It’s said a picture paints a thousand words, and that could not be more true than in the world of press photography, with one image in particular circulating online in the wake of an attempted assassination on former US president Donald Trump.

To recap what is undoubtedly a fast-moving story, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has identified 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks as the “subject involved” in shooting at Trump, who was around 15 minutes into a speech at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania when several popping sounds were heard.

Trump was then seen placing a hand to his right ear before seeking cover, as secret service agents swarmed around the Republican presidential nominee before ushering him off-stage.

The ex-president was also seen raising a fist in the air while being bundled away to safety, appearing to tell the crowd to “fight”.

The gunman was shot dead by secret service agents, while one person in the crowd at the rally was killed. Two others were injured.

In a post to his Truth Social platform after the incident, Trump wrote: “It is incredible that such an act can take place in our country.

“I was shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear. I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin.

“Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening.”

And press photographers have captured the panic which unfolded in those moments, with one snap from Getty Images’ Anna Moneymaker depicting Trump on the floor, visible through a gap in the secret service huddle, with blood trickling down the side of his face.

Though arguably the most widely circulated photo following the shooting is one taken by Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci, capturing Trump raising a defiant fist in the air while being escorted by secret service agents, with the American flag flying behind him:

Now, Vucci has spoken to The Daily Beast about the photo, telling the outlet: “It’s a moment in history that you have to document, right? Being a photographer, you … have to be there. I can’t write about it later. I can’t go back in time and get a redo. So you have to do your job.

“What’s going to happen next? What do I need to do? Where do I need to be? What is the light? What is the composition? So those are the things that starts to go through your head.”

He added it’s about the mindset of “just now doing your job”, which he said is to “inform the American public”.

“I hope they can look at the photos and they can see what I saw that day,” he said.

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In 1865, in what is now referred to as “the golden days of Alpinism”, English mountaineer, explorer, illustrator and author, Edward Whymper, completed the first ascent of the Matterhorn, in the Alps.

Climbing the Matterhorn was considered an impossible endeavor, and his achievement would go on to inspire many mountaineering endeavors to come. 

However, it was marred by conspiracy and scandal as four members of his party were lost on the descent – with many at the time crying foul play.

Whymper later returned to the Matterhorn, in what must have been an incredibly painful experience, in order to take some of the first photographs of the mountain.

He used one of the first portable cameras – mobile but still awkward big pieces of equipment, with potentially harmful chemicals that required 15 minutes of mixing.

When he published his memoir, The Ascent of the Matterhorn, in 1879, the technology at the time prohibited him from publishing it with his photographs. So instead he used his significant skill as an illustrator and included his engravings.

Fast-forward to 1968, and Whymper’s book was republished – but with his original photographs thought lost, the volume featured images taken by a modern photographer.

However, after the images were discovered at auction, Gibson Square Media is republishing Whymper’s memoir alongside his own photographs for the very first time.

The Ascent of the Matterhorn & The Forgotten Photographs will be released on July 18, in association with The Alpine Club.

The book was the first ever adventure bestseller at its original release, and ignited a global obsession with mountaineering that is partly responsible for its enduring popularity today.

Whymper once had dreams of becoming a Prime Minister, and the new publication has a foreword by ex-British PM Theresa May – who apparently admires Whymper and has a longstanding passion for the Alps. Who knew?

“A glance through the catalog of the Alpine Club Library shows that Edward Whymper was about so much more than the Matterhorn,” May writes. 

“Yet it is the Matterhorn that has defined him over the years – and his first ascent of this iconic mountain that defined the relationship between Britain and the Alps and opened up Alpinism to the rest of the world. How ironic therefore that his fame came as much from the drama and tragedy of the descent of the mountain as from the victory and glory of its ascent.”

Summiting the Matterhorn after eight unsuccessful attempts, the first to reach the top, the achievement was marred by the tragedy of the descent.

On the way down to their base in Zermatt, the inexperienced Douglas Hadow lost his footing and he and three other men – French guide Michael Croz, Lord Francis Douglas and Reverend Charles Hudson – fell to their deaths after a climbing rope snapped. Eighteen-year-old Douglas’ body was never found.

Their deaths caused a scandal in England, with rumors of sabotage and rope-cutting running wild within society, and leading Whymper to be called “the Robespierre of Mountaineering” by fellow climber Sir Leslie Stephen.

