Saher Alghorra wins Pulitzer for haunting Gaza war photography
He photographed a wounded child, a bombed tower and a Ramadan meal in ruins while surviving Gaza himself. Saher Alghorra just won the Pulitzer for it.
Saher Alghorra won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Photography for a series that put Gaza’s devastation and starvation in plain view, while also exposing the moral strain of documenting a war from inside the catastrophe. The Pulitzer Prizes described Alghorra as a photojournalist who was born, lives and works in Gaza, and said he got his first camera in 2017. The award carries a $15,000 prize.
His winning images move from one rupture to the next: a woman carrying her injured son to Hamad Hospital after he was shot while trying to get aid near the Zikim crossing; the Israeli bombing of Mushtaha Tower in Gaza City on Sept. 5, 2025; a child wounded in Gaza City on April 12, 2025; and a Ramadan scene in Beit Lahia on March 4, 2025, with a family breaking fast amid the ruins of their home. Together, the pictures show not only the force of bombardment but the hunger, displacement and daily improvisation that have defined civilian life across Gaza.
The work has taken on added weight because international journalists were barred from Gaza, leaving Palestinian photographers like Alghorra to carry much of the visual record from inside the territory. That made his role more than documentary. He was showing a war while living through the same shortages of food, shelter and medical care that his photographs captured.
The images land in a public health emergency as much as a conflict zone. Aid access is perilous, hospitals are overwhelmed, and repeated displacement has left families exposed to starvation and injury. Alghorra’s frame does not separate the blast from the aftermath: the child in pain, the road to the hospital, the meal eaten in a destroyed home, the tower falling over a city already in crisis.
The International Committee of the Red Cross gave Alghorra its 2025 Humanitarian Visa d’or award for photojournalism on civilians in Gaza, and World Press Photo has described him as a Palestinian photojournalist documenting life and conflict in Gaza. The Pulitzer now places him among the year’s top news photographers, but the deeper significance lies in the burden behind the pictures: in Gaza, bearing witness has become inseparable from surviving the same war.
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