By Amira Hass

Amira Hass was born in Jerusalem in 1957, the daughter of Yugoslavian-Jewish refugees. A journalist for the Hebrew daily Ha'aretz, she covers Gaza and the West Bank. She received the UPI's International Award and the Sokolow Prize, Israel's highest honor for journalists, and received UNESCO's Guillermo Camo World Press Freedom Prize in 2003. Hass is the only Jewish Israeli correspondent on Palestinian affairs to live among the people about whom she reports. She is the author of Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege (Metropolitan/Owl, 2000) and Reporting from Ramallah: An Israeli Journalist in an Occupied Land (Semiotext(e), 2003).