New Delhi: A photo of a woman cradling the body of her six-year-old niece, who was killed by an Israeli air strike in Gaza, has won the World Press Photo of the Year award.
The photo was clicked by Reuters photographer Mohammed Salem on October 17 last year, ten days after Palestinian group Hamas’s attacks in southern Israel – that have since prompted heavy retaliation from Israeli forces – took place.
Salem, whose wife had given birth only a few days before he clicked the photo, described it as a “powerful and sad moment that sums up the broader sense of what was happening in the Gaza Strip”.
Inas Abu Maamar (36) cradles the body of her niece Saly (5) who was killed, along with four other family members, when an Israeli missile struck their home. Khan Younis, Gaza, 17 October 2023. Photo: Mohammed Salem, Palestine, Reuters.
He said he found the woman in the photo, 36-year-old Inas Abu Maamar, sobbing and tightly embracing her niece Saly’s body in the Nasser Hospital morgue in Gaza’s Khan Younis city.
Saly, her mother and her sister were killed by the air strike.
“At the outset of the [Israel-Hamas] war, Israel instructed Gazans to evacuate to the area south of the Wadi Gaza seasonal river for their safety. Yet, according to reports, Israeli airstrikes heavily bombarded Khan Younis (21.8 km south of Wadi Gaza) from mid-October,” World Press Photo’s press release said.
It continued: “Many of those killed were families who had left Gaza City days earlier.”
The jury of the World Press Photo Contest said the photo urges us to “confront our desensitisation of the consequences of human conflict” and it makes a statement “on the futility of all wars”.
Salem hoped that the award will make the world “even more conscious of the human impact of war, especially on children”, Reuters’s global editor for pictures and video Rickey Rogers said.
He also won another award from World Press Photo in 2010 for a photograph he clicked showing white phosphorous bombs exploding over Gaza in early 2009.
Gaza’s health ministry says fighting since the Hamas terror attacks on October 7 has killed at least 34,049 Palestinians in the territory and wounded another 76,901.
While the ministry, also run by Hamas, does not differentiate between combatants and civilians, it claims that at least two-thirds of the dead were women or children.
With inputs from DW.
