Trey Yingst Reflects on Covering War, From Horrors of Oct. 7 to ‘Hell on Earth’ in Gaza

Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst is out today with his first book: Black Saturday: An Unfiltered Account of the October 7th Attack on Israel and the War in Gaza. The book is a first hand account of his coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. In an excerpt, Yingst recalls the days after Oct. 7, when he covered the aftermath of the attack in Sderot and the subsequent response from Israel that brought “hell on earth” to Gaza.

* * *

We were live on TV when I saw the first body being pulled from the rubble.

Remember what you’re talking about, I reminded myself. These are human beings. That is somebody’s father, somebody’s brother. A friend or a coworker.

It was a dark and hazy night. I was exhausted, but the constant waves of rockets and mortars kept me going. We stayed live as the covered corpses were pulled from the rubble and loaded in body bags onto a pickup. I had to make many decisions in real time. How graphic can these images be? How do I explain what we are seeing yet not numb the viewer so that they turn off the TV? This was the reality of war.

Maybe it was the bodies being piled in a pickup truck behind me, or the realization of what we were witnessing, or losing track of how many times we’d come under rocket and mortar fire that day. For the first time since the war began, I cracked.

Only for a moment. My voice shaking, as I spoke live on TV, I had to pause to say, “Sorry. It’s difficult.” A rare time when I broke the fourth wall of my reporting. I was overwhelmed. As I held back tears, I recalled an Israeli media report on family members bringing strands of hair to authorities to help identify the bodies of their children—I’m still not sure why that came back to me after all the horrific things we saw firsthand. I was tired. I was trying to balance all the editorial decisions I needed to make.

I thought back to a conversation I had over the phone while in Ukraine with a mentor and boss of mine, Kim Rosenberg. She said to always think about the tone you use when talking about the dead. A brilliant producer, now an executive, she knew that field correspondents could easily become numb to the atrocities they saw.

And on that day, I did feel mostly numb. That pickup truck was stacked high with bodies. Only the feet were hanging out of the body bags.

“Everyone down, flat, cover your head!”

An even heavier rocket barrage was coming in while we were live on-air. Rockets whizzed close to the ground overhead. We felt explosions as some of the rockets hit the ground nearby. Israel Police spokesman Dean Elsdunne, meanwhile, had left Sderot. After watching bodies being pulled out of the police station, he’d decided to visit his friend Akiva in Maglan, in a military unit at Kibbutz Sa’ad that included a soldier named Daniel. Later, Dean told me that the whole roadway to Sa’ad was infested with gunmen. “Like, they didn’t even want to set up checkpoints there,” he said, “because they didn’t want the checkpoints to get ambushed by the terrorists that were inside of the bushes.”

The danger of that situation was soon made dramatically clear when, using a drone, the unit spotted a militant, and as Dean’s friend’s and Daniel’s team headed out in a convoy of Humvees, Dean said goodbye to the guys and went in the other direction.

The second Humvee in the convoy had an issue with a tire and had to pull over. Minutes later, gunmen ambushed the team, killing Daniel.

* * *

By now, everyone on my team was exhausted. Reporting live, I dived for cover so many times that my forearms and elbows were covered in scrapes and bruises. The chyron on the screen read:

FOX CREW TAKES COVER AS EXPLOSIONS ROCK ISRAEL

I was also making sure to gather updates from Gaza so I could report on the situation there. There are two sides to every story, and this was no different. The Israeli response was already starting to kill many terrified Gazan civilians.

“This is truly a nightmare, and the people inside Gaza are experiencing hell on earth,” I reported. Everyone was living in hell. We’d need to be cool and collected amid the flames.

Late that night, back at the hotel, with the confirmed Israeli death toll now above 900 people, I lay for a moment in bed and tried to figure out what our schedule should look like in the coming days. The burnout was so bad that earlier in the day, my producer Yonat and I had gotten in a fight about logistics. When we were talking with IDF spokesman Doron Spielman next to the dead militant, I asked her to call New York about one of our live shots. She didn’t do it because she was working on something else. I said that if she didn’t want to be here, she could work from home. She snapped back.

Later, we apologized to each other. We hadn’t slept. Everyone was stressed. Fights happen when a team is operating in these conditions.

It’s important to be able to make up and move forward. We had to continue—momentum takes cooperation.

As I closed my eyes for a moment, the sounds of rocket alerts and explosions banged in my head. This is a common occurrence, a weird sensation, a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), where you actually hear and see—not imagine, but hear, full volume, and see, in full color—the things you’ve heard and seen earlier. Sometimes there’s an in-your-face trigger, bringing on a hallucination. Sometimes it’s just a repetition of the day.

