The video that made Plestia Alaqad go viral was simple yet traumatic. Early in Israel’s assault on Gaza, she was filming in a neighbour’s flat in Gaza City, showing how they had removed the glass from the windows and were sheltering in the interior.

But as she filmed, a series of strikes hit close to the building, filling the air outside with dust. Alaqad did not flinch but her face became an open-mouthed mask of shock.

“I was trying to explain things, but I think you can hear them now,” she said. The video has been liked more than 200,000 times.

Looking back at the video from an uncomfortable exile in Australia, Alaqad, 22, was as surprised as any viewer about her lack of reaction in that moment.

“I understand why the video went viral, why people ask how I can be calm in a situation like that, whether I’m used to these things, or traumatised. People wonder, because I wonder too,” she said, speaking over Zoom.

Alaqad’s journey from using Instagram to teach outsiders about daily life in Gaza to war reporter happened fast. Before the war she worked for a marketing agency and conducted media training, using Instagram to photograph everyday life in the territory, posting rows of colourful parasols at the beach or sharing selfies with her friends. The goal, she says, was to teach her followers that there was more to Gaza than conflict and destruction.

After Hamas launched an unprecedented raid on Israeli towns and kibbutzim on 7 October, killing 1,200 people and taking hundreds hostage, Alaqad began getting calls to work as a reporter for British and French televisions channels, and her Instagram transformed into a personal account of the war.

Her feed rapidly filled with pictures of destroyed neighbourhoods and strangers sharing their food amid shortages. Alaqad recalls standing in a tent filled with corpses, or walking among the rubble trying to remember the buildings that once stood there.

No international journalists have so far been allowed into Gaza unless they embed with the Israeli military, and with Palestinian correspondents for large outlets often overwhelmed with breaking news, social media has often stepped in to fill the gap.

On the ground in Gaza, a small group of younger reporters have brought the war to the outside world, sharing their most intimate moments of loss and struggle with an audience of millions.

Bisan Owda, a 25-year-old film-maker who covered the attacks on al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, has 3.1 million Instagram followers on her English-language channel, while the 24-year-old photographer Motaz Azaiza, renowned for his eerie drone shots showing destroyed landscapes, has 15.8 million.

Alaqad’s follower count grew from 4,000 before the war to 4.2 million, and as it did so, she opened every message and email she received from viewers so that she could respond to their questions.

“Instagram is a personal diary for me to connect with people, to show them what’s happening, showing them Plestia the human, not only Plestia the journalist. That’s my job,” she said.

Her personal touch found a niche that television news failed to capture, giving an intimate view of day-to-day life inside the enclave where more 1.8 million people have been displaced and entire neighbourhoods destroyed. The death toll in Gaza has surpassed 18,200 people, and almost no family has been untouched by loss.

Sixty-three journalists and media workers have been killed in the war since 7 October, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The Al Jazeera bureau chief, Wael al-Dahdouh, lost his wife, son, daughter and grandson in an Israeli airstrike on his home. Moamen Al Sharafi, another reporter for the network, lost 22 family members in a single attack.

Many Palestinian reporters have kept working despite displacement, the deaths of family members and the ever present danger of injury and death.

“For me, it’s important to build a relationship with people, in order for them to be interested and invested in what’s happening,” said Alaqad. “I’m not just a journalist, I’m not just someone covering the news. I’m also living it.”

She often spent hours looking for somewhere to charge her phone or find enough internet coverage to upload her material. These challenges only worsened after the electricity was cut completely and frequent communications blackouts.

“I don’t want people just to see us as news,” she said. “That’s why Instagram in general is important to me. It means building a connection. We’re not just news that you can switch off with the television when you’re done for the day.”

For Alaqad, a turning point was the death of Belal Jadallah, the renowned head of the nonprofit media group the Press House-Palestine, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on his car. Jadallah had been an inspirational figure for a generation of Palestinian reporters, and his death was a heavy blow.

She returned her flak jacket and helmet marked “press” to the Press House, fearful that they could make her a target, but said she “felt naked without them”.

After work, Alaqad would debate whether to sleep in the car or where she had been reporting – or to return to her family, who had also been repeatedly displaced.

“I used to think, ‘What if I get back to my family, and they are targeted or killed because I chose to be a journalist?’” she said. “Then I thought, ‘What if I don’t go back to them and they get targeted, alone?’”

Alaqad said she often considered whether it would be better for them all to die together. She added: “Now that I’m saying what I was thinking out loud, it sounds crazy. How was it normal to think like that?”

After 45 days reporting on the destruction, Alaqad left Gaza amid growing fears for her family, but she was plagued by guilt about being able to leave the territory.

From exile in Melbourne, she has taken to staying up all night, watching events unfolding at home as she scrolls on her phone, trying to keep up with the news.

Owda and Azaiza have recently posted messages to their followers, saying they fear they are unlikely to survive the coming weeks as Israeli forces advance into southern Gaza.

“A couple of days ago, I was the news, I was there covering the news. And now I’m just … refreshing, refreshing each page trying to know anything, trying to see if my friends are alive or dead.”