Latest news with #Ajjour
Al Jazeera
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
From Gaza to Vietnam, what is the value of a photo?
This month, Palestinian photographer Samar Abu Elouf won the 2025 World Press Photo of the Year award for her image titled Mahmoud Ajjour, Aged Nine, taken last year for The New York Times. Ajjour had both of his arms blown off by an Israeli strike on the Gaza Strip, where Israel's ongoing genocide has now killed at least 52,365 Palestinians since October 2023. In the award-winning photograph, the boy's head and armless torso are cast in partial shadow, his gaze nevertheless intense in its emptiness. Speaking recently to Al Jazeera, Ajjour recalled his reaction when his mother informed him that he had lost his arms: 'I started crying. I was very sad, and my mental state was very bad.' He was then forced to undergo surgery with no anaesthetic, an arrangement that has been par for the course in Gaza on account of Israel's criminal blockade of medical supplies and all other materials necessary for human survival. 'I couldn't bear the pain, I was screaming very loud. My voice filled the hallways.' According to Abu Elouf, the first tortured question the child posed to his mother was: 'How will I be able to hug you?' To be sure, Abu Elouf's portrait of Ajjour encapsulates the cataclysmic suffering Israel has inflicted – with the full backing of the United States – upon the children of the Gaza Strip. In mid-December 2023, just two months after the launch of the genocidal assault, the United Nations Children's Fund reported that some 1,000 children in Gaza had already lost one or both legs. Fast forward to the present moment and the UN's warning, in early April, that at least 100 children were being killed or injured on a daily basis in the besieged territory. They say a picture is worth a thousand words – but how many pictures are needed to depict genocide? Meanwhile, as the slaughter proceeds unabated in Gaza, today – April 30 – marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, another bloody historical episode in which the United States played an outsized role in mass killing. As it so happens, a nine-year-old child also became the face – and body – of that war: Kim Phuc, the victim of a US-supplied napalm attack outside the South Vietnamese village of Trang Bang in June 1972. Nick Ut, a Vietnamese photographer for The Associated Press, snapped the now-iconic image of Phuc as she ran naked down the road, her skin scorched and her face the picture of apocalyptic agony. The photo, which is officially titled The Terror of War but is often known instead as Napalm Girl, won the World Press Photo of the Year award in 1973. In an interview with CNN on the photograph's own 50th anniversary in 2022, Phuc reflected on the moment of the attack: '[S]uddenly, there was the fire everywhere, and my clothes were burned up by the fire … I still remember what I thought. I thought: 'Oh my goodness, I got burned, I will be ugly, and people will see me [in a] different way.'' This, obviously, is nothing any child or adult should have to endure – physically or psychologically – in any remotely civilised world. After spending 14 months in hospital, Phuc continued to suffer from extreme pain, suicidal thoughts and shame over having the photo of her naked and mutilated body exposed for all to see. And yet napalm was but one of many weapons in a US-backed toolkit designed to make the planet safe for capitalism by incinerating and otherwise disfiguring human bodies. To this day, Vietnamese are maimed and killed by the unexploded leftovers of millions of tonnes of ordnance the US dropped on the country during the war. The lethal defoliant Agent Orange, which the US used to saturate swaths of Vietnam, also remains responsible for all manner of incapacitating birth defects and death half a century after the war's end. In her 1977 book On Photography, the late American writer Susan Sontag considered the function of images like Ut's: 'Photographs like the one that made the front page of most newspapers in the world in 1972 – a naked South Vietnamese child just sprayed by American napalm, running down a highway toward the camera, her arms open, screaming with pain – probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred hours of televised barbarities.' Public revulsion aside, of course, US-backed barbarities in Vietnam went on for three more years after Ut published his photo. Now, the fact that pretty much every image out of the Gaza Strip could be labelled The Terror of War simply confirms that barbarity is still a brisk business. And in the current era of social media, in which both still images and videos are reduced to rapid-fire visuals for momentary consumption, the desensitising effect on the public cannot be understated – even when we're talking about nine-year-old children with both of their arms blown off. In an Instagram post on April 18, Abu Elouf wrote: 'I always have, and still do, wish to capture the photo that would stop this war – that would stop the killing, the death, the starvation.' She went on to plead: 'But if our photos can't stop all this tragedy and horror, then what is the value of a photo? What is the image you're waiting to see in order to understand what's happening inside Gaza?' And on that bleak note, I might ask a similar question: What, in the end, is the value of an opinion article? The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
Yahoo
19-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
A moment of joy for a boy who lost both arms in an Israeli airstrike
