Shooting war: Gaza’s visual storytellers under ‘blatant’ attack
Al Jazeera
The strip’s photojournalists, videographers and camera operators are paying the ultimate price for their work.
Yaser Murtaja and Roshdi Sarraj were friends who shared a love of making films about life in Gaza. In 2012, they set up their own production company, Ain Media – its motto: “Deeper than you see” – with just one camera.
Little did the pair of visual poets know that their passion would cost them their lives.
Murtaja was first to be killed, targeted by a sniper while documenting the Great March of Return in 2018, a protest in which Palestinian protesters demanded they be allowed to return to the lands their families had been displaced from in 1948 with the founding of Israel. Sarraj died last year shortly after Israel launched its war on Gaza when his house was hit by two rockets. He was eating breakfast at the time, says his widow, Shrouq Aila, an investigative journalist and producer.
Ain Media is also mourning videographer Ibrahim Lafi, 21, killed under heavy shelling near the Beit Hanoon, or Erez, crossing on the Gaza-Israel border at the start of the war. Two others – Haitham Abdulwaheed, 25, and Nidal Wahidi, 33 – are currently missing.
“It’s really heavy on the heart to feel your profession is a threat,” Aila says. There is no time, she says, to grieve under the attacks.
