A photographer who was about to get married was killed along with her five sisters in an attack on their home in Gaza City.
Fatima Hassouna, a well-known and beloved photojournalist in the Gaza Strip, was killed along with her five sisters in an Israeli airstrike on April 16, 2025. She was only 25 years old and had dreams of traveling and seeing the world.
Her parents were injured, Middle East Eye reports; the father is in critical condition and still unaware that his children have been killed. Her mother, though conscious, is said by her family to be in deep shock and will only talk about Fatima.
Fatima was killed just one day after it was announced that a documentary by Iranian French filmmaker Sepideh Farsi, “Take Your Soul and Walk,” focusing on her presence, would be screened at the Cannes Film Festival next month.
Like all Gazans, she had endured 18 months of hell, losing several family members in previous attacks. However, she was very excited about her wedding to her fiancé, Aziz.
According to Fatima’s brother Jihad: “She was crying on the phone and asked me to take care of myself and my brother. She said she felt like we could all die in Gaza because the bombing was constant, and danger was everywhere.”
Fatima has been described as a “high-flying and passionate” woman. She loved photography, wanted to participate in international exhibitions, and said her camera was her weapon of resistance against the war.
“My camera is like my gun. It changes the world and defends me. I can record people’s stories so that my family’s story is not lost in the dust of oblivion,” she said in an interview.
The war, with more than 200 Palestinian journalists killed since October 7, 2023, has been the “deadliest conflict in history” for journalists, according to the Watson Institute.
Fatima was a kind-hearted, hard-working girl, full of positive energy, said Haneen Salem, a friend and colleague of Fatima, who worked with her on the Untold Palestine project. Despite poverty, hunger and violence, she always said, “God will provide for us and compensate us.”
“Her fiancé was her main motivator,” Salem added. “They were supposed to celebrate their wedding next week. But now Aziz is in deep shock and cannot believe his death.”
According to her cousin, Fatima dreamed of building a happy home, having many children and raising them for a bright future.
She had a beautiful vision of the future for herself and her family. Now, Fatima and her dreams, like hundreds of thousands of other lives in Gaza, have been reduced to ashes under the rubble.
A relative of Akram al-Shafi’i, a Palestinian journalist killed in an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip, mourns at the morgue of the European Hospital in Rafah, January 6, 2024. AP – Hatem Ali
In March 2025, a project was launched by Forbidden Stories to reconstruct footage that had been lost due to the targeting of journalists. In this regard, Mahmoud al-Salim al-Basous, a Palestinian journalist who had previously worked for Reuters and Anadolu Agency, began filming. Only a few days later, on March 15, he was killed in an Israeli airstrike.
At least five Palestinian journalists using drones to document and report on the conflict in Gaza have been killed or seriously injured during Israel’s war against the people of Gaza since October 2023, according to a joint investigation by RFA and eleven other international media outlets, initiated by the Forbidden Stories Consortium. The investigation shows that Palestinian journalists, especially those using aerial imaging technologies, have been systematically targeted by the Israeli military.
On October 9, 2024, Fadi Al-Wahidi was reporting alongside a crew of journalists from Al Jazeera, Al Araby TV, and others, in the Al Saftawi area near Jabalia, when what they claim was an “Israeli quadcopter” initiated a chase that ended with Al-Wahidi being shot in the neck. Forbidden Stories and its partners reconstructed the event that has paralyzed both of his legs.
The Holocaust of Capitalism and the Last Days of the Lives of Two Million Palestinian Workers!
The genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust and barbarism that the Israeli government, with the support of every kind of government up to the bone marrow of the genocidal United States and its partners, has unleashed in Gaza with hundreds of millions of tons of bombs from the arsenals of the American and European bourgeoisie, has truly whitewashed the Holocaust of the Nazi capitalists. Every single point of Gaza is an Auschwitz. The number of horrible multi-ton bombs that have been dropped by the Zionist capitalist bombers on children, infants, the elderly, women, infants, and the sick in these 19 months is many times the number of cursed people living in Gaza. Every human being has received tons of incendiary bombs. This is the only gift that capitalism has for humanity.
For 50 days, no food, water, fuel, clothing, any necessities of life, any essential and basic need for survival has entered Gaza. The Holocaust-creating Israeli army and its American and European supporters have blocked the way for every morsel of food and water to enter this burning hell. The last openings of hope for breathing and life are closing at full speed before the eyes of two million people. There is no strength to move, we are alive, but the bombs continue to fall, body by body, without interruption and continuously, with the largest Israeli and American bombers, on the democracy camp, on the corpses, on the ruins without any water or food. The history of capitalism is, moment by moment, the history of the most exhausting exploitations, the most explosive atrocities, in the burning of humanity, but what is happening in Gaza is beyond description. Two million people are about to surrender to death, thousands upon thousands, under bombardment, hunger, absolute deprivation of food, water, every kind of lifeline, every means of livelihood, everything that sustains life. They will be killed and sacrificed so much that the survivors will agree to forced migration, to completely abandon the residential slums, to abandon the ruins resulting from the bombings, to abandon a place called Palestine. The world, including several billion workers, are living but buried witnesses and fossils of this Holocaust. If these several billion people were to block the artery of profit and capital production for just one hour in unison, together, and in unison. If they were to shout in anger and protest that the Holocaust should be stopped or the wheel of capitalist existence would stop spinning, then the face of this old rotten rope would begin to change seriously. The Holocaust perpetrators would be terrified and two million cursed Palestinian workers would also be saved from certain death. If only these billions of workers would think for a minute that the entire lives of several million people, several million chained together, are in their hands and by turning this key, they would force each of the predatory, cannibalistic capitalist governments to stop continuing the Holocaust in Gaza.
Mazdak Kohkan