Fatima Hassouna

Biography:

Fatima Hassouna (Arabic: فاطمة حسّونة‎), born in March 2000 and died on April 16, 2025, in Gaza City, Palestine, was a Palestinian freelance photojournalist whose work documented the lives of civilians during the war in Gaza. She gained international recognition for her poignant images depicting the aftermath of the war, and became the protagonist of the documentary "Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk," selected for the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. She was killed on April 16, 2025, along with ten members of her family, in an Israeli airstrike on their home in Gaza City. Fatima Hassouna was born in March 2000 in Gaza City. The daughter of a taxi driver, she belonged to the middle class. A multimedia graduate of the University College of Applied Sciences in Gaza, she quickly gained recognition as a photographer and has collaborated with numerous local and international media outlets, including Untold Palestine, the Tamer Institute for Community Education (which has been working on children's issues in Palestine for thirty years and received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2009), and the American platform Mondoweiss. Her work has been published in the British daily The Guardian and featured in international exhibitions such as Gaza, My Beloved, and SAFE. Her fellow photographers have nicknamed Hassouna "the eye of Gaza." She began professionally documenting life in the city after the Israeli bombardments following the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. As one of the few local journalists able to cover the war after foreign journalists were banned from entering Gaza, Hassouna documented the forced evacuations imposed by the Israeli army, the destruction of infrastructure by Israeli airstrikes, civilian casualties, funerals, and scenes of resilience, such as children playing in the ruins. Moreover, in addition to her journalistic activities, she organized writing workshops for children in a school in northern Gaza, which had become a shelter for displaced people. On January 13, 2024, she survived an Israeli airstrike, which killed twelve members of her family. Her work appeared in The Guardian and other international media. On April 15, 2025, she posted her last Instagram story, showing a sunset in Gaza with the caption: "This is the first sunset in a long time." Fatima Hassouna and ten of her relatives, including her pregnant sister, were killed at dawn on April 16, 2025, when an Israeli missile struck their family home in the Al-Touffah neighborhood of Gaza. The attack came one day after the announcement that her documentary had been selected for the Cannes Film Festival and a few days before her wedding to Moutaz, her fiancé since December. The bodies were brought to Al-Shifa Hospital by the Palestinian Civil Defense. According to the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, "her crime was to chronicle the genocide through powerful articles and photographs. Something a genocidal regime cannot allow." In 2025, during the Cannes Film Festival, more than 350 stars and creators signed a letter condemning the assassination of Fatima Hassouna and her family and the genocide in Gaza.