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What Gaza’s Photographers Have Seen Every delay has consequences. Log In Email * Password * Remember Me Forgot Your Password? Log In New to The Nation? Subscribe Print subscriber? Activate your online access Skip to content Skip to footer What Gaza’s Photographers Have Seen Magazine Newsletters Subscribe Log In Search Subscribe Donate Magazine Latest Archive Podcasts Newsletters Sections Politics World Economy Culture Books & the Arts The Nation About Events Contact Us Advertise Current Issue A Day for Gaza / February 3, 2026 What Gaza’s Photographers Have Seen These pictures are records of a genocidal war, but they are something more, too—they are fragments of Gaza itself Huda Skaik Share Copy Link Facebook X (Twitter) Bluesky Pocket Email Ad Policy (Moatasem Abu Aser) This piece is part of A Day for Gaza, an initiative in which The Nation has turned over its website exclusively to voices from the Gaza Strip. You can find all of the work in the series here. In Gaza, the camera lens does not merely capture a scene. It documents the human spirit resisting death. And for Gaza’s photographers, every shutter click is an act of defiance. Each image carries risk, memory, and moral weight. They photograph through smoke and mourning, through hunger and destruction, and through the ache of watching the people they love become the subjects of their work. Throughout the Israeli genocide, Gaza’s photographers have become archivists of loss and of life. Their pictures are records of a genocidal war, but they are something more, too—they are fragments of Gaza itself, windows into our collective soul. Through their eyes, we see not only death and devastation, but dignity, defiance, and love that refuses to die. Late last year, The Nation asked eight photographers from Gaza to choose one picture from the recent past that carried particular significance for them, and to tell us why they’d picked it, when and where it was taken, and what story it tells. This is what they returned with.   🇵🇸 “This one broke me”: Samer Abo Samra (Samer Abo Samra) A Day for Gaza A Ceasefire in Name Only Mohammed R. Mhawish The Gaza Street That Refuses to Die Ali Skaik A Catalog of Gaza’s Loss Deema Hattab My Sister’s Death Still Echoes Inside Me Asmaa Dwaima What Gaza’s Photographers Have Seen Huda Skaik How to Survive in a House Without Walls Rasha Abou Jalal What Edward Said Teaches Us About Gaza Alaa Alqaisi What Happens to the Educators When the Schools Have Been Destroyed? Ismail Nofal At the Doorstep of Tomorrow Engy Abdelal “We Have Covered Events No Human Can Bear” Ola Al Asi Samer Abo Samra, 27, is a freelance photographer. He took this photo on October 29, 2025, at 8:00 am outside the morgue at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Medical Complex following a “massacre that occurred during the Israeli occupation’s breach of the truce that killed about 100 civilians—mostly children and women.” In the photo, a grieving father, Mahmoud Shakshak, bids farewell to his children—Sara and Fadi—who were just killed in an Israeli air strike. He was kissing Sara’s foot when Abo Samra took the picture. “The screams, the disbelief—it was unbearable,” Abo Samra told The Nation. “The father …