DOHA: Palestinian Reuters photojournalist Mohammed Salem has won the prestigious World Press Photo of the Year for his picture showing a woman embracing the body of a child wrapped in white cloth – a quiet moment of intense grief.
The woman is Inas Abu Maamar, 36, and the body she was holding in the photo was that of her five-year-old niece, Saly.
The picture was taken in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on October 17 at the Nasser Hospital morgue, where residents were going to search for missing relatives.
“It was a powerful and a sad moment, and I felt the picture sums up the broader sense of what was happening in the Gaza Strip,” Salem said.
The moment was particularly poignant for the photographer, whose wife gave birth just days before.
He found Inas squatting on the ground, embracing the child, at the Nasser Hospital morgue, where residents were going to search for missing relatives. Inas had raced to the family home when she heard that it had been hit, and then on to the morgue.
