Gaza 2014: life on the front line

Yahya Hassouna is a Palestinian cameraman living and working in Gaza. He is a Rory Peck News finalist for work that he shot for AFP during and after the war in summer 2014. Here he looks back on that time and describes living through and filming the conflict on his doorstep.

As a child of the Jabalia refugee camp, I grew up with war and conflict. It’s always been around me, so it was natural to document it. I first held a camera aged seven years old, and since then I have rarely been found without it.

As a child I accompanied my filmmaker father when he was asked to shoot weddings or other celebrations in Gaza. For a short time I lived in Germany and was lucky enough to learn from filmmakers I admired including Sweden’s Pae Holmquist and Germany’s Sabrina Dittus. Since then, I’ve recorded hundreds of hours of footage showing daily life in Gaza, images I hope may one day be useful for humanity to see the brutality of war. It is my job to be a witness, to shed light on what needs to be seen. It makes me happy to see my work published worldwide. Living in Gaza, under the same suffocating restrictions as everyone else, my camera is the eye of freedom.

When the war broke out between Israel and Hamas in the summer of 2014, I spent 15 days filming the escalation – it was exhausting. One day, at home, I was resting with my pregnant wife and daughter when a huge explosion happened next to our building. I jumped up and started filming. My daughter started sobbing uncontrollably so I stopped to comfort her but she didn’t sleep that night. The next day I decided to get my wife and child out of Gaza through Rafa. I took them with me as I filmed thousands of people at the crossing trying to get out. My family finally got through, but as I watched them leave, my heart was torn between being with them and bearing witness to what was happening in Gaza. I decided to stay.

I spent the rest of the war working day and night. Whenever I filmed families whose homes were destroyed or when I filmed injured children, I thought of my own family. I couldn’t stop thinking about my daughter and the nightmares she continued to have, even after she left Gaza.

I spent a lot of time at my parent’s house. One day I got the dreaded call from the Israeli army to evacuate the premises. It is common practice and I’ve seen it happen to many families in Gaza and I could imagine it happening to my parents too so I moved them and my brother with his two sons, safely out of the building and then went back to get my camera to film what was about to happen. I arrived just in time to see the house 100 meters away being hit.

As a cameraman in Gaza, you are inextricably linked to what goes on around you. One day as I was running to cover a story in the Zaitun area, a man started screaming that a young girl had just been found buried under rubble. There were no cars around, no ambulances, and the cell phone network was down, so I started running to the main street to find help. A minibus hit me. I fell and my camera broke. For the next eight months, every time I lifted my camera, the pain in my arm reminded me that I too was not immune to the chaos of war.

The Rory Peck Awards 2015, hosted by Sky News' Alex Crawford, will be held on Wednesday 18th November at London's BFI Southbank. Tickets available at rorypeckawards.org