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AFP / Mahmud Hams

The man in the wheelchair

Thursday 18 October 2018

Gaza-based Mahmud Hams received top honors in the photo category at the 25th Bayeux-Calvados War Correspondents Prize for his image of a wheelchair-bound demonstrator during the “Great March of Return” protests earlier this year.

A 38-year-old resident of the Gaza Strip, Hams has covered numerous conflicts, from demonstrations to incursions by the Israeli army. Here he describes the particulars of these protests.

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AFP / Mahmud Hams

The promised land, at last

Wednesday 9 August 2017

"I had waited 25 years to get to Jerusalem," writes Mahmud Hams, a photographer based in Gaza.

"My grandfather used to go there every Friday. He would pray and then go visit friends and family in towns and cities in Israel and the West Bank. But that was in another time, in another world. Before the first intifada."

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AFP Photo / Mahmud Hams

At the beach in Gaza

Monday 29 December 2014

Mahmud Hams spent the summer photographing the last war in Gaza. "Fifty days of shots of children crushed in the rubble. Parents weeping beside lifeless little bodies. Death. Destruction. Funerals of men, women, children, sometimes very young children," he writes. "And suddenly, on the same beach where an Israeli missile killed four children playing football, I see an image of pure joy: a happy father throwing his laughing baby up into the air. Ten days after the end of the war, I understand that it is over."

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AFP Photo / Mahmud Hams

After war, Gaza goes back to school

Wednesday 8 October 2014

"Pictures of children going back to school in Gaza - I've taken hundreds of them", writes Mahmud Hams, a photographer at AFP Gaza bureau. "But those I took this year, I will never forget."

"On the children's faces, in place of the joy of being reunited with friends from school, or the enthusiasm of those beginning a new school year, you can often read anxiety and bad memories. When they get there, they don't know if they will find their school friends alive after Gaza lived through its deadliest war in years, a 50-day conflict which left nearly 2,200 Palestinians dead. Among them were around 500 children."

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