Yasmeen Serhan in Time Magazine: The first time Palestinian photographer Saher Alghorra spoke with TIME about his experience documenting the death and destruction in his native Gaza, Israel’s retaliation for the Oct. 7 massacre had barely begun. The impact already was utter devastation. Alghorra’s earliest images captured plumes of smoke emerging where towering apartment blocks once stood, scenes of grief-stricken parents mourning their children, and entire communities rummaging through the rubble of their neighborhoods, searching for survivors.
A year later, the 28-year-old is still documenting the lived experience of Palestinians in a place with scars visible from space. But for all of the images of physical destruction, Alghorra’s most profound photographs are of the human impact. In one, he found a Palestinian child crying in the rain as she and others wait for food to be distributed outside a refugee camp in the southernmost city of Rafah. Insufficient humanitarian aid reaching the Strip means that for most people, one meal a day is the most they can hope for. Dozens of children have died of starvation.
In another photo, a Palestinian family sits in the living room of their dilapidated home in Khan Yunis. The walls are scorched black and the infrastructure is crumbling, but it’s preferable to the alternative—the crowded tents where the vast majority of people in Gaza, including Alghorra, are now living. Since being forced to leave his home in Gaza City in the early days of the war, he now shares a tent with colleagues next to the Nasser Medical Complex, one of Gaza’s last remaining hospitals.
“Covering this war has been difficult and full of risks,” Alghorra says. At least 116 journalists and media workers have been killed doing so since the war began, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists—the deadliest period for journalists since the organization began gathering data in 1992. Alghorra attributes his survival to “God’s kindness and our strong belief that nothing will happen to us except what God has written for us.” Still, he says the fear of death follows him everywhere. “We have become numb.”
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