A father waited for more than a year for his son – Thai agricultural worker Pongsak Thenna – to return. Like many others, he had gone to Israel in search of work and higher pay. Instead of a better life, he ended up being taken hostage. CNA Correspondent episode “They Are Coming Home” puts the spotlight on Thai workers caught up in the war in Gaza and the wait their families endured before they got their sons back. The programme won the ContentAsia Awards 2025 Best Current Affairs Programme Made in Asia for a Single Market in Asia. CNA’s Bangkok-based correspondent, Saksith Saiyasombut, talked to us about the programme.

Why did you decide to tell this particular story? This was an unexpected conclusion to a series of reports and documentaries we had done on the Thai hostages in Gaza, so it felt important to see the story through to the end.

How did you choose which of the Thai workers to follow? Over the course of the entire ordeal, we interviewed many families and former hostages. But when the first anniversary (of the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023) approached, only Wilas Thenna was willing to speak to us, because he wanted to keep the memory about his son and his ordeal alive when others could or would not at that particular point in time. Once we learned that his son Pongsak was going to be released in late January 2025, it felt natural to continue and conclude the story with him.

How closely did you follow the CNA Correspondent format – and what leeway, if any – did you take? The show’s strength is that there’s no rigid format. If a correspondent wants to take over the whole episode, they get the whole 21 minutes at their disposal. Especially when it’s a single topic, that gives you ample time and breathing space to tell your story with the proper context it deserves, but also with stylistic choices to draw the audience in.

There’s a larger message about migrant labour and the search for work. Is this something you intended at the outset? As a child of immigrant parents, the idea of leaving your loved ones behind and traveling half-way across the world for a better future is something that deeply resonates with me. In this case, there’s an added layer: Thai migrant workers in Israel are not only exposed to hard manual labour, but also lethal danger, as we saw on 7 October 2023. It was the deadliest single incident involving Thais abroad in recent memory. And yet, the reaction here in Thailand was largely one of surprise that so many Thais were even there. That disconnect was the spark for me to shine a spotlight on this issue.

Where did you decide to stop the story and why? Any human interest stories creates a big wave of media attention. But we deliberately took a different approach: when the first Thai hostages returned (in November 2024), we waited a week or two before we visited them at home to give them space to breathe and process. With this CNA Correspondent episode, we made the conscious decision not to follow the Pongsak or any other hostages home immediately upon their return. We already had everything we wanted to tell the story by that point and we didn’t need to be part of the media circus that usually happens with these stories.

Adapted from the original version of this article, published on ContentAsia’s dedicated Awards platform on 15 May 2026.

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