The image of a woman with a dead girl in Gaza, winning photo of the World Press Photo

The Palestinian photojournalist Mohammed Salem captured on October 17, 2023 at the Nasser hospital in the Gaza Strip where families were searching for the bodies of their relatives after the Israeli bombing, the image that today, Thursday, was awarded by the World Press Photo, and He also won the Ortega y Gasset award that was awarded on March 20. A 36-year-old woman, Inas Abu Maamar, hugs the limp body of her five-year-old niece. Her face cannot be seen, and as the World Press Photo jury stressed, it is a “powerful and sad” reflection of the pain and loss suffered by Palestinian civilians who have been living with Israeli bombs since October. Salem, a Reuters photographer since 2003, was already honored by the World Press Photo in 2010. “The image was taken with care and respect, offering at the same time a metaphorical and literal vision of an unimaginable loss,” the jury's ruling highlighted. .

Photographer Salem found Inas with his niece in his arms in the morgue where Gaza residents come to look for their missing relatives. Little Saly died along with her mother and her sister when her home in Khan Younis was hit and destroyed by an Israeli missile. Salem took the award-winning photo just days after his own wife gave birth, and describes the World Press Photo award-winning photograph as a “powerful and sad moment that sums up the overall feeling of what was happening” in Gaza.

In announcing the ruling, Joumana El Zein Khoury, executive director of the Amsterdam-based organization, spoke of the importance of recognizing the dangers that journalists face in conflict zones. The war between Israel and Hamas that broke out after the October 7 attack and the subsequent Israeli retaliation has now left 99 journalists dead. “In the last year, the number of journalist casualties in Gaza has reached almost an all-time high. “It is important to recognize the trauma that these professionals suffer to show the world the impact of war,” she noted. The exhibition with these photos opened today in Amsterdam and will travel to Seville from May 3 to 24.

Other categories

Photographer Lee-Ann Olwage, a visual storyteller from South Africa, is the overall winner in the photojournalism category. Through her work, she denounces the lack of public awareness in Madagascar about dementia, which stigmatizes those who suffer from it. She chronicles the life of Paul, a 91-year-old man who has lived with dementia for the past 11 years.

In the Project category, the Venezuelan photojournalist Alejandro Cegarra has been awarded for his work

The Two Walls

, which documents the vulnerability of migrant communities that lack financial resources to pay smugglers and resort to freight trains to reach the United States border. Joined. Cegarra's photo highlighted by World Press Photo shows a migrant walking on a freight train known as

La Bestia

in Piedras Negras, Mexico.

The fourth category is Open Format, and awards Ukrainian photographer Julia Kochetova for

War is Personal

, a digital diary that combines photojournalism with documentary style to show what it is like to live with war as an everyday reality.

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