Winner of the 2023 Ville de Perpignan Rémi Ochlik Visa d'or Award

Winner of the 2024 Ville de Perpignan Rémi Ochlik Visa d’or Award

On October 7, 2023, Hamas militants launched an unprecedented cross-border attack on Israel, killing more than 1,200 people and taking approximately 250 hostages. In response, Israel declared war on Hamas, launching one of the most destructive wars of the 21st century, killing tens of thousands, fueling the largest displacement in the region since the creation of Israel in 1948, and plunging at least half the population into famine-like conditions.

For five months, from the first day of the war until he was able to find refuge in Egypt in late February 2024, photographer Loay Ayyoub covered the humanitarian crisis in Gaza for The Washington Post. In Gaza City, where his parents and grandparents remain to this day, he started taking photos as Israel launched airstrikes that destroyed much of the city.

Like hundreds of thousands of Gazans, Loay was forced to flee his home, first moving to Khan Younis where he found refuge with a dozen other journalists and photographers in the courtyard of Nasser Hospital, sharing tents, food and the precious internet connections needed to send their images and dispatches out to the world.

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Loay and his colleagues spent weeks rushing to the sites of countless airstrikes, climbing through piles of debris as rescuers searched for survivors and the bodies of victims, many of them children. They documented the chaos outside Gaza’s hospitals as fathers and mothers, uncles and aunts, siblings and other relatives carrying their loved ones in their arms came in search of help from resource-stretched, exhausted nurses and doctors.

As Israel expanded its military campaign across Gaza, Loay had no choice but to join the masses of refugees forced to leave the fighting in Khan Younis and move on to Rafah where more than 1.5 million people were packed into tent-filled refugee camps in a city the size of Perpignan (with a population of only 120,000). Israel continued to limit aid reaching the Gaza Strip, and the World Food Program estimated that two-thirds of all Gazans were facing catastrophic levels of hunger, including hundreds of thousands of children suffering from malnutrition and dehydration.
When the security situation made Loay’s job as a journalist untenable, he was able to leave Gaza, crossing into Egypt in late February 2024. Since October 7, 2023, more than 100 Gazan journalists have been killed in the war. Loay Ayyoub found refuge in Egypt, and while his work documenting the conflict in Gaza and its repercussions ended then, the situation in Rafah and across the Gaza Strip has only continued to worsen.

“To show the humanitarian crisis faced by the civilian population in Gaza, to bear witness to their difficulties in accessing care and protection was my daily goal and my duty in my work as a photographer.”

Loay Ayyoub

Loay Ayyoub

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