#Palestinian

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Palestinian Reuters Photographer Mohammed Salem Won this Year's Prestigious World Press Photo of the Year Award with a Heart-wrenching Photo of a Palestinian Woman Cradling the Dead Body of Her Five-Year-Old Niece.

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Palestinian woman Inas Abu Maamar, 36, embraces the body of her 5-year-old niece Saly, who was killed in an Israeli strike, at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, Oct. 17.

Mohammed Salem—Reuters

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Reuters’ Ethics and Standards editor told HonestReporting on Tuesday that the wire service “disputes” our “claim” that its journalists had “decorate[d] their office with terror symbols.”

This despite photo evidence we exposed last week showing scarves with terror groups insignias decorating what used to be Reuters office in Gaza in 2013:

The man in the photo is Reuters current Head of Visuals for Gaza, Suhaib Jadallah Salem. The photo still appears on his Facebook page.

Like the Nazi Swastika, the emblems on the scarves are of genocidal groups — Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades — that call for the killing of Jews/Israelis (like some of Suhaib’s colleagues in Reuters).

There are only two bad explanations to Reuters’ disturbing response: ” Either it doesn’t view these proscribed terror groups as such, or it is denying indisputable evidence.

The rest of Reuters Ethics and Standards editor Brian Moss’s official response did not address our exposure of its journalists in Gaza receiving awards from senior Hamas officials.

Instead, it said: “On the basis of a close review by the Reuters Ethics and Standards department, we dispute the distorted evidence and insinuations of bias in the HonestReporting September 5th article. We stand by our coverage of Gaza and our team, who operate within the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles…Further, we dispute any claim that our journalists received ‘de-facto bribes from terrorists.'”

But here are the facts, which HonestReporting stands behind:

Our review of Palestinian media revealed that since 2015, the proscribed terror group has hosted annual ceremonies to honor Gazan journalists who had won prestigious international awards, including photographers from Reuters.

This cozy relationship between Gaza’s terror groups and the journalists tasked with covering them objectively is ethically flawed. It exposes the disturbing entanglement between terrorists and the media, shaping a distorted global narrative about Gaza.

Honored by Terrorists

In 2017, Hamas held a commendation event for international award-winning journalists in Gaza, where it honored Reuters photographer Suhaib Jadallah Salem — the agency’s current head of visuals for Gaza (who was photographed in Reuters office in front of the terror groups’ scarves.)

One of the photos from the event shows Suhaib’s brother Mohammed Jadallah Salem, a Reuters photographer who recently won the Pulitzer prize and the World Press Photo award, receiving Suhaib’s commendation plaque on his behalf. Two senior Hamas officials are granting the plaque: Khalil al-Hayya and Mushir al-Masri:

Al-Hayya has publicly called for a fight against Israel as “the head of the serpent,” and al-Masri has vowed to “uproot The Zionists With Our Axes, Knives, Guns.”

Receiving commendation from such terrorists is a mark of Cain. It should get any journalist disciplined by any respectable media outlet.

Yet Reuters journalists — knowing perhaps that their bosses won’t find out or even care — had no qualms getting into bed with Hamas. Another photo from the event shows other Reuters journalists around a table not too far from al-Hayya: Reuters Senior Gaza correspondent Nidal al-Mughrabi is sitting near Suhaib’s brother Mohammed and photographer Ashraf Amra (who was also honored at the event and exposed by HonestReporting for endorsing infiltration into Israel on October 7). Beside them is Belal Jadallah, who headed the allegedly “independent” Gaza Press House:

Suhaib himself attended a separate Hamas commendation event for journalists later in 2017. This time, he was honored for performing the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca:

Suhaib received the commendation from al-Masri and Hamas spokesperson Fawzi Barhoum (who have often been interviewed by Reuters), along with the movement’s media officials.

It’s worth noting that four of the Jadallah brothers work for Reuters, in Gaza and Dubai. And the links of the Jadallah family to Hamas go back years. One of the brothers of Suhaib and Mohammed, Sallah, was among the terrorists who kidnapped and killed Israeli soldier Nahshon Waxman in 1994.

The mastermind behind that operation was Moahmmed Deif, who was recently eliminated by Israel. As Hamas’ military chief, Deif was also one of the masterminds behind the October 7 massacre in southern Israel.

If Suhaib and Mohammed were professional journalists, such background wouldn’t necessarily matter. But if they have been hosted and honored by Hamas, it’s alarming.