In a video, Mahmoud Ajjour is beaming as he skips into the breeze. He breaks into laughter as he watches his kite flutter in the sky, pulling it along with a string tied around his waist, in a moment that captured the irrepressible joy of childhood. At 9 years old, Mahmoud has known more trauma than most will see in a lifetime. On Dec. 6, 2023, the fourth grader was hit by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, a blast that severed one of his arms and left the other so badly damaged it had to be amputated. On Thursday, an image of Mahmoud, taken by Palestinian photographer Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times, was named World Press Photo of the Year, a haunting portrait of the impact of the war on children. Mahmoud now lives in Doha, Qatar, with his family, after becoming one of a very small number of Palestinians to be evacuated from Gaza for urgent medical treatment. When Mahmoud smiles, his happiness seems infectious, but some days are harder than others. 'There are bad moments for him,' his mother, Nour Ajjour, 36, told NBC News by phone from Doha, Qatar's capital. 'He doesn't want to play or go outside.' 'We keep him busy and have fun with him,' Ajjour said. She sent videos of him gleefully speeding down a hallway on an electric bike, steering with his feet on the handlebars, and using his feet to play with a lump of bright-green clay. For now, Ajjour said, there's not much Mahmoud can do on his own, and he's impatient for prostheses, asking when he can have them so he can drink water on his own or help his family. 'He likes to help a lot, and I let him help me and carry things on his shoulder,' Ajjour said. Doctors at Doha's Hamad Limb Hospital are currently fitting him for protheses, and in another video, he smiles brightly as he tries on a pair of prosthetic arms. In Gaza, such treatment isn't possible, and Mahmoud is one of at least 1,000 children in the enclave to have lost at least one limb during the war, according to UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund. Many of the children, like many adults, underwent surgery without anesthesia as the health care system buckled under Israel's siege. 'The first few days were very difficult,' Ajjour said. Both of his hands were gone, and without anesthetic, Mahmoud was in both physical and existential pain. 'He would look at his hands and not see them,' the boy's mother said. 'He would scream and say, 'Where are my hands,' and the first thing he said was, 'How will I hug you, how will I pray?'' These days, Mahmoud is learning how to type on a computer, write and use a phone with his feet. Ajjour said he dreams of going to university and becoming a journalist so he can tell the stories of Gaza's children. This article was originally published on
NBC News
19-04-2025
- General
- NBC News
A moment of joy for a boy who lost both arms in an Israeli airstrike
In a video, Mahmoud Ajjour is beaming as he skips into the breeze. He breaks into laughter as he watches his kite flutter in the sky, pulling it along with a string tied around his waist, in a moment that captured the irrepressible joy of childhood. At 9 years old, Mahmoud has known more trauma than most will see in a lifetime. On Dec. 6, 2023, the fourth grader was hit by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, a blast that severed one of his arms and left the other so badly damaged it had to be amputated. On Thursday, an image of Mahmoud, taken by Palestinian photographer Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times, was named World Press Photo of the Year, a haunting portrait of the impact of the war on children. Mahmoud now lives in Doha, Qatar, with his family, after becoming one of a very small number of Palestinians to be evacuated from Gaza for urgent medical treatment. When Mahmoud smiles, his happiness seems infectious, but some days are harder than others. 'There are bad moments for him,' his mother, Nour Ajjour, 36, told NBC News by phone from Doha, Qatar's capital. 'He doesn't want to play or go outside.' 'We keep him busy and have fun with him,' Ajjour said. She sent videos of him gleefully speeding down a hallway on an electric bike, steering with his feet on the handlebars, and using his feet to play with a lump of bright-green clay. For now, Ajjour said, there's not much Mahmoud can do on his own, and he's impatient for prostheses, asking when he can have them so he can drink water on his own or help his family. 'He likes to help a lot, and I let him help me and carry things on his shoulder,' Ajjour said. Doctors at Doha's Hamad Limb Hospital are currently fitting him for protheses, and in another video, he smiles brightly as he tries on a pair of prosthetic arms. In Gaza, such treatment isn't possible, and Mahmoud is one of at least 1,000 children in the enclave to have lost at least one limb during the war, according to UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund. Many of the children, like many adults, underwent surgery without anesthesia as the health care system buckled under Israel's siege. 'The first few days were very difficult,' Ajjour said. Both of his hands were gone, and without anesthetic, Mahmoud was in both physical and existential pain. 'He would look at his hands and not see them,' the boy's mother said. 'He would scream and say, 'Where are my hands,' and the first thing he said was, 'How will I hug you, how will I pray?'' These days, Mahmoud is learning how to type on a computer, write and use a phone with his feet. Ajjour said he dreams of going to university and becoming a journalist so he can tell the stories of Gaza's children.
