Laila El-Haddadis a Palestinian freelance journalist, author, 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, 2011) and co-author of the forthcoming The Gaza Kitchen (Just World Books, 2012). She is also a contributing author of The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict and a policy advisor with al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. El-Haddad writes principally for the al-Jazeera English website and the Guardian Unlimited.
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From 2003-2007, El-Haddad was the Gaza stringer for the Aljazeera English website and was praised for her extensive behind the scenes coverage of the Gaza disengagement 2005 and Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006.
El-Haddad is also co-director of the award winning film Tunnel Trade, made with Tourist With A Typewriter production company. She has also contributed to the Beit-Sahur based Alternative Tourism Guide's Palestine guidebook.
Since November 2004, she has authored an award winning blog formerly called Raising Yousuf: A Diary of a Mother Under Occupation, and now known as Gaza Mom. The site won the Brass Crescent Award for "best Mideast blog", was nominated as best Mideast blog in the 2007 Bloggies Award, has been selected as Blog of the Day by www.BlogAwards.com, and chosen as a Blog of Note by www.Blogspot.com.
A running theme in El-Haddad's writing is the personalization of the situation of Gazans and Palestinians by writing with humor and introspective humanity about her domestic life and those of other Gazans. By revealing Palestinians neither as terrorists nor as currency in a worldwide market of political opposition to western dominance, but as sympathetic people capable of wit and humor amid violence and the occupation of their territory, she thereby contributes a human voice from Palestine.
She has been published in The Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The New Statesman, Le monde diplomatique, and the Electronic Intifada, among others, and has been a guest on NPR stations, CNN, and the BBC.
El-Haddad was born in Kuwait. She was raised primarily in Saudi Arabia, in the Saudi Aramco compound in Dhahran, while summering in Gaza. Her father, Dr. Moussa El-Haddad is from Gaza City, her mother, Dr. Maii El-Farra, from the town of Khanyounis in southern Gaza. Both are now retired and reside in Gaza City. She was educated in Bahrain and the United States. She earned her B.A. in Political Science and Comparative Areas Studies from Duke University and her Master in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, after being awarded the Clinton Scholarship for Palestinian graduate students.[1]
El-Haddad carries Gaza residency (hawia) and a Palestinian Authority travel document. She is married and has one son, Yousuf, and one daughter, Noor.