Unethical Nexus

Top news editors probably know it’s impossible to be a journalist in Gaza without links to Hamas, which controls the information flow. In other words, professional journalism in Gaza is impossible, and news outlets should admit it to their audience.

But being hosted by Hamas, receiving its commendations, and displaying terror groups’ insignias isn’t a case of journalists even trying to be professional. This is an agenda-driven, cooperative, symbiotic, reciprocal, and personal nexus that benefits each side.

A Hamas statement from one of the commendation events said it best:

The media office of Hamas organizes this annual event to honor creative journalists for the fourth year in a row, in appreciation of their efforts in serving the Palestinian cause.

Journalists who violate the agency’s code of ethics by receiving de-facto bribes (or at least benefits) from terrorists to “serve the Palestinian cause,” and decorate their office with terror symbols, are not deserving of international praise or the defense of the Reuters Ethics and Standards department.

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March 1, 2024: Rafah, Gaza Palestinians take part in Friday prayers near the ruins of a mosque destroyed in Israeli strikes Photograph: Mohammed Salem/Reuters

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Palestinian Reuters photographer Mohammed Salem won this year's prestigious World Press Photo of the Year award with a depiction of loss and sorrow in Palestine's Gaza a heart-wrenching photo of a Palestinian woman cradling the dead body of her young niece.

The photograph, captured on October 17, 2023, at Nasser Hospital, shows 36-year-old Inas Abu Maamar sobbing while holding five-year-old Saly, who was killed along with her mother and sister when an Israeli missile struck their home.

Salem described his photograph as a "powerful and sad moment that sums up the broader sense of what was happening in the Gaza Strip."

"Mohammed received the news of his WPP award with humility, saying that this is not a photo to celebrate," said Reuters' Global Editor for Pictures and Video, Rickey Rogers, at a ceremony in Amsterdam, "but that he appreciates its recognition and the opportunity to publish it to a wider audience."

"He hopes with this award that the world will become even more conscious of the human impact of war, especially on children."

This is not the first time 39-year-old Salem has been recognised for his work on Israeli attacks on Palestine. He received a World Press Photo award more than a decade ago for another depiction of the human toll of conflict in the besieged enclave.

Credits: TRT World

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Palestinian woman Inas Abu Maamar, 36, embraces the body of her 5-year-old niece Saly, who was killed in an Israeli strike, at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, October 17, 2023. Reuters photographer Mohammad Salem was in Khan Younis on Oct. 17 at the Nasser Hospital morgue, where residents were going to search for missing relatives. He saw Inas squatting on the ground in the morgue, sobbing and tightly embracing Saly’s body. “I lost my conscience when I saw the girl, I took her in my arms,” Inas said. “The doctor asked me to let go... but I told them to leave her with me.” Mohammed Salem won the 2024 World Press Photo of the Year award for this image. | Photo Credit: Reuters

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PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES. Gaza Strip. Gaza City. March 25, 2017. Palestinian members of Hamas’ armed wing take part in the funeral of senior militant Mazen Fuqaha.

Photograph: Mohammed Salem/Reuters

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Palestinian woman Inas Abu Maamar, 36, embraces the body of her 5-year-old niece Saly, who was killed in an Israeli strike, at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.

Reuters photographer Mohammed Salem wins 2024 World Press Photo of the Year award

AMSTERDAM, April 18 (Reuters) - Reuters photographer Mohammed Salem won the prestigious 2024 World Press Photo of the Year award on Thursday for his image of a Palestinian woman cradling the body of her five-year-old niece in the Gaza Strip.

The picture was taken on Oct. 17, 2023, at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, where families were searching for relatives killed during Israeli bombing of the Palestinian enclave.

Salem's winning image portrays Inas Abu Maamar, 36, sobbing while holding Saly's sheet-clad body in the hospital morgue.

"Mohammed received the news of his WPP award with humility, saying that this is not a photo to celebrate but that he appreciates its recognition and the opportunity to publish it to a wider audience," Reuters Global Editor for Pictures and Video, Rickey Rogers, said at a ceremony in Amsterdam.

