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Betsy Hiel
Affiliation during program: Toledo Blade
Country Focus: West Bank/Gaza

	Program: Fall 1998 [email protected]

Betsy Hiel has been the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's foreign correspondent since April 2000. Based in Cairo, Egypt, she has reported from Algeria, Bahrain, Greece, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, the Palestinian territories, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey and Yemen. She covered the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens and the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy. She covered the 2006 summer war between Israel and Hezbollah, writing about Israelis under Katyusha fire. Hiel covered the 2003 war in Iraq, crossing into that country through Turkey, then continued to report from Iraq thoughout 2003 and 2004 -- including a series of stories on mass graves. She also reported on the Israeli-Palestinian clashes that grew into the Intifada in 2000 and 2001. She has written extensively about Arabs and Muslims in America, and her series of articles about Arab-Americans in Toledo, Ohio, is included in the Smithsonian Institution's Naff Arab-American Collection in the Museum of American History.

She received a bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Minnesota and a master's degree in Arab Studies from Georgetown University; she has studied at the American University in Cairo and Hebrew University, Jerusalem. She is the co-author of book The Islamic Revival Since 1988: A Critical Survey and Annotated Bibliography, and was a contributor to the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World. She is proficient in written and spoken Arabic.

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