In Gaza, where pain is the only constant, Ismail Abu Hatab was born an artist — someone who saw light as hope, and the camera as survival.

He wasn’t just a photographer behind the lens. He was a living witness to what remained of life in a bleeding land. He dreamed of leaving Gaza one day — not to escape it, but to carry it with him to the world, to make its story heard, its resilience seen.

Today, his lens went dark.

Ismail was martyred this morning, while doing what he always did: telling the story.
Documenting it with eyes that never missed a child’s face, a mother’s hand, or the fading shadow of a tent.

In a time of war and siege, when the world turned away, Ismail built an art installation titled: “Between Sky and Sea.”

It was a project born under bombardment, shaped in displacement, and sent — without its maker — to Chicago, after being first shown in Los Angeles inside a symbolic Palestinian tent.

He couldn’t leave Gaza. He was wounded, displaced, and deprived of even the basics. But he once said:
“I couldn’t leave Gaza, but I was able to send our story.”

His ambition was never small.
He dreamed of growing as a filmmaker, of learning new languages, of studying documentary cinema abroad.
But the world closed its borders.

Still, he kept filming — as if justice were watching. As if one image might melt the stone of global indifference.

He used to say: “Each image I take doesn’t just show what’s gone — it says we are still here. We are human. We love, we dream, we create, even on the edge of death.”

His photographs were not just snapshots. They were wounds.
Children playing among rubble, women hanging laundry beside tents, tired faces lit by dignity — and all captured as he dragged his injured leg, homeless, with no electricity or food.

In November 2023, Ismail was seriously injured and lost the ability to walk. But he never lost his will.

“I don’t film from the outside,” he said.
“I film from within. From the heart of the story.”

Today, he is no longer with us.

But his legacy lives on. His lens remains open in the eyes of those who watched him work through fire, holding his camera like a fruit of life in a field of death.

Ismail is gone.
But his images still scream:
“Gaza is not only death. It is dignity born every day from the rubble.”

Alaa Alburai, Kufi Productions