Bisan Atef Owda, a Palestinian journalist, has just won the Emmy for Outstanding Hard News Feature: Short Form for her ongoing project “It’s Bisan from Gaza and I’m Still Alive.”
This comes after a campaign to get her nomination at the 2024 News and Documentary Emmy Awards rescinded was rejected by the Television Academy.
The project documents Owda’s daily life in Gaza amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. She previously won a Peabody Award for this project earlier this year.
At the News & Documentary Emmys, Owda was nominated alongside media outlet AJ+. However, her nomination drew outrage from the Jewish nonprofit Creative Community for Peace, which accused her of being a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a United States-designated terrorist organization.
CCFP cited speeches she purportedly gave at PFLP rallies and events she hosted to honor Palestinians injured or killed in violent confrontations with Israeli soldiers. The PFLP also referred to her as a member of the Progressive Youth Union of the organization in 2018.
The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences stated that it wouldn’t rescind her nomination, noting that all documented ties between her and PFLP occurred “between six and nine years ago,” when Owda was still a teenager.
The Academy added that it was “unable to corroborate” reports of other ties and that it wasn’t able “to date, to surface any evidence of more contemporary or active involvement by Owda with the PFLP organization.”
Notably, Owda is an activist and filmmaker known through Instagram (4.7 million followers) and TikTok (191,500 followers), where she documents her experience during the ongoing Israel-Hamas War in Gaza.
Other winners from the News category ceremony included ABC and CNN, both with multiple wins, among others.
