Honestly, I should never have ended up as a foreign correspondent.

It might surprise you to learn I struggled in my final years of high school and only just scraped through my Higher School Certificate, almost failing Year 12 English.

My English teacher would be shocked that I became a journalist — let alone write a book!

Know the news with the 7NEWS app: Download today

News Cowboys was both a labour of love and a challenge.

Writing short TV news scripts is a far different skill — relying on the facts of the stories but repressing the emotions felt while covering it.

Journalists are told to push our feelings down deep.

I was taught early that this is not a profession for cry-babies.

As a foreign correspondent even more so.

You move from one story to the next quickly.

From covering disasters, massacres, political stories, Hollywood red carpets and back to tragedies.

There was no time to reflect.

News Cowboys forced me to do a lot of that.

Being a correspondent is also like playing a game of Survivor for journalists.

You’re far away from the safety of the mothership.

In a different time-zone from your colleagues back home in the newsroom.

You not only have to cover the unfolding story but also survive.

Find accommodation, fuel, food and even the basics like power to charge batteries in places where they’re short supply.

Then there’s the logistical challenge of feeding your story back home.

News Cowboys is dedicated to my son Addison.

An explanation of why Dad wasn’t around as much as I could have been when he was very young.

It was often hard returning home from major disasters to doing dad stuff.

From seeing dead bodies to jumping on the trampoline or going to soccer practice.

It was a hard reset.

My beautiful wife Tracy often had to piece me back together.

Wrapping myself up in my family was my therapy.

I’m sure there were times when I was grumpy or distant.

News Cowboys was the tongue in cheek nickname the crew of our Seven’s United States bureau gave ourselves.

We were sometimes reckless with our own safety, but never the truth.

Flying off at a moment’s notice to cover events all over the world — many of them the worst scenarios history could imagine.

We were just News Cowboys ready to ride on to the next hair-raising adventure.

Mike Amor’s News Cowboys is available in all good bookstores.You can catch Chapter 8 — Heartbreak and Anger: Gaza — below.

‘Relax, habibi,’ said Mustafa, using the casual Arabic term of endearment.

‘Relax. This is the same car as Princess Diana drove.’

He was looking directly at me with a big smile on his face, not watching the road ahead.

Trent Miller and I were anything but relaxed. We were hurtling along an Israeli highway at 180 kilometres an hour. Given that Diana died in the same model Mercedes, Mustafa’s logic did nothing to ease our nerves.

It was a reassurance we would hear repeatedly when we complained about his driving. Which was often. Incredible bloke, lousy driver.

Trent and I landed in Jerusalem just after Christmas, 2008, as Israel launched a barrage of airstrikes on the Gaza Strip.

A fragile ceasefire between Israel and the Hamas-controlled Palestinian enclave had broken down that November after Israeli paratroopers conducted a raid to destroy a tunnel it claimed was being built to conduct raids.

Several Hamas fighters were killed. Hamas responded with a barrage of mortars and locally made Katyusha and Qassam rockets. Israel hit back with airstrikes.

After months of deadly tit-for-tat attacks, punctuated by unsuccessful calls for ceasefires, on Christmas Day Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had had enough and issued a final warning telling Hamas to stop firing rockets.

Within hours the militants delivered their response: six more rockets landed in Southern Israel.

On 27 December the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched Operation Cast Lead, which initially relied on air assaults to target weapons caches, police stations and Hamas infrastructure.

So as Trent and I arrived, the cycle of violence had begun again, leaving the world bracing for a full-scale ground invasion by Israeli forces. As usual, civilians on both sides were paying the price.

The biggest challenge on any international story is always finding a good fixer, normally a local journalist, who speaks the language and, most importantly, has contacts. After spending the first night in a Tel Aviv hotel, we met our fixer, who had been assigned by Sydney.

Billy, who came from America’s Deep South, was a large man dressed like a hillbilly in denim overalls and a straw hat. He could easily have been an extra from Deliverance.

He was driving a Suzuki Mighty Boy, the smallest truck I had ever seen. It was barely big enough for him, let alone the two of us and our equipment. We could see the hotel staff grinning as all three of us crammed into the tiny vehicle, with our gear in the back. Billy was clearly a kind man, but he and his Mighty Boy were not going to work for us.

