow retains his hope.
The interview ends on an upbeat note as Sami sets off to find chicken to eat, as he has promised his young daughter.
10 October 2025
28 September 2025
In this extraordinarily candid outpouring of testimony from the head of a family in flight from Israel’s army, Gazan journalist Sami abu Salem talks to film-maker Mike Joseph about his fears for his and his family’s future: it is not only death and humiliation that haunt Sami by the minute, but the aimlessness: go here, go there—Israel’s instructions can kill you if you follow orders and flee, and kill you if you don’t. Wherever you turn there is little food and no shelter. There is also the alarm about the future: what is to come for his children, now two long years without school and beginning to question their father?
Listen to the full audio here or in sections below.
FULL AUDIO
OR PLAY THE AUDIO IN 6 PARTS
PART 1
PART 2
Of course Sami is escaping Gaza City, but not the Gaza Strip. There’s no escape. It’s often called the world’s largest open-air prison, but perhaps Gaza will now be called a concentration camp.
PART 3
Sami Abu Salem feels torn, for abandoning the Hell of Gaza City to protect his children. He is no longer witnessing the destruction of that five thousand year old city and its people. Instead, now he is reporting life and death in an Israel-designated humanitarian zone. Another circle of Hell.
PART 4
If you are in Gaza, you may soon die. That is hard. But until you die, you must live, and that is also hard. I don’t have words for what Sami shares next. He must care for his elderly mother Fatima, who needs sanitary pads, as there is no toilet for her.
PART 5
Nearly 2400 years ago, Sun Tzu, the Chinese Military General, wrote this:
“All warfare is based on deception.”
When Sun Tzu wrote his Art of War, Gaza was already an ancient city.
Sami has just reported a classic deception in the propaganda war that we are all subject to. Where will the tens of thousands it is driving out of Gaza City sleep tonight? Israel films the two or three thousand tents it allows into Gaza, and denies the 80,000 tents it is blocking at the Gaza border. And now Sami turns to a potentially deadly deception that he is fearing in his new refuge in Al Maghazi.
PART 6
In 1938-9 the UK admitted European Jewish children, visa-free, to protect them from Hitler – the Kindertransport. It didn’t save my mother’s young brother and sister from Hitler’s SS, but it did save 10,000 young lives.
Since 2022 the UK has sheltered nearly a quarter of a million Ukrainians from Putin, under special visa schemes.
But since 2023, the UK has offered little or nothing to protect Palestinian children. I know good people who are struggling right now to create exactly the routes of rescue and support that Sami dreams of for his children. Their challenge is not Israel’s government, but Britain’s.
The reality is that the UK was of course not complicit with Hitler, and, equally, is not complicit with Putin. But in the case of Netanyahu, shamefully, it remains complicit in arming, trading and engaging with Israel, to the extent of welcoming its President Isaac Herzog to Downing Street in September 2025. The man who said of Gaza Palestinians on Oct 12 2023, “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible”.
That nation includes Sami Abu Salem and his family.
18 September 2025
Sami abu Salem sent Mike Joseph this update:
SAMI
Hi Mike
I succeeded to flee from Gaza city. Now in Almaghazi refugee camp central Gaza strip.
I began my trip with a strike 30 meters from me (2 killed and I survived)
Crammed in a tuktuk, lots of walking amidst sewage and destroyed roads, and also we were carried in board of tuktuk,
After escalation the wave of fleeing increased. Lots of people escape. Not enough vehicles, so lots escape by walking.
Lots of people still in Gaza and will not leave because they cannot because no money to pay for transportation (a van costs $US1000)
Others need special service like the handicapped, no way
Others do not know where to go…I know lots of friends want to leave but they cannot.
I do not know what to do, I cannot think, we are helpless
MIKE
You are not helpless. Once again you have survived. And we all applaud your strength.
SAMI
Thank you. I am trying to go to Khan Younis. Will be out of internet
MIKE
You are so brave. Once again you rescue your family, and you do your work as a journalist, showing us what is happening. These things should be told, and you are doing it.
