Skeptics ask whether images change anything. History says sometimes, decisively—always, unevenly. Nick Ut’s 1972 photograph of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, the “Napalm Girl,” entered front pages and living rooms, accelerating anti-war sentiment around Vietnam. “Tank Man” from Tiananmen became a global shorthand for ordinary courage defying a state. Sharbat Gula, the “Afghan Girl,” put a singular human face to the abstraction of “refugees,” shaping public empathy for decades. The 2015 photograph of Alan Kurdi, a Syrian toddler washed ashore in Turkey, sparked immediate spikes in public attention, fundraising, and even policy shifts in countries like Canada and the U.K. Photographs, when they land right, do something language can’t: they collapse distance.
That collapse is what photojournalists in Gaza have been risking their lives to achieve for years. And it didn’t start two years ago. Long before October 7, 2023, Gaza was a place where daily life unfolded under siege— beach days at Shati, children flying kites between power cuts, weddings held in alleyways, teenagers flirting on rooftops— punctuated by sudden airstrikes that long predate this current escalation. The Strip has been sealed since 2007, its borders throttled by land, sea, and air, forcing residents to improvise entire lives inside a confined frame. In that frame, local photographers worked quietly, documenting both joy and restraint, the routines that made survival bearable.
Since late 2023, the catastrophe has widened beyond what language can carry. Independent tallies describe a territory leveled, a population repeatedly displaced, hunger weaponized, and famine conditions confirmed in parts of Gaza. In this period, journalist killings reached record highs—Gaza has become the deadliest conflict for media workers ever recorded. Still, Gazan photographers keep showing up with the same tools they used to photograph everyday life: cameras, battery packs, and an instinct for where the human story is.
This is a portrait of three of them—Jehad Alshrafi, Sameh Rahmi, and Ismael Abu Dayyah—whose images insist that the world look back.
Jehad Alshrafi
At 23, Jehad Alshrafi’s frames have already circled the globe. Working with the Associated Press since 2024, he captured one of the most searing sequences of this war: a building in Gaza City at the exact moment it was hit, a boiling cloud of smoke shouldering the sky while people sprint for cover. It’s one of those rare images that compresses cause and consequence into a single breath. But his lens has also stayed with the quieter scenes that survive the blast radius—kids cooling off by the sea, vendors frying falafel on a dark shoreline, men fishing beside tent camps. That duality matters: even in an obliterated city, people insist on life.
January 2025
June 2024
August 2024
December 2022
June 2021
Sameh Rahmi
If you scan agency archives, you’ll find Sameh (Nidal) Rahmi’s byline stitched through Gaza’s public life for years, whether it’s sunsets on Gaza Beach in 2023, the border protests of 2018, street scenes and human-interest frames that once felt routine. Those pictures now land like time capsules. When the bombardment escalated in late 2023, Rahmi’s voice bled into his images. In a WhatsApp diary published by Le Monde, he narrates exhaustion and fear between assignments, a field note from someone photographing the collapse of his own city. Rahmi’s archive makes the shift painfully legible. The same streets, now buckling; the same hands that once carried groceries, now lifting the wounded; a coastline that used to be a long exhale, interrupted by tents and smoke. That’s the point of continuity photography in Gaza has always maintained—the “before” lives in the “after,” stubbornly.
June 2023
December 2022
January 2023
December 2022
August 2021
Ismael Abu Dayyah
Working as a videographer and photographer with the Associated Press, Ismael Abu Dayyah’s frames often meet people at the threshold—ambulances, hospital corridors, the minutes when life can still tilt either way. His byline sits beneath many of the war’s most immediate images from Rafah and beyond. But before October 7, Abu Dayyah wasn’t stationed only in emergency rooms. His lens spent just as much time on Gaza’s shoreline as it now does in hospitals. His archives from recent years show Palestinians doing what every society deserves to do: boys playing, families enjoying sunsets on the beach, Eid and Christmas celebrations, kids gathered around watching football matches on the street. But threaded through these moments of joy were always reminders that life here rested on a fault line. Abu Dayyah’s “everyday” galleries were punctured by images that made one thing undeniable: none of this started two years ago.
February 2023
February 2024
February 2023
November 2022
July 2022
The post Gaza Through the Lens: Joy, Ruin, and the Photographers Who Never Stopped Recording Both appeared first on MILLE WORLD.