Enter Mustafa.

A colleague who had been to Israel gave us his number. Mustafa was a Palestinian, a father in his early forties, who always wore aviator sunglasses and a black leather jacket.

He was an impressive, confident-looking man with a quick wit. As a devout Muslim, he was a passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause and didn’t hide his disdain for what he perceived as Israel’s subjugation of his people and religion. We quickly became friends.

Mustafa may have been a limousine driver, not a journalist, but he had wonderful local knowledge and connections.

Speeding to the Gaza border for the first time, we could see the Qassam rockets fired by Hamas. (This was before Israel introduced its Iron Dome anti-missile system that would later shoot down many Palestinian rockets.) It was difficult to tell in which direction the rockets were heading. You would see the missile’s smoke trails followed quickly by the warnings over speakers to take shelter.

Motorists on highways would stop and leap from their cars to lie down in roadside ditches. For Israelis, it wasn’t uncommon. For Trent and me, it was terrifying.

The outgoing fire from Gaza would typically be followed by incoming missiles from the Israeli military, targeting Palestinian rocket-launching units.

At a service station on a hill overlooking the Gaza Strip, we sat down for breakfast, surrounded by resting Israeli soldiers.

The windows would vibrate and buckle as Israeli warplanes and attack helicopters carried out bombing runs, large plumes of smoke marking their targets.

A Hamas rocket launch would be answered by an Israeli explosion big enough to level a multi-storey building.

It was a mismatch of weaponry: homemade missiles up against the most advanced and deadliest armaments available.

Occasionally you could see American-made reconnaissance drones moving slowly above Gaza, trying to pinpoint targets.

It was difficult to get past the fact that we were eating while watching others, many of them starving, die.

Israel had stopped all media from entering Gaza, but a steady stream of images revealed the dreadful toll and the horror of what was happening was hard to escape. There were reports that the IDF had bombed three United Nations schools where hundreds of families had sought refuge, killing 48 people.

Fathers could be seen running with dead or dying children in their arms.

‘Nowhere is safe. People had come fleeing the conflict hoping for safety. Now they’re dead,’ said John Ging, the director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza. The United Nations said the schools were clearly marked and their coordinates provided to Israel, but the IDF maintained it was returning fire after Hamas militants shot at its soldiers from the school grounds.

‘They have deliberately used civilian institutions to conduct their terrorist war against Israel,’ claimed Australian-born Israel government spokesman, Mark Regev.

‘We carefully vet anyone seeking shelter in our locations,’ said Ging.

I couldn’t help but ponder whether those were the explosions we saw while eating breakfast.

The horror of the Israeli bombing kept coming.

A family of 12, including seven children, were killed when their house was shelled.

‘They’re destroying the normal people; they’re killing the normal people. They don’t kill the people who they are fighting,’ said a grieving relative.

It was impossible to verify the stories. It was as much a battle for the truth as it was for control. The IDF released video of an airstrike that killed a dozen men loading canisters — they said they were rockets — onto a truck. The following day they were forced to issue a denial: the men were workers taking oxygen canisters to a hospital.

Instead of spending New Year’s Eve with family and friends, Trent and I found ourselves in a country at war. It was eerily quiet. There were no parties because the Jewish New Year is celebrated at Rosh Hashanah in October. We counted down the last minutes of 2008 sitting in a bar, listening to music on Trent’s phone and occasionally striking up a conversation with others.

Despite being with one of my greatest mates, the feeling of loneliness was overwhelming.

My wife was at home alone, caring for our 15-month-old son. Amid the bombs and conflict, I missed his innocent smiles and daily milestones even more. He had only just started walking in the days before I left. How much more had I deprived myself of?

As exciting as a correspondent’s job could be, at moments like these you were left to wonder whether it was worth the sacrifice.

As Operation Cast Lead rolled into 2009, Israel called up 6000 conscripts ready to launch a ground war.

‘Hamas, we’re coming to destroy you,’ chanted young Israeli soldiers. We could see the heavy weapons, tanks, armoured personnel carriers and bulldozers massing on the border. There was a feeling of dread in the air.