Amazingly, Whymper’s controversial achievement is still a hot topic in Zermatt. Did he cut himself free of the safety rope so he could be the first to stand atop the mountain, thus leaving the group without a failsafe? Or was it all just a tragic accident, morphed into a mystery by the sensationalism of time?

If you’re hearing the call of the wild, why not take a look at our guides to the best action cameras, the best travel cameras, the best 360 cameras, and the best waterproof cameras on the market. 

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press photographer who captured the image of an injured, defiant Donald Trump waving his fist to a sea of supporters on Saturday after an apparent assassination attempt knew he had one task: to keep his camera on his subject.

“It’s a moment in history that you have to document, right?” Evan Vucci told The Daily Beast by phone late Saturday, hours after he captured the shocking images. “Being a photographer, you have to, have to be there. I can’t write about it later. I can’t go back in time and get a redo. So you have to do your job.”

Vucci was one of the pool photographers on duty during Trump’s late-day rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, one he perceived as a normal rally—not unlike those he’d covered before. Until, over his left shoulder, he heard gunshots.

“From there, I trained my lens on former President Trump,” Vucci said.

Thoughts of his safety? Didn’t concern him. Thoughts of his surroundings? Irrelevant at that moment. All he cared about, he said, was what the conditions were to document history.

“What’s going to happen next? What do I need to do? Where do I need to be? What is the light? What is the composition? So those are the things that starts to go through your head,” he said. “It’s very much in the mindset where you’re just now doing your job.”

Videos captured Vucci racing toward the right side of the stage seconds after the shooting, as he believed it best to follow where the Secret Service agents were likely to escort Trump off the platform.

“They stand them up, and then he starts pumping his fists to the crowd,” Vucci said. “At that point you’re just making sure that your composition is good and you’re making the images that you need to make.”

Vucci’s photos took the nation by storm, documenting a bloodied former president a week before he was set to secure the Republican nomination. His photos, along with those of peers such as New York Times veteran photographer Doug Mills and Getty Images’ Anna Moneymaker, lit up all forms of news broadcasts and social media, a dark convergence of the virality of the digital age with the grim occasion of an assassination attempt on a U.S. leader.

History has trained Vucci for such a moment, teaching him the patience and calm nature needed to remain steady when a scene takes a sharp, potentially violent turn. An AP photographer for about 21 years, he won a Pulitzer in 2021 for his breaking news coverage of the 2020 racial justice protests in Washington, D.C. after George Floyd’s death, and he has covered wars, Washington, and almost everything in between.

Vucci was also known for capturing the face of the Iraqi journalist who threw a shoe at President George W. Bush—though not Bush ducking to avoid the shoe, a moment he’s still frustrated by. “Bush ducking the shoe I never got because I was on the shoe thrower,” he said. “You just want to do the best you can so people can look back on it and be like, ‘Yeah, that was a moment in history.’ And here we are.”

Vucci wasn’t bothered by the rising conversation around his photos’ political significance, which pundits online noted how the striking shot of a bloodied Trump displaying strength—literally, in clenching his fist— could help tilt the election in his favor.

“I shoot politics for a living, man. Every single photo I take people are going to argue about,” Vucci said with a laugh. “I spend my life around a very highly polarized part of our society, so no matter what I do, people are gonna hate it. People are gonna love it. Listen, as long as everyone hates me equally, I’m doing the job.”

That responsibility guided Vucci through the harrowing moments on Saturday, producing photos that will help drive political discourse through the election and be imprinted in the minds of Americans—and likely history books—for generations.

“I’m glad I didn’t let anyone down. I got a standard to hold,” Vucci said. “I got into journalism to, you know—the idea is to inform the American public, and I hope that they can look at the photos and they can see what I saw that day.”

“I found myself spending the whole summer waiting to see a hyena use a crosswalk in the middle of the night.”

That’s just another day (or in this case, night)  in the life of Yuval Dax, a veteran nature photographer for the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI).

Over the course of his 22 years as a wildlife and conservation filmmaker, the 50-year-old Israeli has captured stills and videos of countless species, and has had his work featured by renowned publications.

His works are exhibited in the Eretz Israel Museum at the Israel nature exhibition; his wildlife footage is available online in the new Incredible Animal Journeys series by Nat Geo Wild/Disney; and will be included in the BBC “Asia” series airing in November.

