Out of the powerful images emerging from Gaza, one picture stood out. Contains graphic images.
This boy lost his home and collection of pet birds in Gaza. One white dove survived.
![This boy lost his home and collection of pet birds in Gaza. One white dove survived.]()
Ezz AL-ZANOON / APAimages / Rex
As picture editor at BuzzFeed UK, I scroll through hundreds of photos every day. The recent influx of images showing the devastation of the Israel-Gaza conflict have become all too familiar.
Press photo agencies offer scenes of destroyed Palestinian buildings: houses reduced to gaping holes, dangling steel girders, and crumpled grey concrete. Piles of debris that were once people's homes are now sites for Palestinians to pick through. In some cases, they are the graves of the people who lived there.
While searching through these bleak images this week, one stood out — a Palestinian boy of around 13 years old cradling a white dove in the rubble of a shattered building.
The dove, a universal symbol of peace, lies injured in the boy's hands. Knowing nothing of the story behind the photo, it's easy to sentimentalise such a poignant image.
To find out more, I contacted the UK supplier of the photo, Rex Features, which put me in touch with APA Images, an independent Palestinian photojournalism agency based at the heart of the conflict.
The photo was taken by 22-year-old Palestinian Mahmoud Imad Al-Zanoon, a professional photographer who has been documenting the conflict since he was 16. Naaman Omar, general manager of APA Images, acted as translator for Al-Zanoon in a phone interview from Gaza.
Through Omar, Al-Zanoon told me the boy and the dove were in the city of Beit Lahia, north of the Gaza Strip, near the Israeli border.
He didn't know the boy's name (Al-Zanoon was moving quickly so as to get as many pictures of the area as possible) but he did speak to him to learn that the ruined building in the background was the boy's home. He and his family were in a shelter when their house was destroyed.
Returning to the site alone, the boy found that the family's collection of pet birds, including doves, chickens, and canaries, had all been killed, except this one white dove that had survived the shelling. "My family are in the school shelter and they might come here in an hour to help me find our things," he told Al-Zanoon.
A solitary boy searching his ruined home must be a common sight in a region where the average age is 17, according to Channel 4's Jon Snow. "The people that live in Gaza are mainly unbelievably young," Snow tells us in a YouTube video. "A quarter of a million are under 10."
Children have played a horrifying role in the conflict in recent weeks. This was highlighted when the names of 373 children killed in Gaza were published in UK newspapers on Wednesday.
The Guardian's Peter Beaumont witnessed the shelling of children playing hide and seek among fishermen's shacks in Gaza's port on 16 July. Four were killed. His fellow journalists administered first aid to two other wounded children, and a photographer carried one to an ambulance.
![]()
Smoke billows from a beach shack following an Israeli military strike, on 16 July, 2014 in Gaza City which killed four children.
THOMAS COEX/AFP / Getty
View Entire List ›
