Gabe Levin ’26 was recently named an Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholar for his reporting on the Israel-Gaza war with the newspaper Haaretz in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Levin, editor in chief of the Cornell Daily Sun and a student in the College of Arts & Sciences, spent the summer of 2024 reporting on stories of the war both in Israel and in the West Bank.
“It was tremendously eye-opening, but also really painful,” Levin said of the experience. “You feel the weight of being there, the human suffering on both sides of the war.”
Levin went with a team of editors to the Nir Oz Kibbutz, which was attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7.
“One quarter of their community was either murdered or taken hostage, so we were talking to people who were just moving back,” he said. “To hear the recollections of people, the stories of them hiding in their houses, it’s heart-wrenching stuff. You can see the bullet holes in the doors.”
He also talked to Israeli soldiers who were refusing to serve in the military and many Palestinian refugees who had tried to use GoFundMe to raise money to escape across the Rafah border. They faced so much red tape and bureaucracy getting their money from the fund-raising site that they weren’t able to leave.
Despite reporting on the war on the ground, Levin said his own sense of safety was overshadowed by the unimaginable hardships faced by the people he wrote about.
“The people we were covering were in situations that were so harrowing—you’re talking to a person who survived an airstrike that hit the house next door,” Levin said.
Levin said he appreciated that the Haaretz newspaper brought together journalists from diverse backgrounds and perspectives.
“You have Jewish and Palestinian writers from Israel working on projects trying to find common ground,” he said. “I was co-reporting with a Palestinian journalist and working with editors from a range of international backgrounds.”
Levin, who’s majoring in Near Eastern studies, said his background knowledge of the area proved vital.
“Being in a classroom with people who disagree with each other and studying complex topics like the history of the modern Middle East, I found a lot of professors who create an environment where you can have respectful dialogues,” Levin said.
Ross Brann, the Milton R. Konvitz Professor of Judeo-Islamic Studies & a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow in the Department of Near Eastern Studies (A&S), said Levin’s honor is well-deserved.
“Gabe Levin’s recognition as an Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholar deservedly identifies him as a student-journalist-scholar par excellence,” Brann said. “Kudos to Gabe for reporting for an Israeli newspaper from Palestinian Bethlehem.”
Levin chose Cornell in part because of the Daily Sun, which is the oldest independent university newspaper in the country. He started as an opinion columnist when he was a first-year student, but found that news coverage was his forte.
“I knew I wanted to be a journalist, but not sure what kind,” he said. “But I also knew that Cornell is a very international place, so if I wanted to understand the world, I knew I should come here.”
Levin is also part of the Milstein Program in Humanity and Technology, which he said has given him “the opportunity to learn about the world through the prism of technology.”
“During the [Milstein] summer in New York City, every day you’re learning new things,” he said. “You build a computer, talk about how AI works and about the thorny ethical questions that come with that. All these things are shaping the world we live in.”
Levin has also worked at the San Diego Union-Tribune as a commentary writer and was an intern at Voice of America.
The Press Club awards are given to students who have demonstrated a passion to become international correspondents. This year, 18 students were chosen for the awards, which include either a $3,000 scholarship or a $4,000 fellowship to be used to fund time in a bureau of a leading news organization. Levin will be honored during an awards ceremony March 5.