‘These are the Israeli tanks that would spearhead any ground invasion,’ I said to camera, as I stood in front of them.

‘Just over that hill is Gaza. It would take only minutes to get there, but that would be the easy part. Once inside they would face heavy resistance.’

Just hours later, under the cover of darkness, Israel launched a ground assault after eight days of airstrikes. Troops poured across the border with the support of attack helicopters and with flares lighting their way. But Hamas was ready, promising to turn Gaza into a cemetery for Israeli soldiers. Dozens of fighters were killed in the initial street-to-street battles. There

were claims of Israeli casualties.

Trent and I found a hill for a live cross to the 6 p.m. bulletin

back home. Suddenly, just minutes from us going to air, a

mortar struck a ridge a few hundred metres away. It not only

unnerved Trent and me, but also startled the master control in

Sydney, who was setting up for the cross.

‘What was that noise?’ Gavin Plunkett asked over the phone.

‘It was a mortar hitting that hill,’ I said, as Trent panned to the rising smoke.

The satellite trucks and lights of TV crews from across the world who had set up on the hillside must have made a tempting target for Hamas mortar and rocket crews. Strangely, despite the proximity of the explosion and the very real possibility of more, there was no panic. No one decided to move. We all just went on reporting. It’s one of the risks of being in a conflict zone: something that would appear dangerous in other circumstances suddenly seems less so.

By the second day of the invasion, Israeli tanks had reached the city of Khan Younis. Again we could see the fierce battle from a distance. Israel was forced to defend more reports of civilian casualties, including a 12-year-old Palestinian boy killed by an Israeli rocket or tank shell while playing on a rooftop.

‘I can’t believe that,’ his father said of his son’s death. ‘We forbid our children to go to the streets because it’s not safe to go there, so we ask them to stay here in the home.’

But Israeli civilians were also suffering. Five Israelis were injured when 45 Hamas rockets were fired over the border. In one home we visited in the city of Sderot, less than a kilometre from the border with Gaza, the ceiling had collapsed, leaving debris strewn across the living room. Its residents were alive but shaken.

‘I couldn’t even move,’ Sailit, a woman in her twenties, told me, still clearly terrified. ‘I was just so panicked I couldn’t really move. I held my nephew.’

Sailit had hoped Israel’s ground invasion would stop the rockets from falling but soon learnt that Hamas wouldn’t give up that easily.

‘It’s a long process that we have to, I’m sorry . . .’

She flinched as more explosions could be heard nearby.

‘I know it’s a long process in order to get a better life here in Sderot [but] I just want it all to be over.’

A city of just 30,000 residents, Sderot had become one of Hamas’s main targets.

In the years leading up to 2008, more than a dozen locals had been killed and dozens more wounded by an average of four rocket and mortars a day. By the time we arrived, the attacks had increased to 60 a week.

Because of Sderot’s proximity to Gaza, locals had only seven to 15 seconds to find shelter. The population was heavily traumatised. Many wanted, but could not afford, to leave. Steel canopies had been built over playgrounds in the hope of giving children some protection from incoming mortar or rocket fire.

Because Trent and I wanted to experience what it was like for Sderot residents to live under the constant threat of attack, we decided to sit with our camera in the middle of the town, just metres away from one of the many public bomb shelters, and wait for a missile attack. We waited. And waited. Several hours passed but there were no rockets. For us it was a good news, bad news situation.

Conscious that we didn’t want to be left empty-handed for that night’s news, Trent and I decided to give up and began walking back to Mustafa, who had parked nearby. We were loading our gear when an announcement burst from the speakers that lined Sderot’s streets. The message was in Hebrew but the meaning was obvious. We were under attack.

Trent and I grabbed the camera and ran for the public bomb shelter. Breathless, Trent filmed as we scrambled inside, packed in with other panicked residents. The thud of an explosion rang out before we could make it to safety. Some of those sheltering with us whimpered at the sound of another loud bang. They had been through this many times. You could see it on their faces, the mixture of terror and resignation.

The bunker was rudimentary and hardly seemed bombproof.