16 September 2025
Messages from Gaza: A Story of Hunger, Survival and Silence”
There’s a moment at the end of every screening of my film, GAZA A Story of Love and War, after the credits have rolled and the music falls silent, and now it’s the audience’s turn to respond. In that pause, I sense people thinking, I want to know if Sami abu Salem is still alive, but how can I ask that?
I too hesitate every time I think I should contact Sami. On 21 July I opened an exchange of messages, writing,
I am lost for words at your continued suffering. Please know that you are not forgotten, and we hold our governments responsible for failing to act to stop the killing, the siege, the destruction, the inhumanity.
Sami replied –
Thank you very much Mike. Thank you for your efforts. Honestly nowadays I am focusing just on our hunger. We are hungry Mike. Hunger restricts my thinking. Nowadays I do think just of food. We have no food, no flour, no rice, makaroni and all basic things.
Two days later, the Daily Express featured a frontpage picture of emaciated one-year-old Muhammad al-Matouq, and suddenly it was respectable to care about Gazans. Evidently they were not all Hamas fighters. Some were simply hungry children. Within a week, French President Macron, UK Prime Minister Starmer, and Canadian Prime Minister Carney all announced that they would recognise Palestine in September. After explaining for decades that recognition could only come ‘when the time was right’, the image of a starving child proved irresistible.
A month later in August I messaged–
Sami – I am meeting my MP again next Monday. He continues to work with other MPs urging Government for action against Israel. But it is all too slow, too late. Can I give him a message from you please? I know he will listen. I don’t know if he can act.
Sami was sheltering in Gaza City, and I feared for his safety if Israel followed up its threat to invade the city in force. He replied –
I am looking for a place to displace into. Israel is “threatening” to invade Gaza but actually they’ve already begun. Two neighbourhoods (Alzaitoun and Alsabra) are under bombing several days ago. Families killed. Houses destroyed and people are escaping. Orders of evacuation come closer to me. And starving is still hitting Gaza. The pics of food trucks and airdrops deceive audiences.
Last Sunday, 14 Sept, Sami wrote –
I am as a citizen under fire, as a father, I do care but in stopping bombing and displacement. Now my first priority is the life of my family. I want to flee Gaza city but I cannot. No enough transportation.
Honestly, I do not care about the imminent summit of Arab shit leaders nor the EU, because I believe that the result is just statements, no body dare to hurt Israel because it is supported by US … hundreds of thousands are stuck under horrible bombing. Can not leave. Presently I can’t because no enough transportation. Other families because they don’t have money, transportation is too expensive, 500-1000 ISd
Other families didn’t find a place to move to, the Israelis control most of Gaza strip
Other families can not because they have handicapped, elderly, physical disabilities and will never find a proper place for the handicapped to stay
There are some spaces but risky and no sources of life especially water, exactly like sahara desert
Mike, my family and I are still in Gaza city, could be killed any time.
If you have seen my film featuring Sami Abu Salem (GAZA A Story of Love and War) you will know his brilliant journalism, one moment documenting in fine detail what he sees with his own eyes, then suddenly reaching for context in the long history of Palestine since Zionism. He does this now, connecting this fateful moment in 2025 with his mother’s violent expulsion in 1948 from her childhood home, by my uncle’s Haganah militia:
We used to blame our parents and grandparents and tell them “why did you escaped in 1948, if we were you we will never flee… but now we are fleeing, even cannot fleeing, harsher than the 1948 as my mother says.”
Today, 16 Sept, I did not contact Sami, afraid what I would discover as Israel invaded Gaza City with thousands of troops, and people began fleeing the city in numbers. I noticed Sami was on WhatsApp every hour or so. So he is still alive, and now may stay to die in Gaza City.
Tomorrow our King entertains the only man in the world who can stop this, save Sami, save Gaza, stop Israel annexing the rest of Palestine. They will celebrate our special relationship at a Royal Banquet. Apparently this is in Britain’s interest. I find this repulsive, immoral. None of this is happening in my name – but such outbursts show what a poor politician or hopeless diplomat I would be.
Is journalism better? What use is all the journalism in the world if government-imposed famine and genocide continue while we sit down to dinner?