In an interview with ISRAEL21c, Dax explains that his entire career has been an effort to highlight the beauty and diversity of wildlife in Israel — a feature that he says is often overlooked.

“When you talk about wildlife in Israel, people are always surprised because they don’t see wildlife around them in everyday life; they think wildlife starts at Ben-Gurion airport on the way to a safari in Africa. 

“But in fact, for me, Israel is the best place for wildlife in the whole of the Middle East: it’s one big nature reserve surrounded by a big, big fence,” Dax says.

“My mission is to give Israeli wildlife prime time.”

From diapers to DSLRs

Dax has been pursuing that mission for a long time.

“I’ve been a naturalist and a nature lover since I can remember,” he recounts. “I was already looking for birds and feathers when I was three years old. I got my first pair of binoculars when I was six years old. My mom says I learned to read both English and Hebrew by looking at birdwatching guidebooks.”

By age seven, he had joined the Jerusalem bird club, and at 16, began guiding younger children in birdwatching.

Around that time, he got his first camera, which he used to record footage of nature in his area. “I was just fascinated by the small things around me, like flowers and insects,” he recalls.

While he enjoyed nature photography as a hobby, in his early childhood years Dax had no Israeli nature photographers to emulate, and as a result he resigned himself to finding a more traditional career.

Initially, he pursued degrees in biology and art, both of which he found impractical in terms of career prospects. However, his big break came when an instructor assigned him a film about barn owls.

This first piece of conservation filmmaking was a success, igniting his passion for nature photography and inspiring his career choice. 

Dax began finding more and more opportunities to record footage of Israel’s wildlife, gradually building experience and accolades.

“The more I filmed, the more success came,” says Dax. “I started investing in equipment. All my equipment was secondhand, the worst equipment, but I was doing many things that no one had done before in Israel, so that was an advantage.”

Doors opening for a shutterbug

Dax’s dedication to documenting Israel’s wildlife has resulted in a unique collection of images showcasing the country’s biodiversity, which he shares annually in a “Year in Photos” webinar through SPNI.

The past year has been particularly eventful for Dax. He collaborated with the BBC to film swifts and hyenas (the aforementioned stakeout for a hyena using a crosswalk was for this collaboration), and worked on a project for National Geographic, capturing the migratory patterns of storks, cranes and pelicans.

One of his most challenging endeavors in the last several months was tracking the elusive caracal, Israel’s only remaining wildcat after the extinction of the leopard. 

This project involved extensive fieldwork and overcoming various obstacles, including broken equipment and physical injuries.

“I was just in the desert, driving in every direction, drinking bad coffee from gas stations and putting up trail cameras,” he recalls. 

“It’s a really physical effort. It drives you to the edge of your physical limits because you have to move around a lot and you can get really hurt; I’ve broken a couple of bones while shooting in Israel and abroad. It just happens because of the conditions.”

What ate my camera?

During his hunt for the caracal, he encountered a mystery you could really sink your teeth into:

“Someone was eating my camera.”

After finding one of his trail cameras broken into little pieces where he had left it, Dax remembers feeling confused.

“I wasn’t sure what did it in the beginning. I was trying to think, ‘Who would do such a thing? One thing is stealing it, but why break it into small pieces and leave it?’”

Luckily, the mystery didn’t remain unsolved for long, thanks to an intact memory card found at the scene of the crime.

“I was checking their pictures and I saw so many wild animals arriving at the camera, like a wolf and a wild ass and a wildcat and a porcupine… but the last picture was the huge, ugly face of a hyena,” he says. 

“And I realized that it was a curious hyena that was checking its teeth on the camera.”

After putting that riddle to rest, Dax ran into other hardships — including having one of his trail cameras stolen by drug smugglers in the middle of the night — but the photographer’s perseverance paid off when he finally captured an image of the caracal.

Zooming out; zooming in

Because he has a constant eye on Israel’s nature and wildlife, Dax has observed several significant changes in Israel’s natural environment over the years.

“You can hardly shoot wildlife without some noise or garbage in the background. It’s really hard to find a place which is totally quiet anymore, and the amount of garbage in this country is growing exponentially — even the most remote places I remember as totally natural are now flooded with plastic waste.”

Still, he remains dedicated to showcasing Israel’s wildlife and promoting conservation efforts.

