The Palestinian photojournalist Mohammed Salem has captured the image awarded this Thursday by the World Press Photo as the photo of the year: a woman hugs a girl who has just lost her life in the Gaza Strip, a “powerful and sad” reflection of the pain and the loss suffered by Palestinian civilians who have lived with Israeli bombs since October.
The photograph does not show the face of either of the two people who appear in the image. The adult woman, whose face is hidden by her arm, wears a long blue outfit and a brown veil that covers her hair, while the body and head of the girl she hugs are wrapped in a white cloth, a sign that he is no longer alive.
Both appear against a white tiled background and floor, so nothing in the image distracts the viewer’s gaze from the two who are the sole protagonists of the photograph: Inas Abu Maamar, 36, and her niece Saly, a little girl. 5 years old who died along with his mother and sister when their house in Khan Younis was hit and destroyed by an Israeli missile.
Salem found Inas crouched on the floor, hugging the girl, in the Nasser Hospital morgue, where Gazans go to look for missing relatives. Inas had rushed to her family home when she heard that she had been bombed, and from there she went to the morgue to look for the remains of her nephews and her own sister.
Salem, who has worked for the Reuters news agency since 2003 focused on documenting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, took this photo just a few days after his own wife gave birth, and describes the World Press Photo award-winning photograph as a “powerful and sad moment that sums up the general feeling of what was happening” in Gaza.
The photographer has identified the protagonists with names and surnames, but they could be any of the tens of thousands of Palestinian victims who have succumbed to Israeli bombs in the Gaza Strip since last October 7, a military offensive in retaliation for the attack. from the Hamas group to Israel. Nearly 33,900 Gazans have been killed and more than 75,000 wounded, more than 72 percent of them women and children, in six months of war.
Women and children represent more than two-thirds of the fatalities, according to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). The International Court of Justice (ICJ) demanded that Israel take all possible measures to prevent a genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, including allowing humanitarian aid access.
This image captured by Salem is inevitably reminiscent of the one also awarded in the 2012 edition by Samuel Aranda. The Spanish photographer photographed a woman named Fátima who was also holding her injured son Said in her arms during a demonstration in Sana’a (Yemen). In this photo, the main faces are not shown either and the composition has a great similarity to the winner this year.
Photographer Lee-Ann Olwage, a visual storyteller from South Africa, is the overall winner in the photojournalism category. Through her work, she denounces the lack of public awareness in Madagascar about dementia, which stigmatizes those who suffer from it.
It tells the life of Paul, a 91-year-old man who has lived with dementia for 11 years, and for a long time, his family assumed that he had “gone crazy” and attributed the symptoms he suffered to alcohol consumption, but this diagnosis did not He convinced his daughter Fara, who chose to take care of her father.
In the photo, grandfather and granddaughter, Odliatemix, prepare to go to church, illustrating the Maglache concept of valim-babena, the duty of adult children to help their parents.
In the Long-Term Project category, the contest awards Venezuelan photojournalist Alejandro Cegarra for his work “The Two Walls,” which documents the vulnerability of migrant communities that lack financial resources to pay smugglers and turn to freight trains to reach the United States border.
Cegarra’s photo highlighted by World Press Photo shows a migrant walking on a freight train known as “La Bestia” in Piedras Negras, Mexico. This means of transportation is very dangerous and over the years, hundreds of people have fallen onto the tracks, being maimed or losing their lives.
The fourth category is Open Format, and awards Ukrainian photographer Julia Kochetova for “War is Personal,” a digital diary that combines photojournalism with documentary style to show what it is like to live with war as an everyday reality. This project combines photos with poetry, audio clips and music.
