Black Saturday An Unfiltered Account of the October 7th Attack on Israel and the War in Gaza

Black Saturday, an unfiltered account of the October 7th attack on Israel and the war in Gaza was released yesterday.

The October 7th massacre was the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. That is an objective fact.

The Israeli response against Gaza has led to the highest death toll among Palestinian civilians in the history of their people. These are two facts that are true at the same time.

I mean we watched this story unfold in real time and that's why it was important for me to write this book because I wanted people to know not only what we saw but what people experienced.

The focus of the book is on the people directly affected by this conflict and by this attack.

I think anyone doing anything else is doing a disservice to the journalism community because our role as journalists is not to take a side it is to shine light in dark places hold those in power accountable even if it's Hamas even if it's the Israeli military and continue to tell these stories in a way that makes people care.

Absolutely and the reality is that this story is emotional you know there are a lot of politics involved in this story there's a lot of history involved in this story and people are sensitive to the realities on the ground and so it's challenging to navigate but that's part of covering what we cover and that was part of my role in writing Black Saturday to make sure that we were highlighting the many different positions and the many different people that exist on a spectrum throughout this region.

Yeah I mean it was scary to be there in the middle of these firefights and as the war was developing understanding the capabilities of Hamas I mean they have the ability to ambush forces they did they killed many Israeli soldiers that way targeting them with IEDs or anti-tank guided missiles at the beginning and RPGs and so these are all real threats that you face inside and you can be in an armored vehicle or you can be in a jeep but the threat is real and it's there and we have to sort of navigate that as we gather the story not just in Gaza but now in Lebanon.