The omission of Gaza’s recent bombardment from your selection of iconic images of the 21st century is puzzling (‘The sight of it is still shocking’: 46 photos that tell the story of the century so far, 27 December). What about photos of the skeletal remains of Gaza’s landscape, after being bombarded with thousands of tons of explosives, using artificially intelligent software that is a harbinger of all our tomorrows?
What about the demonstrations across cities and campuses, or pensioners and priests opposing starvation and genocide being handcuffed and bundled into police vans? Or 18-month-old malnourished Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq being held by his mother in a nappy made out of a black plastic bag? Or the assembled photos by the Gaza Media Center of 238 journalists killed in the campaign, the highest number ever recorded in any conflict?
These are seared into our collective memories as much as photos of Ukraine, particularly for billions of people in the global south. The photo that was included of the West Bank separation barrier was no substitute for those devastating images.
Name and address supplied
• Your picture special includes a photograph of migrants stuck on the wall around Melilla, a Spanish exclave in Morocco, showing a golf links on the Spanish side of the wall complete with players intent on their game. This reminded me of a poem from the early 20th century by American social reformer Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn: “The golf links lie so near the mill / That almost every day / The laboring children can look out / And see the men at play.” Not a perfect analogy, but then it’s an imperfect world.
Phil Coughlin
Houghton-le-Spring, Tyne and Wear
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