PHOTOJOURNALIST SAHER ALGHORRA DOCUMENTS DESTRUCTION AND GRIEF IN HIS CITY BY SANGSUK SYLVIA KANG
WORLD
SAHER ALGHORRA HAS LONG LOVED TO DOCUMENT both the beauty and challenges of life in Gaza. That’s what first drove the 27-year-old Gaza native to become a photojournalist. But even Alghorra—who has already lived through the devastating 2008 and 2014 Gaza-Israel conflicts—was not prepared for what has transpired this month. “The humanitarian situation here is extremely catastrophic,” Alghorra tells TIME.
Hamas launched a surprise attack on Oct. 7 that killed at least 1,400 people in Israel. Gazans have been subject to thousands of airstrikes since then, and Israel imposed a total siege cutting off electricity, water, food, and medicine, on top of a 16-year blockade that already left most Gazans reliant on aid. More than 3,300 people have died in Gaza in this latest escalation, and more than 13,000 have been wounded, the Palestinian Health Minister said Oct. 18.
Child casualties make up a quarter of the total, Gaza authorities told Reuters, and Alghorra’s photos put those numbers in stark relief. In one, Omar Lafi mourns the loss of his nephew, with whom he was inside a market buying food when the nearby Al-Sousi Mosque in Gaza’s Al-Shati refugee camp, set up in 1948, was hit by an airstrike. On a separate occasion, Alghorra recalls, he saw a father holding his daughter near Al-Shifa Hospital, exclaiming that he was planning to throw her a birthday party, before she was killed by an airstrike.
At least 700 children have died in Gaza since the Israel-Hamas War broke out. To grasp how deadly the conflict has been so far for Gaza’s children, more children were killed in Gaza during the first nine days of this war than in 20 months of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
And those who live have not escaped the trauma. Alghorra recalls meeting two children at the emergency room at Al-Quds hospital who had lost their father while escaping airstrikes. “They sat there crying. We tried to help find [him],” he says. Alghorra followed them until they finally found the man injured in a different part of the hospital. “They hugged each other and collapsed in tears.”
ALGHORRA’S PHOTOGRAPHS SHOW the many ways Israeli airstrikes continue to overwhelm the 2.2 million Palestinians living in what is one of the world’s most densely populated places. Families grieve
