CrossFireArabia
In a place that gazes over the horizons and links the sky with the sea, Ismael Abu Al Hattub was martyred. He wasn’t killed in battle but in a simple café on a Gaza beach. It was the place that he was planning to hold his photography exhibition, but failed to see the light.
This beach which he loved, wrote about and photographed under fire and siege, stamped his final existence and obituary.
He once saw a temporary retreat in the place snatched by the gray strikes made by Israeli raids. Abu Al Hattub saw the beach as mirroring the new disdain life has become…a platform for death, blood and mayhem.
He wasn’t merely a journalist but a witness, holding his camera, as if it was open to the world for a life stage in which reality had become a goal to strike. He led his visual project from the ruins of Gaza and made his picture image an “ambassador” to be narrated to the world.
At the height of the military strikes and bombing, with the homes brought to the ground, Abu Al Huttab used to document not only through his lens but by his heartbeat writing on World Press Day that “in Gaza the camera is targeted, the word is struck down and the vest is dammed by the thudding missiles.
These words were not poetic descriptions but a stark reality his body lived through. Last November 2024 he escaped from certain death while he was photographing the Al Ghafari Tower that was viciously struck.
He came back after a year of hardship and pain to continue what he started, to become a voice in the era of silence and the eye in the stage of blindness.
Between the skies and the sea
Between the tents, the debris and wreckage and between the displaced people on roads Abu Al Hattub collected his photographs refusing to tuck away his camera till the strange sounds of death.
And as a result, he sent his photos to be seen in a joint Palestinian platform exhibit in Los Angeles. However, this wasn’t an ordinary exhibition but an echo dangling on western walls narrating the heinous situation of Gaza.
“From the middle of Gaza under the airstrikes, displacement and starvation I was determined to hold this exhibition from afar to tell the story of our people who have no refuge but the beach,” he wrote.
He would say in every “image there is a soul” and the photos are able to defeat the walls and penetrate the thick international silence.
A dream buried in the sand
He was supposed to train, this week, digital security to a group of journalists in Gaza, he had a date with the interested generation of the future. However, his fate with death was sealed. It was a cruel moment by an even cruellest pretending-to-be master race.
His life passed before our eyes after his face was changed into a collective presence as the tent he was living in became his platform, the sea a sanctuary and the lens resistance.
Journalist Muthana Al Najjar wrote: “The owner of the tent exhibition in the middle of Los Angeles, ascended to the heavens after joining the martyrs after a raid on a makeshift café…he tried to show the Gaza tragedy to the world through an exhibition titled in between the sky and the sea and was made absent in an air strike on the beach he loved so much.”
He departed but his pictures remain, and the narrative is there for all to see. He added the youths of Gaza continue to dare to live despite all the odds stacked against them. The Israeli war machine will not win.
He is not the last number to be killed but one of 228 journalists Israeli warplanes targeted during this genocide. Their pens were broken, but their messages remain and whilst the photo lens has dropped in silence the picture will continue to echo.
What Abu Hattub presented was not only a painful picture but a stubborn visual language that doesn’t submit to the American-made bombs and missiles or the continuing siege. He realized that the camera was not objective but rather biased to the truth, justice and people.
Today as the smoke towers above the Gaza Sea, his words remain, his narratives fly over depicting that Gazans are determined to live and stay on their land in the face of extraordinary adversary.