NBC News
19-04-2025
- General
- NBC News
Boy who lost both arms in Israeli strike is being fit for prosthetics in Doha
Mahmoud Ajjour became the face of Palestinian children's suffering in the Israel-Hamas war when a photo of him won the World Press award. Videos sent to NBC News show Ajjour adjusting to life after he lost both of his arms in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023.
Al Jazeera
18-04-2025
- Health
- Al Jazeera
‘How do I live like this?' asks Gaza boy who lost arms in Israeli attack
A Palestinian child who was severely wounded in an Israeli drone attack on Gaza last year, and who was pictured in an image that won the 2025 World Press Photo of the Year award, says he has been struggling to adapt to life since losing both his arms in the explosion. Speaking to Al Jazeera from Doha, Qatar, where he has been receiving treatment, nine-year-old Mahmoud Ajjour recalled the moment the bomb exploded, targeting his home in March 2024. At first, Ajjour, who hails from Gaza City's old town, said he did not realise he was wounded. 'I thought I had simply fallen. But I found myself on the ground, exhausted, and wondering what had happened,' he told Al Jazeera. In reality, one arm 'flew off, and one flew and fell right beside me', he added. Still unaware that he had sustained serious wounds – wounds that mutilated his entire body – Ajjour said he looked around and saw his arms. Although they looked familiar, his brain still could not comprehend that they had been blown off. 'My mother then told me that I lost my arms,' Ajjour recalled. 'I started crying. I was very sad, and my mental state was very bad.' His mental health deteriorated further when he, like many others in Gaza, had to undergo surgery without anaesthetics due to a severe lack of medical supplies. Throughout the war, Israeli forces have largely kept vital border crossings shut, preventing the entry of much-needed medical supplies, as well as food and other aid, including fuel. 'They performed surgery on me while I was awake,' Ajjour said, the shock still evident in his voice. 'I couldn't bear the pain, I was screaming very loud. My voice filled the hallways.' Ajjour is one of thousands of children in Gaza who are suffering life-changing injuries due to relentless, indiscriminate Israeli bombardment. According to the United Nations Children's Fund, more than 10 children each day have lost one or both of their legs since October 7, 2023, when Israel launched its ongoing genocide in Gaza. That is more than 1,000 children. 'Gaza now has the highest number of children amputees per capita anywhere in the world – many losing limbs and undergoing surgeries without even anaesthesia,' UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in December. Ajjour is now learning to write, play games on his phone, and dress himself using his feet – but still needs special assistance for most daily activities. He now longs for the days when his arms were still intact. Before the attack, Ajjour said he used to go to the market and buy his mother vegetables and food she needed. 'Now, everything is difficult, including feeding myself, helping myself to the bathroom … but I try my best,' he said. 'I manage my life like this. I make it work.' Ajjour dreams of a future where he can return to Gaza and help rebuild the devastated enclave. He hopes the world can 'end the war on Gaza'. 'We want to live on our land. We don't want the Israelis to take it,' he said. 'People are dying there [in Gaza]. And my home was bombed. How could I live like this?' Israel's ongoing assault on the besieged and bombarded territory has so far killed more than 51,000 Palestinians and wounded at least 116,505 others, according to Gaza's Ministry of Health. It has also forcibly displaced most of its 2.3 million strong population, ravaged most of the land, damaged basic infrastructure and dismantled its already-struggling healthcare system.
