Gaza Photo Essay

She refuses to leave her land and move from the ruins of her house and now lives in a shelter home next to her former house and land. In the last war in 2012, their house was occupied by the Israeli army.They detained their father Mohammed for several days while their mother Jihan and their kids were forced to stay in the house with Israeli soldiers.

5 January 2013 | Occupied Palestine, Gaza City A man prays surrounded by the remnants of a governmental building in Gaza City.

A building in Gaza City after being bombed by an Israeli F-16.

Farmers are most likely to be settled in small communities like Rafah, Khan Younis and Beit Hanoun, which are now known as frontlines, where missiles most likely to be fired and lives taken.

In these struggling farming towns, the Israeli army has bulldozed land and sniper fire is a familiar occurrence.

Because of the fuel crisis, many farmers use horses and carts to transport their goods.

Right: Medhat Hamad’s wife peels an orange on their farm in Beit Hanoun.In Gaza, with the Israeli border within sight, Palestinian farmers lead worn-torn lives, dealing farming fields on the frontlines.Trying to make a living cultivating crops like strawberries, oranges, grapefruits and olives, their task became even more difficult after a military blockade in 2007 made it impossible to export their products.A feeling of being suddenly insecure in one’s own humanity—or equally a feeling of being suddenly exposed as human, implying that the concept of humanness is essentially insecure or unstable—now seems an accurate description of my first encounter with the Gaza photograph almost two years ago.Furthermore, an experience that leaves one insecure in one’s humanity may be said to allow an insight into the essential inadequacy of the solutions that human beings have proposed to those problems that occur uniquely as problems.Belal Almzannar stands in front of his house, next to the building where 10 members of the Al-Dalou family were killed.He lost his brother and grandmather in the bombing.The family says their farm was bulldozed several times by the Israeli army.Ghanma Jbara, prepares tea on the ruins of her house in Rafah.In our world, explosions are often proposed as solutions; so what is the problem?The purpose of this essay is to ask about our relationship to the photograph, and since a world, or part of our world is made present in the photograph, about our relationship to the world insofar as it is revealed in the Gaza Photograph.