Built above ground, with cement-brick walls and a reinforced concrete roof, it would provide only limited protection from a direct hit. But it gave at least some chance of survival.

In hindsight, it was a totally reckless thing to do: exposing ourselves to the risk of a rocket attack. It was a classic example of thinking of the journalistic upside while not considering the real danger of the downside. I can honestly say, not for the first time in this book, that even as a father, selfishly my mortality never entered my head.

We returned to our car, desperate to find out where the rockets had landed. We found Mustafa in the front seat. He told us that he had been waiting for us to finish putting the equipment away, when he realised the warning had sent us scurrying, leaving him there alone. By this time, it was too late for him to join us in a rush for cover.

‘I just sat there praying. I kept telling the rockets that I was one of the good guys, that I was on their side,’ Mustafa said with a chuckle. We beat the local fire brigade to the aftermath of the rocket attack — just one of 30 fired at the community that day. Thankfully it had exploded in a front yard, causing some damage to part of a home and a fence but no casualties.

Not far from the attack, we found fresh Israeli forces marshalling on the Gaza border. The soldiers tried to stop us from filming their columns, physically pushing us away. They, too, would soon join the street-to-street battle against Hamas.

Unlike the troops excitedly chanting before the ground invasion began, these young conscripts had heard tales of what lay ahead.

No one was in more demand than the Israeli bomb squad.

As dozens of rockets rained down on local communities, a lot of ordnance was left unexploded and required disposal, a delicate and dangerous task. We rode along with squad members for a day. They drove us past the checkpoints where media had been stopped along the border with Gaza. Army Humvees were the only other traffic on the dirt roads.

‘We are now just on the outskirts of the Gaza Strip,’ Inspector Micky Rosenfeld, the Israel Police national spokesman to the foreign media, told us.

You could see the Palestinian villages just a few hundred metres across what looked like unused farmland.

A small concrete wall, of the type used in roadworks, provided our only protection as we stopped to film.

‘It’s very dangerous if we’re spotted,’ Rosenfeld warned. ‘We can be in target range of rockets that can be fired or mortars that can land on us.’

As he gave me a pair of binoculars to take a look, his handheld radio crackled with a message in Hebrew. Rosenfeld’s facial expression and mood suddenly changed.

‘We have to get back into the vehicle,’ he said urgently. Trent and I needed no convincing. Back in the relative safety of the bulletproof truck, racing away from the border, it was soon clear that, just as Rosenfeld had said might happen, we had indeed been targeted by a Hamas mortar team. A plume of smoke marked an explosion from a mortar landing not far from where we had stood moments earlier.

But Hamas would soon find their target. The bomb squad responded to a direct hit on an apartment building in Ashkelon, about 15 kilometres north of the Gaza border. A car was left pockmarked with shrapnel. Locals gathered around in despair, though this time they had been lucky and no one had been seriously injured. Hamas rockets and mortars were packed with small ball bearings.

‘It’s designed to cause a lot of damage,’ Rosenfeld said. ‘Anyone within a 30-metre radius will be killed with those small ball bearings that fly like bullets through the air.’

Every Israeli civilian casualty would be matched ten-fold by the losses of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

Because we had been banned from entering Gaza, it was incredibly difficult to report on what was happening in the strip. We were, though, determined to report fairly on the claims from both sides of the conflict.

There would be worldwide condemnation over four Palestinian orphans who had to be rushed to hospital, starving, too weak to stand after they had been left for days next to the corpses of their mothers.

‘Mama, where did you go?’ cried a little boy with a broken arm in a steel brace, from his hospital bed. The Red Cross said it could not reach the children because Israeli soldiers had blockaded the neighbourhood. According to Katharina Ritz from the International Red Cross,

‘There was no food given. No medical treatment given. The soldiers were nearby.’

As the conflict dragged on, we tried to capture both the mood of Israel – a country at war again – and what the war meant for the Palestinians who also called this land home. Tension was building on the West Bank and along the border with Lebanon.

We travelled to a nursing home in Israel’s north that been hit by one of three Katyusha rockets fired by Hezbollah in Lebanon. It had pierced the roof. The manager said it was a miracle no one was killed.

‘We want to live in peace. It could be a wonderful place in the Middle East.’

