Personal Info
- Country of residence: United States
Information
Laila El-Haddad is a Palestinian freelance journalist, writer, blogger, and media activist from Gaza City. She is currently based in the United States. El-Haddad is the author of Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything in Between (Just World Books) and co-author of the book-in-writing The Gaza Kitchen. She is also a contributing author of The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict. El-Haddad writes principally for the al-Jazeera English website and the Guardian.
El-Haddad was born in Kuwait in 1978. She was raised primarily in Saudi Arabia, where her parents worked, and she spent her summers in Gaza. She traveled to the United States to attend Duke University, and then went on to receive her MPP from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where she was awarded the Clinton Scholarship for Palestinian graduate students. She then moved back to Gaza to work as a journalist while her husband Yassine Daoud remained in the US; since he could not come visit her as a Palestinian refugee, she would often travel back to the US to visit. Because of her lack of US citizenship or documentation other than Palestinian travel documents, she was often stopped, and once, she was stranded in Cairo for 55 days with her son. The experience of constantly waiting, whether for documentation or for borders to open, informs her take on the issues that Palestinians face today. In 2006, she moved to the US to be with Yassine, leaving her parents in Gaza, and in 2008, when Israel launched a three-week-long attack on Gaza, she kept in close contact with her parents from across the ocean as they were trapped in Gaza City.
El-Haddad is married with one son, Yousuf, and two daughters, Noor and Malaak.
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