JANNA JIHAD, PALESTINE

 

JANNA JIHAD, PALESTINE

Janna Jihad is a teenage girl who has grown up in the Palestinian village of Nabi Salih, located north of Ramallah city in the West Bank. It is part of Palestinian territory that has been under Israel’s military occupation since 1967.

Janna, and Palestinian children like her, are denied their rights and face discrimination on a daily basis. The Israeli army regularly arrests children from Janna’s village, often during raids on their homes in the middle of the night while families are asleep. Children struggle to access their rights to education and freedom of movement because of barriers and checkpoints which force delays on any journey. It can take hours to get to school instead of a few minutes. People find it hard to travel for work and to earn a living to support their families. For anyone who is sick, it can be nearly impossible to get to a hospital.

In 2009, when Janna was three, her community used their right to peaceful protest and began weekly demonstrations. But they were met with violence. When she was seven, Janna’s uncle and her friend were killed by the Israeli military. Janna used her mother’s phone to record what was happening and reveal the truth. By the time she was a teenager, her live videos were being watched by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. In 2018, Janna became the youngest press card-carrying journalist in the world, at the age of 12. Yet she has faced many threats for her work.I started journalism at the age of seven because I wanted the whole world to know what is happening here and how we live in fear and uncertainty. I want a normal life, a normal childhood.

Janna Jihad