For six months — from the first hours following Hamas’ unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, to March 2024 — Loay Ayyoub photographed for The Washington Post the war in Gaza, one of the most devastating conflicts of this century, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives, led to the largest displacement in the region since Israel’s creation in 1948, and plunged at least half the population into famine-like conditions.
Photo copyright: © Loay Ayyoub
In The Tragedy of Gaza, Loay Ayyoub distills the unimaginable scale of human suffering into just ten powerful frames—each one a quiet scream, a fragment of a catastrophe too vast to fully grasp.
Shot over six harrowing months for The Washington Post, this short story bears witness to one of the most devastating and consequential conflicts of our time. The strength of this work lies in its ability to convey urgency, grief, and historical weight within such a tightly curated edit that tells a story the world must not ignore.
Loay Ayyoub is a Palestinian freelance photographer from Gaza. He graduated from the Faculty of Media, Department of Journalism and Public Relations, Al-Azhar University (Gaza) in 2017.
In times of relative peace, his work focuses on the lives of Gazans in the Strip. But when conflict arises, he takes on the role of a war photographer, giving a window into an area closed to all other journalists.
The most recent of which was the war that began on October 7, 2023 and is still ongoing to this moment for the Washington Post, until he left Gaza for the Arab Republic of Egypt in mid-March 2024.
He began his career photographing demonstrations on the eastern border of the Gaza Strip in 2019 and worked on a number of articles for several media outlets such as the Washington Post, The Guardian, and NPR. His work has received numerous international awards.
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