Photojournalist documents Gaza's displacement and danger under siege

Saher Alghorra’s photographs from Gaza captured a life shaped by displacement, hunger and danger, culminating in an image of a woman screaming for her son after he was shot while trying to collect aid from a truck near the Zikim crossing.

Alghorra was listed by the Pulitzer Prize as a contributor to The New York Times, and The New York Times said on May 4, 2026 that he won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in breaking news photography for documenting the toll of Israel’s attacks in Gaza. World Press Photo also included his work in its 2026 contest, putting his images among the most closely watched visual records of a war that has kept many outsiders at a distance.

One of those photographs, captioned by World Press Photo, described a woman whose son had been shot while trying to get aid from a truck near the Zikim crossing in the north of Gaza along the coast. He was being rushed to hospital on the same truck in Gaza City. The image compresses the daily reality of the enclave into a single frame: getting food can mean entering a zone of fire, and the route to treatment can be the only available ride.

The broader setting for those pictures has been the Gaza Strip’s humanitarian collapse since the Israel-Hamas conflict erupted in October 2023. The United Nations Office at Geneva said the enclave has faced an unprecedented humanitarian crisis that has unfolded largely beyond the spotlight of international media struggling to access the war-torn territory. That lack of access has made photographers like Alghorra and Motaz Azaiza central witnesses to a war in which civilians are photographed not at the edge of history, but in its daily impact.

The New York Times published a video on February 20, 2024 about Azaiza, a Palestinian photographer who turned his camera to pain and loss in a territory under siege after war broke out in Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023. Alghorra’s recognition two years later showed how the work of Palestinian photojournalists had become one of the few steady records of life under bombardment, where the usual markers of normalcy have been replaced by queues for aid, rushed trips to hospitals and the constant risk of being in the wrong place when hunger and gunfire meet.