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Just before her life was cut short, Fatima had forged a bond with Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi. A video correspondence and exchange that led to the making of a movie: Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk. Selected at Cannes, this film has, in spite of itself, become a tribute, an act of remembrance.
Fatima could have been hailed as one of the great voices of the image, a young, committed, and determined Palestinian photojournalist. Her story could have been that of a woman behind the camera, lighting up the night, capturing the truth.
But no.
And it wasn’t fate that decided otherwise. This was not inevitable. This was a crime. An organized, planned, perpetrated massacre. A genocide, ostentatious and deliberate, under the gaze of a resigned, complicit, and complacent international community.
Fatima Hassouna—I was not at all familiar with this name.
“I want a death that the whole world will hear about”
And yet, I later learned that she was nicknamed the “Eye of Gaza.” She was there, in the heart of the ruins, like a remedy for fatality. She documented the daily horror, the pain, the life that resists under the rubble. She sent out shards of truth, fragments of dignity, from hell.
Fatima was killed. The eye of Gaza has closed.
But what they wanted to kill was not just one woman. Not just one more woman. They wanted to kill a voice. A gaze. A memory. Because beyond the bombs, beyond death, that’s what they are trying to destroy: the act of witnessing. This tenuous yet vital, fragile yet powerful link between Gaza and the rest of the world. Every murdered journalist is another silenced voice, a victory for the code of silence.
Fatima was killed.
A sentence in the passive voice that sounds like a death knell in the condescending media. A neutral statement that erases the murderer and dilutes the crime. As if the murderer were unattainable, indefinable, sacred, unspeakable.
Wrong. Fatima was killed, bombed along with ten members of her family, including her pregnant sister, by the criminal, genocidal state of Israel. In remembering her, let us have the decency to put words to the evil.
Fatima was 25 years old and had graduated in multimedia from Gaza’s University College of Applied Sciences. What they wanted to destroy was a woman. A voice. But also a promise for the future. It’s the Palestinian intelligentsia that’s being assassinated. Artists, thinkers, journalists. Those who enlighten. Those who disturb.
Fatima was preparing for a new chapter in her life. She was due to get married in August. But Israel has turned Gaza into an open-air cemetery, a hell on earth. A false commune for thousands of lives cut short, dreams shattered, stories interrupted without warning. Anonymous stories under the rubble, so that memory is erased along with the body.
“I want a death that the whole world will hear about,” she wrote.
Fatima Hassouna. Before her death, her name meant nothing to me.
Mea culpa.
