Fatima Hassouna, the 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist who has chronicled the claustrophobic dignity of life in the #Gaza Strip, was killed Tuesday in an Israeli airstrike that obliterated her family home in #Gaza City#. Nine members of her family died alongside her. The strike came just weeks before her international debut at the Cannes Film Festival, where she was due to be the central protagonist of a documentary selected for the ACID programme.
The film, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk results from a year-long collaboration between Hassouna and the French-Iranian director Sepideh Farsi. Based on video conversations and firsthand footage captured by Hassouna, the film unfolds as an extended exchange between two women, one living under siege and the other watching from afar.
The Israeli military said the strike was aimed at a Hamas operative in the area. Officials claimed precautions had been taken to avoid civilian casualties but did not explain how or why an entire residential block housing ten civilians was destroyed. Friends and colleagues of Hassouna are not persuaded. “Fatima wasn’t a militant. She was a journalist. That house was full of women and children,” said one fellow reporter in Gaza, speaking anonymously. “She showed the world the parts of this war that don’t make the headlines—maybe that was the threat.”
Hassouna’s photographs were rarely printed in mainstream newspapers but widely circulated online. They had a distinctive stillness that didn’t dramatize. They lingered, offering no abstractions. A boy clutching his shoes amid the rubble. A woman sweeping a floor open to the sky. A cat curled beneath a broken window frame.
In statements issued following her death, the ACID programme at Cannes confirmed that the screening would go forward as planned and include a tribute. “Fatima Hassouna was not only the subject of this film—she was its co-author,” read the note from the selection board. “This screening will now stand as a testament to her life and courage.”
Filmmaker Sepideh Farsi, in mourning, called Hassouna “the soul” of the film. “Her voice, her gaze, her presence—everything in this film carries her. She taught me what it means to endure and to speak, even when you’re surrounded by death,” she said in an interview with Le Monde.
Hassouna is one of more than 150 media workers killed in Gaza since the escalation of Israeli hostilities in October 2023, according to the International Federation of Journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists has called it “the deadliest conflict for journalists in modern history.” Many were freelancers with no protective gear, no international backing, and no option to evacuate.
Fatima never left Gaza. She had chances, say colleagues, but refused. She told friends she couldn’t bear to document the war from the outside. On her blog, in a post dated January, she wrote: “I stay because someone has to show this life from the inside, with eyes, not drones.”
In Gaza, reactions to her death were immediate and raw. “She was Gaza’s eye. Now we are blind,” said Nour Abu Qamar, a young photographer who trained under Hassouna. “She didn’t just record events. She made people look.”
If there is any consolation, it is that the film survives. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk will premiere at Cannes as scheduled. It will not be the work of an outsider explaining a war-torn land where women, children, and media workers are primary targets. Instead, it will be a collaboration between two women—one living, one killed—and a dispatch from within the horror.
