Leaving with a broken heart: A photographer’s journey out of Gaza

“Life was beautiful,” photojournalist Mahmoud Nasser told us on the 27 November 2023 livestream. Mahmoud, who has Canadian citizenship, left Gaza with his pregnant wife and his family earlier this month. But, he said, he believed living in Gaza was “a calling – I had to go there, I wanted to go there. I wanted to capture my country … according to the way that I saw things.” “Everything about Gaza is amazing,” he explained. “But I don’t know if I can say the same about it now because it seems like everything has changed. The things that I loved when I was there, I don’t think they are there anymore.“ Mahmoud described the agonizing decisions he and his family had to make while under constant threat of Israeli bombing, especially as residents of Beit Hanoun in the north of the Gaza Strip. “In 2014, we lost our [generational] home in Beit Hanoun due to the war,” he said, referring to the Israeli attacks that summer. “But when this war broke out, I wasn’t in Beit Hanoun – my father was there, I was with my wife in Gaza [City]. When the current attacks started, Mahmoud said, he and his brother ultimately decided to bring their father to Gaza City. “Now, thinking about what transpired days later, it was a great decision because Beit Hanoun was the first place to evacuate. It got hit really hard. And had we gone there, [we] don’t know what would have happened,” he said. We discuss Mahmoud’s journalism work, his recent photo essays published by The Electronic Intifada, and what it was like being among thousands of internally displaced people sheltering in Khan Younis refugee camp before he left Gaza. We also talked about his dreams for his unborn child, and why he said he would go back to Gaza “in a heartbeat” to raise his family there. You can watch the entire broadcast here: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐜 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐚𝐝𝐚 Visit our website for more reporting: Facebook: Twitter: Instagram: Soundcloud: Spotify: Apple Podcasts: #TheElectronicIntifada #TheElectronicIntifadaPodcast