2023-10-21 06:00:00
For two weeks, every day, Mohammed Zaanoun has taken his car and sped from gutted buildings to still smoking ruins, photographing the devastation of the Gaza enclave under Israeli bombs.
“Everywhere on the road, I witness bombings, we constantly hear explosions, I see missiles hitting. Everywhere you look, you see destroyed buildings. In the streets floats the smell of the remains of martyrs, gunpowder, fire and death. There are more than a thousand bodies trapped under the rubble because there are not enough rescuers to cope with the scale of the bombings. They, the medical teams, my journalist friends… All are targets, many have been killed”says the Gazan photographer over the phone, affable despite the sleepless nights, constant fear and grief.
Some scenes he witnessed will probably never fade from his memory, like the little girl calling for her family, trapped under the rubble of her home in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City.
Evacuation of an injured little girl calling for help in the rubble, after an explosion in the neighborhood of Zeitoun, in Gaza, October 18, 2023. MOHAMMED ZAANOUN FOR “THE WORLD” Evacuation of the injured after an explosion in the neighborhood of Zeitoun, in Gaza, October 18, 2023. MOHAMMED ZAANOUN FOR “THE WORLD”
The figures, with cold accounting, say nothing about the extent of the tragedy. In two weeks, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, more than 4,100 people, mostly civilians, were killed in bombings carried out by the Israeli army, and more than 13,100 others were injured. .
The IDF bombs continuously. Israel shows its desire to destroy Hamas, the movement which rules the enclave, after the bloody attack it carried out in the Hebrew state on October 7, killing 1,400 people and bringing more than 200 hostages to Gaza. The Israeli offensive is accompanied by a state of siege: nothing has entered or left the enclave for two weeks. However, Gaza was already weakened by sixteen years of blockade. More than a million Gazans have been displaced by the bombing; Mohammed is one of them.
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His house, on the northern edge of Gaza City, not far from the seafront, was destroyed. His son was slightly injured in a bombing. He moved his family to his in-laws, in the Al-Rimal neighborhood, which was partly destroyed last week, then to his sister. They are now refugees in the south, in Rafah, with a relative of his wife. When they arrived, “the house was in mourning” : their host had just lost part of his family in a bombing.
Mohammed hides from his four children that their home is nothing more than a pile of rubble: “I tell my daughter that I will go get her bike later, that I don’t have time. I tell him we will find our house soon. » For two days, Wednesday October 18 and Thursday October 19, he followed displaced people, like him, tossed between two shelters, between two bombings. He tells the Monde what the people he photographed told him.
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