I’ve had to learn how to handle that and the other mental health stresses endemic to war reporting. For me the problems started in Ukraine, where I’d arrived before the Russian invasion, a twenty-eight-year-old thrilled to have another opportunity to lead Fox’s foreign coverage. I was also eager to work again with the cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski; we’d done extensive reporting together in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Qatar. Hours after I landed, we were on the road to Kherson and the border of Crimea, diving right into the story, as Ukraine braced for an anticipated Russian attack. Soon we would be under artillery fire from the Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, running for cover live on Fox News.

When the Russian invasion actually began, we reported from Kyiv, heading each day to the outskirts of the population center. We’d been warned that the city might fall into the hands of the Russians in a matter of days. That didn’t matter. We were witnessing history firsthand and showing the world the realities of war.

That all changed when Pierre was killed, alongside our local Ukrainian producer, Oleksandra “Sasha” Kuvshynova; my Fox colleague Benjamin Hall was gravely injured in the same attack. After Pierre’s funeral, I went home to America. But I just sat there, itching to go back to the war zone, so days later I was back in Ukraine, reporting from the mass graves in Bucha and attending Sasha’s funeral.

After more than 180 days in Ukraine, I was burned out and suffering. Some days I would wake up depressed, feeling that the work we do is irrelevant: I could show the world the atrocities of war—but would the world ever stop committing atrocities? Was it even worth it, especially given the risk of such work?

Other nights, I’d wake up in a cold sweat, panting, after a nightmare: a Ukrainian battlefield transported to my yard in Pennsylvania, Russian troops hiding in the tree line. The nightmares became so common that I dreaded going to bed.

I’ve been told that I’m seen as a tough, manly, stoic reporter who runs toward battle with no fear. I like to think that some of that is true—but the realities of this job are much more somber. Viewers, followers, and notoriety are irrelevant when you wake up panicked from a dream where you’re being tortured and thrown into a mass grave, or where your childhood home is under attack and you have nowhere to hide.

I’ve seen so many of the great war correspondents ruin their lives with drugs and alcohol. I have empathy for them. I’ve also determined not to fall down that rabbit hole.

Instead, I’ve turned to a healthy diet, consistent exercise, and meditation, or simply doing breathing exercises I’ve learned from YouTube. I like to meditate near the beach. Something about the Mediterranean Sea reminds me of the mind: sometimes it’s rough, but eventually it turns placid again. Cold exposure is a more recent addition: a plunge into literally near-freezing water, then training the mind to stay in there, to become comfortable in discomfort. After an ice bath near my apartment in Tel Aviv, I would sometimes walk home, have a double espresso, and watch motivational videos.

Tonight, though, I couldn’t sleep.

For the first time since the massacre on Saturday, I scrolled through reporting on our work to see what kind of coverage we were getting. In an opinion piece in Poynter, a well-respected journalism publication: As a significant moment unfolds in Israel, the media reaches deep. I received a shout-out from the author for “superb work.” When you’re seeing the things we saw, hearing the things we heard, people at home believing in you and appreciating you help, and it’s not about your professional ego.

It’s about feeling like you’re useful in a time when everything around you is falling apart. It’s a piece of hope, as trivial as that may seem.

* * *

Even while we’d been live-reporting under heavy fire that evening, Prime Minister Netanyahu was making one of his first public addresses since the massacre, speaking to the Israeli people and the world.

He began his remarks in front of four Israeli flags and wore a blue tie to match the flags.

“Israel is at war.” Netanyahu gripped the edges of the podium, looking straight into the camera. The speech sought to lay the groundwork for what was to come.

“Hamas will understand that by attacking us, they have made a mistake of historic proportions. We will exact a price that will be remembered by them and Israel’s other enemies for decades to come.”

The prime minister went on to compare Hamas to ISIS, noting that they executed civilians. He thanked President Biden, then other world leaders, and finally the U.S. Congress for their support.

This was calculated.

Netanyahu understood that Israel’s response would draw world condemnation. He also understood that the United States would be supplying many of the weapons, bombs, and financial support that Israel needed to defeat Hamas and maintain a defensive posture against other regional threats.

For the United States and the Biden administration, the attack by Hamas was deeply personal. The U.S.-Israel relationship aside, American citizens were directly affected by the actions of Hamas. Thirty-two American citizens were killed on October 7, 2023. More than twenty of them were serving in the Israeli military and had dual citizenship, but they were no less American, especially in the eyes of the U.S. government. In addition, Americans were taken hostage by Hamas and were being held inside Gaza.

* * *

This excerpt, from Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst’s new book Black Saturday: An Unfiltered Account of the October 7th Attack on Israel and the War in Gaza, was provided to Mediaite courtesy of Fox News Books, an imprint of Harper Collins. Black Saturday was published on Oct. 1.