There were now fears that a new front could break out on the Lebanon border. It had only been two years since Israel and Hezbollah had been locked in a conflict that claimed hundreds of lives.

As we drove back from the Lebanon border, we were once again pleading with Mustafa to slow down. He was again offering his reassurances, when suddenly we rounded a blind curve at well over 100 kilometres an hour to find traffic stopped in a small village ahead. Mustafa was forced to brake suddenly, swerving to narrowly miss one car, angering its occupants.

Whatever was yelled by them at Mustafa in Hebrew was repeated by Trent and me in English.

One frightening moment was soon to be followed by another. Israel had banned Palestinian men under the age of 50 from taking part in Friday prayer at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

We knew there was going to be trouble.

The Temple Mount is considered one of the holiest places in Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

The mosque, built on a hill in the Old City, is the second oldest in Islam. Up to 400,000 worshippers can pray in its courtyard.

It is also where the First and Second Jewish Temples are believed to have once stood.

Running below the Temple Mount is the Western Wall, all that remains of the temples, destroyed by the Babylonians and the Romans, respectively, and sacred to Jews. It is also known as the Wailing Wall because Jews pray there to mourn the destruction of the temples.

It was feared Muslims could target Jews praying below, in retaliation for the war in Gaza. In defiance of the ban, men prayed in the streets outside the mosque, kneeling in unison on their prayer mats, reciting verses from the Quran. They were expressing deep devotion to their faith but you could also feel their anger slowly reaching boiling point. Israeli riot police dressed in battle gear stood nearby, clearly anticipating trouble.

A group of young men and teenagers suddenly gathered, taunting and swearing at the police.

Trent and I noticed other local media scurrying to their cars, pulling out and putting on helmets. We soon found out why.

Rocks began to rain down on the police, who were dressed in heavy protection, and we were caught in the middle of a fullblown

rock fight. The young Palestinians would break up pieces of the road and hurl them towards the police in an attempt to push them back. Under normal circumstances, you would be impressed by their throwing ability.

Under a hail of rocks, Mustafa bravely made a dash to his precious Mercedes, quickly moving to save it from damage. The rock throwers would advance, only to be repelled by the heavily armed police, who used shields to protect themselves.

At one stage, the officers thought they had won and the protesters had disappeared. Everyone began to relax. Some of the police even removed their helmets. There was chuckling at the sight of two clearly unprepared foreign journalists.

Suddenly there was a thud. Then another. Rocks were landing near us, this time from a different direction. The young protesters had outsmarted the police by circling around in an ambush. They ran out of a side street, closer than before, pummelling us with road fragments that could easily have cracked our unprotected skulls. It never occurred to us to put on helmets.

This remains one of my most dangerous encounters.

The rock throwers quickly vanished again, but the anger they carried on their faces wouldn’t disappear so easily.

The next day we drove across Israeli checkpoints, and past Bedouin camps, into the West Bank and its capital, Ramallah.

We had been warned it could be dangerous for Western media, but Mustafa had convinced us that we would be safe with him. We entered a bustling city, like Gaza virtually cut off from the rest of the world by an eight-metre-high wall that ran for 700 kilometres.

Because of the fear of suicide bombers, the movement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian workers to and from Israel had been heavily restricted, sending unemployment and resentment in the West Bank skyrocketing.

Added to that outrage, residents had watched in horror the suffering of their fellow Palestinians in Gaza. As local schoolteacher Ramadan Shekawi told us, ‘It’s a catastrophe because it’s not part of another country, it’s part of Palestine. So the people there are

our people.’

He shared the common Palestinian view that Israel was an occupying force.

‘There are 550 checkpoints within that are stopping us from going from one Palestinian city to another Palestinian city.’

As we left, we stopped to do a piece to camera in front of the enormous border wall separating the West Bank from Israel.

There we were surrounded by young children. Seemingly just inquisitive, they quickly became aggressive, grabbing at our equipment and trying to snatch anything they could out of our pockets. As grown men, it was hard to know how to fight them off. I was afraid that one of them could have a knife.

Thankfully Mustafa hurried from the car and yelled some stern words in Arabic that sent them fleeing. It was yet another example of how danger can present itself at the most innocuous of moments.

