Grief in Gaza: Image of mourning Palestinian wins World Press Photo award
As families searched
for relatives in the Nasser Hospital morgue, a woman held onto the body of her
five-year-old niece.
18 Apr 2024
A haunting image of a
grieving Palestinian woman embracing the body of her little niece, who was
killed in an Israeli strike in the Gaza Strip, won the 2024 World Press Photo
of the Year Award on Thursday.
The photograph taken by
the Reuters news agency’s Mohammed Salem shows Inas Abu Maamar cradling the
body of five-year-old Saly, who was killed with her mother and sister when a
missile hit their home in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, in October.
Salem was in Khan
Younis’s Nasser Hospital on October 17 when he saw Abu Maamar, 36, sobbing and
tightly holding the shrouded body of her niece in the morgue.
The picture was taken
10 days after the start of the current conflict, following the attack by the
Palestinian group Hamas in southern Israel.
“It was a powerful and
a sad moment and I felt the picture sums up the broader sense of what was
happening in the Gaza Strip,” World Press Photo quoted Salem as saying.
“It is a really
profoundly affecting image,” said Fiona Shields, jury chairwoman.
“Once you’ve seen it,
it’s kind of seared in your mind,” she said. “It works as a kind of literal and
metaphorical message really about the horror and futility of conflict.”
“It’s an incredibly
powerful argument for peace,” Shields added.
South Africa’s Lee-Ann
Olwage, shooting for GEO, won the Story of the Year Award with an intimate
portrayal of a Malagasy family caring for an elderly relative suffering from
dementia.
“This story tackles a
universal health issue through the lens of family and care,” the judges said.
“The selection of
images is composed with warmth and tenderness reminding viewers of the love and
closeness necessary in a time of war and aggression worldwide,” they added.
Venezuelan Alejandro
Cegarra won the Long-Term Project Award with his vivid monochrome images of
migrants and asylum seekers trying to cross Mexico’s southern border.
Shooting for The New
York Times/Bloomberg, Cegarra’s own experience as a migrant “afforded a
sensitive human-centred perspective that centres on the agency and resilience
of migrants”.
In the Open Format,
Ukraine’s Julia Kochetova won with her website that “brings together
photojournalism with the personal documentary style of a diary to show the
world what it is like to live with war as an everyday reality”.
The 2024 award-winning
pictures were selected from 61,062 entries by 3,851 photographers from 130
countries.
The photos are on
exhibit at De Nieuwe Kerk, a 15th-century church in the centre of Amsterdam,
until July 14.
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