By Anthony Deutsch

Reuters - April 18, 2024

https://www.reuters.com/world/reuters-mohammed-salem-wins-2024-world-press-photo-year-award-2024-04-18/#

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Gaza

A Palestinian boy stands next to his father at their house which was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in Beit Lahiya

Photograph: Mohammed Salem/Reuters

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The Struggle to Save Lives Inside Gaza’s Hospitals

Photograph by Ahmad Salem—Bloomberg/Getty Images

— BY Sanya Mansoor | November 6, 2023 | Time

Within minutes of the Oct. 31 Israeli attack on the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, the victims began flooding the Indonesian Hospital a mile away. Dr. Marwan Sultan, the hospital’s medical director, says that most of the injured and dead were women and children. Some had deep burns, serious head injuries, or missing limbs, Sultan told TIME four hours after the attack. There are only 16 intensive-­care beds in the hospital, which was running dangerously low on fuel, threatening the lives of his patients. If the electricity goes, says Sultan, “they will die. They will die.”

The conditions for medical care in Gaza are deteriorating across the besieged 140-sq.-mi. coastal strip. Surgeons are operating by flashlight and rationing water, anesthesia, and the generator fuel needed to perform surgeries, provide electricity for incubators, and care for kidney-dialysis patients, doctors and health organizations tell TIME. The roughly two dozen hospitals still operating in Gaza are absorbing the patients of the 12 that have closed because of a lack of supplies and the ongoing bombing, says the World Health Organization (WHO). “Medical teams are on their knees,” says Hisham Mhanna, spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza.

A man mourns as he attends a funeral of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on Oct. 24, 2023.Mohammed Salem—Reuters

All war zones are awful, but Gaza presents a unique hell. Much of the enclave of 2 million is now a battlefield, with civilians and combatants intermixed, and homes and businesses sitting side by side with military infrastructure. Nowhere is that reality felt more keenly than at the territory’s hospitals, which have simultaneously become safe havens and potential targets, and where the impact of Israel’s offensive is measured every day in lives—more than 9,000 killed as of Nov. 2, including 135 medical personnel, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

After the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks that killed more than 1,400 people in Israel and started the war, the Israeli military began a massive bombing campaign. On Oct. 13, it ordered civilians to depart the northern part of the strip for the south, and on Oct. 27 it sent in ground troops and armored vehicles. Hamas has fought back above and below ground, from a network of concrete tunnels extending hundreds of miles.

For the estimated 1 million people displaced by fighting, the search for shelter has brought many to makeshift tent cities. More than 50,000 are packed into the Al-Shifa hospital complex in northern Gaza, says Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a surgeon. Mattresses line the floor, kids run around, and a stench hangs in the air. So many people in such a small space, with inadequate access to hygiene and sanitation, will lead to an outbreak of infectious diseases, Abu-Sittah worries. Hospitals are struggling to dispose of dead bodies, which pose their own health ­hazards. Abu-Sittah has been going to a corner store to buy bottles of vinegar and laundry detergent to clean wounds. “Every day you make more and more compromises,” he says.

An injured child receives treatment at the Nasser Hospital as the Israeli attacks continue in Khan Yunis, Gaza on Oct. 29, 2023.Abed Zagout—Anadolu/Getty Images

Some two dozen hospitals have been asked to evacuate to the south, according to the WHO, which says doing so would risk patients’ lives. When Israeli government officials called Al-Awda hospital and told its manager, Dr. Ahmed Mhanna, to evacuate staff and patients, “I refused, of course,” he says. “Where can I deal with my patients?”

Doctors worry that their facilities will be hit in the bombardment. On Oct. 30, an Israeli airstrike damaged part of Gaza’s only cancer hospital, the Turkish-­Palestinian Friendship Hospital, says its director, Dr. Sobhi Skeik. “My message is please don’t kill cancer patients,” Skeik says. On Nov. 1, the WHO said that the hospital had shut down.

Days before that, the Israel Defense Forces presented evidence it said showed Hamas had established a command center in and beneath Al-Shifa hospital. A Hamas official ­denied the allegation. Targeting a hospital would be a war crime, whether or not Hamas is using it to hide in, says Susan Akram, a law professor who directs Boston University’s International Human Rights Clinic. “Israel has an obligation to protect the entire population in Gaza,” she says. For its part, Israel notes that using a hospital to hide military equipment or facilities is itself a war crime.

Even without a direct attack, the hospitals lack key supplies, which are coming in at a painfully slow pace amid the Israeli siege. On Oct. 31, the U.S. said that 66 trucks of humanitarian aid were entering Gaza daily, a fraction of the hundreds per day before the war. Fuel remains a critical issue. The Israeli military reportedly believes Hamas holds more than 500,000 liters that it could provide to hospitals. The U.S. says it is pressuring Israel to break its blockade and allow aid in. President Biden called Nov. 1 for a humanitarian “pause” in the war, but faces criticism for providing military aid to Israel.

