Gurbetelli was born in Palu, Elazığ, and studied chemistry at the University. Later she worked as an assistant at the Çukurova University. As a chemist she calls the Chernobyl catastrophe of 1986 and the chemical attack in Halabja in 1988 two major events, turning points in her life. Following, she began to get involved politically active, she wanted to make a change. Due to her political activities, she was arrested in 1990, and prosecuted and sentenced for supporting the PKK. She stayed in prison for two years. After her release, she became the Editor in-Chief of "Özgür Gündem", a newspaper which showed the Kurdish side of the Kurdish-Turkish conflict. But her tenure was short-lived as she was detained with 107 other people during a search of the newspapers headquarters in Istanbul on the 10 December 1993. Eventually she was arrested on the 12 January 1994 and prosecuted and sentenced for During the trial, in which the prosecutor demanded up to 15 years imprisonment, she and the other prosecuted journalists received a lot of support from the Committee to Protect Journalists and people like Harold Pinter, Noam Chomsky or Louis Begley. She was sentenced to 3 Years and 9 months imprisonment but released in June 1994. After she was not allowed no work as a journalist, she joined the PKK in 1995. She was killed in combat on the 8 October 1997.