“Nature… it really makes me excited whenever I touch it. Being somewhere outside before sunrise gives me a kind of a thrill, an excitement,” he concludes. “Anything can come in such a wild place — and we still have an extremely wild place here in Israel.”

Sergio Purtell first went to America – to Hamilton, Ohio – as an exchange student from his native Chile in 1972. He returned again, at the end of the following year, this time as an exile, after the CIA-backed coup against President Allende. He had been studying architecture, but was moved to try to understand instead the structural paradoxes of his adopted home; photography seemed to offer that freedom. “I wanted,” he says, “to unravel its mysteries as an outsider who had witnessed the capriciousness of power and the tenacity of the displaced.”

A new book of Purtell’s photographs, Moral Minority, mostly from the 1980s, charts the ways in which he went about that quest. He mostly looked to the margins of his adopted home. Robert Frank’s magisterial 1959 odyssey The Americans was one template, but Purtell was interested in something less in earnest, more accidental. He found that place, he has said, at small-scale events that brought families out of their houses, to “gather or perform or compete in some way”, so: “parades, agricultural fairs, sports events, flower and reptile shows”. Suburban America at play.

The quiet comedy of this image – taken at the Eastern States Exposition, “The Big E”, in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1981 – is typical of his method. The girl trying on her monkey for size exhibits a kind of consumer seriousness at odds with the laughing ape; the picture seems to offer a sly critique on the evolution of shopping culture in Reaganite America, but is not judgmental. Purtell’s camera is simply amused by the restless human zoo of buying stuff, America’s gift to the world. “My aim,” the photographer says in the introduction to his book, “was to reveal a certain order, to see the world with intention. I hoped to evoke a view of America at once familiar and estranged.”

• Moral Minority is published by Stanley/Barker (£50)

Palestinian photojournalist Samar Abu Elouf has been covering war and strife in Gaza for more than 10 years. (Amjad Al Fayoumi)

Editor’s note: This story contains graphic images. Viewer discretion is advised.

The first thing Samar Abu Elouf does before photographing a dead child is make sure it isn’t one of her own.

Feelings of fear, panic and duty overcome the award-winning photojournalist and mother of four, who makes no attempt to conceal her tears as she raises a camera to her eye and snaps, capturing another agonizing scene in Gaza.

It’s been more than 10 years since Abu Elouf became a photojournalist, defying traditional gender roles and blazing new trails for women in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory. Since then, she’s captivated the world and set hearts on fire with portraits of death, displacement and despair — as well as moments of joy and resilience.

Her latest photographs — documenting the horrors of war in Gaza since October 7 — have garnered critical acclaim, including the 2024 Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award and a George Polk Award.

They depict mothers and fathers mid-scream, crouched over tiny bodies wrapped in white, blood-stained shrouds; hospital cribs full of premature babies, their malnourished bodies as frail as twigs; children looking up at the sky in horror as Israeli bombs rain down.

“Taking pictures of corpses hurts me most. One of the worst was a photo of 170 dead bodies, all piled on top of each other,” Abu Elouf, 40, tells CNN in Arabic from a hotel room in Cairo, where she had earlier given a talk on war photography. “These are human beings, not just bags of flesh, blood and bones. Bodies of all sizes, from newborns to grandparents. These are people who dreamed of living until tomorrow and had hope they would survive the war.”

As a Palestinian from Gaza, Abu Elouf has experienced more war and strife than she cares to remember. But the level of brutality and destruction wrought by this latest assault caught her by surprise and threw her life into a tailspin.

Israel launched its war in Gaza after Hamas’ attack in Israel on October 7, in which 1,200 people were killed and hundreds of others taken hostage, Israeli officials say. In the nine months since that attack, Israel’s bombing campaign and ground offensive in Gaza has killed more than 38,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

For months, Abu Elouf slept in the back of her Jeep, using the bathroom once a day and eating what little food she could find. She drove back and forth between cities, chasing Israeli airstrikes, standing atop the rubble of demolished homes listening to the screams of people trapped below. Determined to tell their stories, Abu Elouf never stopped working — not even when the bombs killed family members and destroyed her home in Gaza City, she says.

“I’m not just a person with a camera, I’m a human being. As I’m taking these pictures, I know what I’m seeing isn’t normal,” she says, her voice cracking under the weight of her words. “Being a journalist in Gaza feels like you’re dying on the inside over and over again.”

