Fox News reporter Trey Yingst reveals gruesome task of covering Oct. 7 terror attack: We were so close to dying

One gnawing thought still clings to war reporter Trey Yingst about the October 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel which he replays in his head over and over: It could have been me.As the barbaric Hamas rampage of Israel — which left 1,200 dead and 240 taken as hostages — was taking place, Fox News’ Yingst was hurtling toward the scene.“One of the things that’s still with me is how close my team and I were to death on that fateful morning,” he writes in his new book “Black Saturday,” (Harper Collins), noting that a split-second decision about stopping at an intersection in Israel’s battered south, may have meant the difference between life and death.“If we’d kept going… we would have found ourselves right in the midst of the carnage, under attack by Hamas gunmen.

Would I have tried to reason with the gunmen before they killed me? Would I have explained in Arabic that I was a journalist? “Would they have murdered me anyway?”As Chief Foreign Correspondent for Fox, Yingst has burnished his reputation in war zones around the world for the last decade at the frontlines in Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine.But nothing prepared him for the past year, when he was woken up inside his Tel Aviv apartment at 7am on what’s become known as “Black Saturday,” the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.In his gripping firsthand account, Yingst, 31, talks to soldiers, civilians, leaders in Israel and figures in Hamas that paint a devastating portrait of the cost of war.

He writes about entering Gaza five separate times on military embeds — a correspondent’s attachment to military units in armed conflict — and witnessing tense firefights between Israel and Hamas.As he tried to get a handle on the scope of the attacks, in the midst of the confusion and shock on October 7, reporting from the scene would become a delicate needle to thread. “Stick to the facts and avoid opinion or emotion-based analysis,” he told himself. “I had prepared...