Everyone in Gaza has been affected. “We often focus on the victims of airstrikes,” says Dr. Brenda Kelly, a consultant obstetrician in Oxford, U.K., “but ordinary lives don’t stop. Women still go into labor. They still have miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, preterm births.” Dr. Hatem Edhair, the head of the neonatal intensive-­care unit at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, fears that electricity shutting off will mean the deaths of five babies in his care who are dependent on ventilators. “If there is no electricity,” he says, “it means the end of their life.”

Al-Awda hospital’s Mhanna, speaking by phone Oct. 23 in southern Gaza, seemed unfazed by the sound of a blast during the interview. “We are afraid; we are human beings,” Mhanna says. “But we cannot do anything except continue our mission with our patients.”

—With reporting by Leslie Dickstein

An injured child is rushed into a hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, following an Israeli air strike on Oct. 24, 2023.Yousef Masoud—The New York Times/Redux

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Khan Younis, Gaza Strip

Palestinians mourn during the funeral of Haniyeh Qudih, a nurse killed in an Israeli airstrike

Photograph: Mohammed Salem/Reuters

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🇵🇸📷#ArtIsAWeapon

🏆Reposted from @worldpressphoto ‘A Palestinian Woman Embraces the Body of Her Niece’ by Mohammed Salem (@mohammedsalem85), @reuters, is the World Press Photo of the Year.

This image shows Inas Abu Maamar (36) cradling the body of her niece Saly (5) who was killed, along with four other family members, when an Israeli missile struck their home, in Khan Younis, Gaza, 17 October 2023.

The photographer describes this photo, taken just days after his wife gave birth, as a “powerful and sad moment that sums up the broader sense of what was happening in the Gaza Strip.” He found Inas squatting on the ground, embracing the child, at the Nasser Hospital morgue, where residents were going to search for missing relatives. Inas had raced to the family home when she heard that it had been hit, and then on to the morgue.

At the outset of the Israel-Hamas war, Israel instructed Gazans to evacuate to the south for their safety. Yet, according to reports from @guardian and @aljazeera, Israeli airstrikes heavily bombarded Khan Younis in southern Gaza from mid-October. Many of those killed were families who had left Gaza City days earlier. By the end of 2023, Palestinian women and children accounted for more than two-thirds of the death toll in Gaza, according to @unitednationshumanrights.

The jury was deeply moved by how this image evokes an emotional reflection in every viewer. Composed with care and respect, it offers at once a metaphorical and literal glimpse into unimaginable loss. Set in a geographically distant medical setting, it resonates globally, urging us to confront our desensitization to the consequences of human conflict.

The image is multi-layered, representing the loss of a child, the struggle of the Palestinian people, and the 33,000 people killed in Palestine. The jury recognized that this photographer was awarded for the same subject nearly a decade ago, underscoring the continued struggle for recognition of such a pressing issue.

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The annual World Press Photo Contest recognizes the best photojournalism and documentary photography produced over the last year. Discover the #WPPh2024 awarded works via the link in the bio.

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2024 World Press Photo of the Year

A Palestinian Woman Embraces the Body of Her Niece

Photographer:

Mohammed Salem

Reuters

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October 17, 2023

Inas Abu Maamar (36) cradles the body of her niece Saly (5) who was killed, along with her mother and sister, when an Israeli missile struck their home, in Khan Younis, Gaza.

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#WorldPressPhoto2024

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Gaza City: A Palestinian girl stands outside her family house amid a heatwave worsened by lengthy power cuts due to energy shortages.

Photograph: Mohammed Salem/Reuters

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Saudi Crown Prince MBS: Palestinians should 'accept Trump proposals or shut up'

Saudi Crown Prince MBS: Palestinians should ‘accept Trump proposals or shut up’

 Palestinians run from tear gas fired by Israeli troops during a protest along the Israel border with Gaza. Photograph: Mohammed Salem/Reuters. Photo not used in original article

Saudi crown prince criticises Palestinian leadership, says must accept what US offers or stop complaining, report says.

30 April 2018 | Staff| Al Jazeera English

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, often known as…

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Photographer Mohammed Asad documents a Palestinian spear-fisherman who holds a fish while diving underwater in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of the southern Gaza Strip Credit: Suhaib Salem/Reuters