To get back to our hotel in Jerusalem, we had to return through one of those many checkpoints that Ramadan Shekawi had mentioned. There was a long line of cars waiting to get through, but Mustafa was having none of that and decided to drive along a median strip and push his Mercedes into the line just before the checkpoint.

This, naturally, angered other motorists and caused alarm among the already nervous young Israeli soldiers, concerned that our car could be a suicide bomber speeding towards them. They approached us with machine guns drawn, yelling at Mustafa who, rather than easing the situation, proceeded to yell back.

It was an argument that was in danger of spiralling out of control.

From the back seat I told Mustafa to shut up and wound down the window to apologise to the officers, showing them our Australian passports and explaining that we were journalists. They waved us through.

Mustafa smiled, as if he had won.

As the war in Gaza dragged on, and Australia’s appetite for coverage waned, Trent and I would file our story in the morning and spend a few hours exploring the region in the afternoon.

In Bethlehem we visited the Church of the Nativity and the grotto that Christians believe was the birthplace of Jesus. There were tourists there but not the crowds you would expect for such a holy site. A local restaurant owner complained of the border wall that cut his neighbourhood in two. Friends and family who lived only a few streets away suddenly were cut off. A visit that previously took just a minutes could now take hours as it required passing through checkpoints. The wall also restricted the flow of visitors to the ancient city.

When we drove through Jericho to the Dead Sea we saw children throwing rocks at an Israeli armoured vehicle. Trent jumped out of the car to film the stand-off, only to find himself between the opposing sides. Even in the most revered places, it was difficult to escape the conflict.

Trent and I would spend three weeks covering the war, which ended in a ceasefire on 18 January. The United Nations estimated that 1400 Palestinians were killed in the war, almost a thousand of them civilians. Three Israeli civilians were killed by rocket attacks and 10 soldiers died in the war, four of them killed by friendly fire.

Heartbreak and anger. Those have been the overwhelming feelings watching the unfolding violence between Palestine and Israel since 7 October 2023. Not only had little changed but the situation had worsened, fuelled by continued unbridled hatred.

The attack on Israel and the subsequent retribution were far greater than anything Trent and I had witnessed in 2008.

The thousands of lives lost over Christmas and New Year back then did little to prevent the heavy toll of killings that would be inflicted more than a decade later.

There seems to be no end.

No solution.

Those who continue to pay the most terrible price are caught in the middle: average Israelis and Palestinians who ultimately just want what we all want, for their loved ones to live a peaceful life. I saw their anguish and grief back then and can only imagine the horror they have since endured.

An independent Palestinian state — surely the only long-term answer — still seems like a fanciful concept, buried alongside the victims of the violence.

To be clear, the 2023 Hamas attack was barbaric.

These weren’t freedom fighters; they were bloodthirsty terrorists, cowards who killed and kidnapped, even raping their victims, before retreating to hide among their innocent fellow citizens, men, women and children.

Many of the atrocities committed were in the same border towns Trent and I had visited.

Israel had every right to hunt down and kill those responsible, including the Hamas leadership, and liberate the hostages. But, as we witnessed first hand, the Israeli response was again heavy-handed and indiscriminate: killing tens of thousands of civilians and destroying entire towns.

Sadly, politics prevented some plain talking – conservatives backing Israel unconditionally and labelling any criticism as antisemitic; liberals, particularly the young, defending, even justifying, the Hamas attackers as freedom fighters.

Many of the loudest voices couldn’t find Gaza on a map.

They refuse to concede that there are major faults on both sides. Neither is willing to buckle to the other.

Trent and I left the region feeling torn. The history of the conflict is hard to truly grasp. We had great empathy for the Palestinians, who were effectively imprisoned on their own land, both in Gaza and the West Bank, cut off from the rest of the world. Young people with little hope were growing up resentful.

The more destruction and isolation inflicted on them, the more their lust for retribution grew. But those who are entrusted with their faith are all too willing to sacrifice them. Hamas sees no peace with Israel, only annihilation. Likewise, we saw how Israelis across the border lived in fear of rockets destroying their homes and killing their families. And so it goes on.