[2] Guerin began her career working for newspapers in Dublin such as the Sunday Tribune before[3] joining RTÉ News in 1987 and becoming its youngest foreign correspondent when she was sent to Eastern Europe at the age of 23 in 1990.
Regularly reporting from war zones, in 2002 Guerin told Evening Standard contributor Quentin Letts about having to wear appropriate clothing:I got my first flak jacket from the Irish Army but they did not give me the armour plates that you slip into the vest.
[6] Almost two years later, the Israeli government wrote to the BBC accusing her of a "deep-seated bias against Israel" in a report on a teenage would-be suicide bomber.
[9] In December 2005, the BBC told Broadcast magazine that Guerin had spent two years longer in the Jerusalem posting than the normal three-year rotation usual for its correspondents.
However, it was pretty bad timing to announce it within days of Director General Mark Thompson's visit to Israel where he had a meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon".
In the letter, which was published in The Jewish Chronicle, Grade faulted her reporting for assuming "equivalence" between Israel and the Palestinians.
[13] According to Grade: "it was improper of the correspondent to claim that 'there's no sign of involvement by militant groups', before immediately showing footage of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) banners at the home of a 19-year-old terrorist who carried out a deadly knife attack at Lion's Gate in Jerusalem on October 3".
The interview revealed that Zubeida had been estranged from her mother since April 2017, got married and had had a baby just two weeks prior to the BBC report.
[17][better source needed] On 28 February 2018, reports emerged that Zubeida's mother had been arrested by the Egyptian security forces.
In January 2020, Guerin's reporting from the Yad Vashem Center in Jerusalem on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz caused controversy, being criticised for appearing to link the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to the Holocaust.
She was accused of antisemitism, and of inserting her personal bias against Israel into the Holocaust Memorial ceremony, without relevance to what the report was about.