For the second year in a row, a picture featuring the tragedy of the ongoing genocide in Gaza wins the World Press Photo of the Year.
World Press Photo of the Year (2025)
This year’s picture depicts Mahmoud Ajjour, a nine-year-old Palestinian boy whose arms were mutilated in an Israeli attack last year. He was fleeing Gaza with his family when he turned back to urge others on before an explosion severed one of his arms and badly injured the other. The two arms were amputated just close to the shoulder.
Now armless and in Qatar, Mahmoud Ajjour was captured under the showers of the sun, his skeleton bare behind his white singlet. Click. Click. Another Palestinian tragedy has made another global spectacle.
The world doesn’t need another World Photo of the Year to appreciate the tragedy unfolding in Gaza. Bold Palestinian journalists—about 200 of whom have been killed in the war—have shared thousands of pictures and videos over the days and weeks and months since October 7 to document the devastation of a people and the destruction of a city. Israeli soldiers have regaled the world with pictures and videos of their adventures bombing homes and shooting civilians. There’s more than enough pictures to go around.
That the picture of yet another Palestinian made it to the World Press Photo of the Year highlights the sheer enormity of their enduring Palestinian tragedy, a tragedy that a camera can barely capture, and shows why the world must move beyond the spectacle to see the war ends now.
We need it to. Since the war started, the pictures and videos rolling out of the enclave have turned into a performance for moral or emotional consumption by a detached global audience, but the reality is far less performative for Palestinians.
World Press Photo of the Year (2024)
Before Mahmoud Ajjour, the 2024 winning photo also captured a Palestinian cradling the cold body of her five-year-old niece killed in yet another Israeli attack. Children are still being killed. Israel has killed more children—other people’s nieces, sons, and daughters—before and since then. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) puts the numbers at 17,000+ since the war started on October 7. More than 2,000 of these children never didn’t clock 2 years before their lives were cut short. The bodies of some of the dead were never recovered from the rubble. Others were too blown to pieces to even be considered bodies anymore
One would think, expect, or at least hope that this macabre spectacle will inspire meaningful interventions to end the Palestinian suffering, but no. Here we are, more than 17,000 killed later, with the world calling on “both sides” to end the war. Meanwhile, UNICEF reported that more than 300 children were killed in just 10 days after Israel resumed its campaign following the ceasefire—a ceasefire that was supposed to lead to an end to the war.
The Palestinian situation and the pictures emerging from it remind me of The Vulture and The Little Girl. In 1993, The New York Times published the picture of Kong Niong, a Sudanese boy, with the caption: “A little girl (sic), weakened from hunger, collapsed recently along the trail to a feeding center in Ayod. Nearby, a vulture waited.” The picture won the photographer, Kevin Carter, the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in 1994. It also generated massive awareness about the Second Sudanese Civil War and the famine it imposed on civilians.
However, critics lampooned Carter for exploiting the boy’s tragedy. Kevin Carter’s trouble started when a listener phoned in in during one of his interviews and asked him what had happened to the little boy. “I didn’t wait to find out after this shot,” he said, “I had a flight to catch.” Then the caller said, “I put it to you that there were two vultures on that day, one had a camera.”
Like the hapless Sudanese boy stalked by a vulture, the children of Gaza are being stalked vultures armed, not just with cameras, but also with powerful military, media power, and the backing of complicit nations. Some enable the carnage. Others uphold it with their silence.
Unlike Carter, the world must move beyond its fascination with the spectacle of Palestinian children’s suffering and begin to intervene meaningfully to end it. Pictures of Palestinian children dying at the behest of these vultures should not just be a spectacle for magazines, social media, and the World Press Photo of Year judges. They should inspire stones against the vultures stalking these children, against those who put them in the world’s largest “open-air prison”, and give them the respite and justice they sorely need and deserve.
The Palestinian horror is real. As witnesses to that horror, we have one of two choices: speak up for the Palestinian people and against the genocide, or remain voyeurs taking in the suffering of a people. As Susan Sontang wrote in Regarding the Pain of Others, “the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it... or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.”
There’s so much more the world can do to ease the suffering. This is not the time for learning. For over a year, we’ve witnessed the brutality of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the West Bank, and beyond. This reality is a tragedy—not a spectacle. We can’t afford to turn it into a show for voyeurs.
*Hussein Adoto is a medical student and writer based in Nigeria.
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