Clothing and blankets hang on balconies at al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al Balah, Gaza. Thousands of displaced people have sought refuge in medical wards across the territory.

Some of the 28 premature babies who had been in intensive care at the embattled Al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza and were evacuated across the border to Egypt in November.

‘I had to make a choice, and I chose my dream’

Abu Elouf was 26 years old and a mother of three when she decided she wanted to be more than an obedient wife and dedicated homemaker.

“When I lived that life, I always felt that something was missing. I was so young and suddenly my life didn’t feel like mine anymore. I dreamed of studying, of doing something meaningful for myself and my people,” Abu Elouf says.

She explored different disciplines — writing, public relations, even accounting — but nothing spoke to her like photography.

“It’s not just a photo, it’s the soul I see behind the photo,” Abu Elouf says. “You get to peek into someone’s life, to feel close to a complete stranger and emotion tugging on your heart.”

The idea of becoming a photographer immediately consumed her life. She began every morning with a walk on the beach, often submerged in daydreams about the work she’d do and the impact it would have. She imagined herself walking through galleries featuring her photographs and on stages winning awards.

“I wanted to show people what Gaza is — that there is beauty here,” she says. “That the people of Gaza, despite the injustice and oppression they’ve always faced, still insist on finding joy and innovation and life.”

So when her former husband and both of their families reprimanded her for desiring to study photography, she snuck out of the house and did it anyway.

“If you can’t tell by now, I’m a bit stubborn,” Abu Elouf says, laughing. “I couldn’t find it in me to accept my fate of staying at home with no passions or dreams of my own. That was the moment that transformed my life, when I had to make a choice, and I chose my dream and the passions of my heart, and to leave everyone’s judgment behind.”

Children play on the beach in Gaza during a power outage in 2020.

Young women prepare to eat iftar, a fast-breaking evening meal, during Ramadan in 2022.

Children wade in the water in Gaza in 2021.

A fire breather performs on the beach at sunset in 2016.

In 2010, between the responsibilities of motherhood and the pressures of society, Abu Elouf enrolled in photography courses. She supplemented her studies with free, online tutorials on composition, exposure and editing.

With no money or camera of her own, Abu Elouf often drove across Gaza to find photographers willing to lend her equipment, which she experimented with on a range of subjects. She photographed beautiful beach days and Eid celebrations, as well as Israeli attacks and demonstrations against the military occupation. Some days were light and fun, others plagued by violence at every turn.

“I would run from the north to the south. I would run to the border, still so new to the streets with no sense of where the danger was or what risks I was putting myself in. I just wanted to take pictures, to get to know Gaza and the world around me,” she says.

Within a year, a series of photographs Abu Elouf had taken of Palestinian women and children was selected for a university exhibit in Gaza. The following year, while still using borrowed equipment, she won a photo competition hosted by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). Her winning photograph depicted Palestinian children, faces lit by candlelight, celebrating a birthday in a refugee camp.

The image — as harrowing as it is heartwarming — revealed as much about the children as it did about Abu Elouf. “It was a defining moment for me as a photographer when I realized people could see my personal emotions seeping through my photos,” she says.

Before long, Abu Elouf began freelancing for news outlets, including Reuters, Middle East Eye and Al Ghaidaa, a local women’s magazine.

In 2015, a photograph of her covering a border protest went viral. Lacking safety equipment, she made a helmet out of a cooking pot and a vest from a blue plastic bag. She scrawled “TV” and “press” on them to identify herself as a journalist.

“I wanted to make sure I was seen as a journalist, not a protester, and I had the right to be protected as such. I became famous in Gaza for that image of me. I went in front of the Israeli soldiers and people laughed, asking me what I cooked for them in the pot, but I couldn’t care less,” she says. “I just took my pictures.”

Abu Elouf was used to being doubted and laughed at. For the first eight years of her career, some male colleagues mocked and harassed her, undermining her talents in photography. But as her work began reaching the world — published in such high-profile outlets as New York magazine — she earned the respect of her colleagues and is now considered one of the most distinguished photojournalists in Gaza.

“I created myself,” she says proudly, “all on my own.”

Running toward the fire

Despite the dangers of her profession, Abu Elouf says she’s not afraid to die.

“I don’t know what it’s like to run from danger, I only run toward it. Even when a missile is dropping, I don’t run,” she says defiantly.

