Since Oct. 7, Gaza has been recorded not only through headlines and casualty figures, but through images that insist on remaining. In a time when speed, algorithms and political convenience reshape reality almost instantly, photography has once again become one of the most fragile yet durable forms of truth. Among those carrying this responsibility are two Palestinian photojournalists, Ali Jadallah and Mustafa Hassona.

Working for Anadolu Agency (AA), Jadallah and Hassona have documented Israeli attacks, civilian loss and everyday survival in Gaza since the earliest days of the war. Their photographs have circulated widely in international media, won major awards and become familiar to global audiences. Yet their deeper significance lies elsewhere: These images are no longer just news material; they are records in Gaza’s visual archive.

That archive is now gathered in two limited-edition, English-language photo books published by AA Kitap, edited by artist and academic Nevzat Yıldırım. The books bring together photographs that document not only devastation, but also endurance, resistance and the effort to remain human under siege.

Encountering the images

My relationship with these photographs did not begin with names or credits. Long before I knew who had taken them, I had encountered many of these images online, paused on them, returned to them and carried them with me. They stayed, not because they were shocking, but because they were precise. They did not exaggerate pain; they allowed it to be seen.

Later, I was invited to contribute to another Anadolu Agency project, "Defendant and Witness," which also involved Ali Jadallah and Mustafa Hassona. That project, too, was built around testimony and record-keeping. It was there that my engagement with their work became more direct. My task was, on paper, simple: to write brief descriptive texts – three or four sentences – for selected photographs.

It turned out to be anything but simple.

When the photographs arrived, I realized that describing what was already unbearable did not create distance; it removed it. I found myself unable to look at some images more than once. As details emerged – a child’s posture, a fragment of a destroyed home, a look held for a fraction too long – the emotional weight accumulated. After two or three photographs, I had to stop. I cried. Then I returned. Again and again. What I had assumed would be a technical exercise became one of the most difficult writing processes I have experienced.

This was not because the images were dramatic. It was because they were honest.

Photography as responsibility

The photographs in these books operate in the same register. They do not aestheticise suffering, nor do they seek spectacle. They insist on proximity. War is present in every frame, but so is life: gestures of care, moments of resistance and the fragile continuity of daily existence.

In his poem "If I Must Die," Refaat Alareer writes not about death itself, but about what must survive it. The poem transfers responsibility from the silenced to those who remain: If the voice is lost, the witness must speak. Truth, in this sense, is not inherited automatically; it must be carried.

Jadallah’s and Hassona’s photographs follow the same ethical logic. They are not appeals for sympathy, nor instruments of persuasion. They are acts of witnessing. They say: This was seen, this was lived, this cannot be undone by forgetting.

Against the noise

We live in an age of overwhelming information, where images are endlessly reproduced, manipulated or generated. Artificial intelligence can now fabricate realities faster than truth can be verified. In such an environment, the value of an unaltered photograph taken under real risk increases dramatically. To record reality faithfully has become a form of resistance.

There is also a longer historical continuity behind this effort. AA was founded during Türkiye’s War of Independence, at a time when the country itself was fighting to make its voice heard against colonial fragmentation. Carrying suppressed realities to the world is part of its institutional memory.

More than a century later, that mission resonates in Gaza.

An unfinished archive

These two photo books make something very clear: This is not a completed story. The archive they contribute to is still being written, often at great personal cost to those who document it. The books include contextual notes, editorial framing and biographical details of the photographers, but they also acknowledge what remains unresolved.

"Gaza: A Chronicle of War" and "Hope and Gaza: The Face of Sorrow" are not commemorative objects. They are working documents of history. They ask the reader not only to look, but to accept the responsibility that comes with seeing.

Because in times like these, remembering is not passive.

It is a form of witness.