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Air Siren’s Woke Me Up Early On Saturday, October 7th

David De Jong is the Middle East Correspondent for the Dutch Newspaper, FD. He lives in Tel Aviv, Israel, and has been reporting from the ground since the early hours of October 7th.

He’s been non-stop for almost 3 weeks now.

David’s first hand experience over the last 2 and a half weeks, includes the horror of being among the first reporters on the ground at the music festival, to some of the sites hit worst from October 7th through to disinformation and how to think about the media coverage of this conflict so far. 

Follow David De Jong Twitter here…

Here is #154 w/ David De Jong on his first hand reporting throughout Israel since October 7th.

Here is a transcript of the opening exchange from the conversation…

Ryan
Good morning Mr. De Jong.

David
Good morning, Ryan.

Ryan
I just wanted to open up with, you know, how's it been? You've been writing multiple stories, but I think just a good place to start with asking you firsthand experience since October 7th. How's it been?

David
Yeah, it's been surreal. It's been also just working 24-7. I mean, I think I cover the entire Middle East. I don't just cover Israel and Palestine. So, especially with this, so far I hadn't covered any conflict in the region. I generally never covered a conflict before.

I certainly never covered a regional conflict. I mean, the stories I usually do are about, you know, anything from IPOs in the Gulf to economic crises in Lebanon and Turkey, to, you know, covering the judicial reforms in Israel up to now, or, you know, doing stories in the occupied West Bank, or, you know.

of reporting in the Occupy on settler violence, et cetera. I mean, all kinds of stuff. But yeah, I mean, everything changed on October 7th at 7 a.m. when, you know, I was woken by the air raid alarm and, you know, jumped out of bed into the so-called Mahmad, which is a safe room.

in the apartment in Tadaviv. And it became very quickly clear, and there were these reports, and we saw the first videos of kind of armed militias getting into, or, you know, getting into, armed militants getting into Sellerot, which is two kilometers from the border with the Gaza Strip.

And nobody first realised that the skill, I would say, I didn't first realise the skill of what was happening. Because it was really trickling, the information was trickling in, but it was immediately, it was clear. I mean, the text messages I sent to my boss of that morning, you know, in Dutch, they... Let me actually pull them up because it's quite...

You know, it's kind of history in the, you know, it's history in real time, in a way, unfortunately.

Ryan
Mm.

David
You know, who's having the... The air raid alarm is going off. There's been more than 300 rockets fired from Gaza to Israel. And there's also an image of militants that have crossed the border and are shooting at civilians in Sederot. And then there's also apparently a building hit in Tel Aviv. This is going to be very likely war. And...

……. continue the conversation with the podcast here.