Her courage didn’t come overnight. Reminiscing on the first anti-occupation demonstration she covered, Abu Elouf confesses she ran away with protesters when Israeli soldiers began firing bullets and tear gas. When she returned home and saw that her colleagues’ photographs were better than hers, she vowed to never run away again.

“My job isn’t to hide, it’s to photograph. Even when everyone around you is screaming, covering their ears as the missiles are dropping and they’re trying to find a place to hide, you don’t look down or look for safety, you focus on them,” she says, now a seasoned war photographer.

The only thing that scares her, she says, is the prospect of losing her children.

That fear was realized for many of her colleagues, including her dear friend Mohammed Alaloul, an Anadolu Agency photographer. She rushed to his side in November when he learned that several family members, including four of his children, were killed in an Israeli airstrike.

The destroyed home of Alaloul. The attack killed four of his children as well as four of his brothers and some of their children and neighbors.

Adam, Alaloul’s youngest and only surviving child, suffered cuts from shrapnel. His mother had facial burns and broken bones.

Abu Elouf says she swallowed the lump in her throat and choked back a scream as she photographed him praying over the bodies of his children.

One of her photos shows Alaloul still wearing his press vest, tears streaming down his face as he clutches his daughter’s lifeless body to his chest. Behind the camera, she wept too.

“This isn’t uncommon, seeing journalists and photographers finding their dead children while working,” Abu Elouf says. “My biggest fear is finding myself in the position of the people I photograph, to be the one pictured mourning over my children’s bodies.”

Many Palestinians believe Israel is targeting journalists and their families. The Israeli army insists its forces do not intentionally target journalists and that Israel supports a free press.

Since October 7, at least 108 journalists and media workers have been killed in Israeli airstrikes and other attacks — 103 of whom are Palestinian, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. CPJ says it’s the deadliest period for journalists since it began gathering data in 1992, and that it’s also investigating about 350 additional cases of potential killings, arrests and injuries in the region.

The killing of her colleagues has become so frequent that ordinary Palestinians have begun distancing themselves from journalists to avoid airstrikes, Abu Elouf says.

“In the past, civilians would stay close to journalists because they felt safer near us. Now they stay as far away as possible,” she says. “If I’m in line at a bakery or an ATM, strangers on the street are scared to stand anywhere near me. They say to each other: ‘She’s a journalist, stay away from her. They might kill her while we’re close by.’”

Abu Elouf understands their fear and doesn’t begrudge friends or family for keeping their distance — but says she must remain true to her calling.

“I work to capture stories, to make the world see. This is worth dying for.”

There’s nowhere in the world like Gaza

Despite a lifelong vow to never leave Gaza, Abu Elouf says she reluctantly accepted an opportunity in December from the New York Times, where she often works as a freelancer, to evacuate with her children to Qatar.

“Never in my life, not during any of the wars in Gaza including this one, did I want to leave Gaza. But I couldn’t risk one of my children being injured or facing any more mental trauma. I knew I’d never forgive myself,” she says.

Still, she struggles being far from home. “Being away from Gaza has been a million times harder than trying to survive the war and living under bombardment,” she says.

At night, Abu Elouf shuts her eyes and prays, begging sleep to come and silence the haunting memories of war and all it has stolen from her. She tries to imagine she’s back home, walking by the sea with her morning coffee or holding her mother’s hand.

“I try to sleep, but I can’t from the smell of death that won’t leave my nose and the faces of the dead that won’t leave my mind,” she says.

For now, Abu Elouf fills her days giving talks about the war, advocating for her colleagues still in Gaza, and helping her children navigate life in a foreign land. She doesn’t know which direction her career will take. Until she can return to Gaza, Abu Elouf says she’ll likely follow Palestinians injured and displaced from the war to wherever they have been evacuated and continue documenting their lives there.

She’s also started practicing English, hoping it’ll help her land assignments in other conflict zones, like Ukraine or Sudan. It’s her duty as a photojournalist, she says, to give voice to oppressed people everywhere.

But no matter where she goes, there’s only one place she’d rather be.

“Gaza is intertwined with my heart and soul. I love her sea, her energy. She is what inspired my love for photojournalism. If I could be anywhere — even with the injustice, the violence, the war — it would be Gaza.”

His photograph of five young people lounging on the Brooklyn waterfront as smoke engulfed Manhattan mesmerized viewers and stirred controversy.