In February 2010, Australian photographer Jim McFarlane was documenting local children at an after-school club in Gaza City. Teachers had asked each child to bring in a sentimental item – something important to them. “One young boy, maybe 12 years old, brought along a blue plastic bag,” McFarlane tells me, his voice breaking. “Inside the bag were some bomb fragments and a tin, and inside the tin were the ashes of his father, who he saw get killed. That’s something I’ll always remember.”
The emotional encounter was one of many during a 10-day assignment in Gaza, where McFarlane was working as part of a trio of international photographers. They were there to document the lives of people in the wake of the Israeli incursion of December 27, 2008, known as Operation Cast Lead, which took place a year previously, and killed 1,417 Gazans, including 313 children. Thirteen Israelis, including three civilians, were killed in the period’s violence, four from friendly fire.
The driving force behind the photographic mission, which was supported by Save the Children, was Lebanese-English photographer Anthony Dawton, who’d been working in the West Bank with children’s charity Al Madad Foundation. Dawton brought along McFarlane, a colleague and close friend he’d met while living in Melbourne in the 1980s, and Italian photographer Giuseppe Aquili, who’d started out as Dawton’s assistant. Their backgrounds were in commercial photography, including weddings and advertising, but all found documentary photography more rewarding. “We want to show the reality of life in the places we work,” McFarlane says.
The trio’s 2010 Children of Gaza exhibition raised more than £150,000 for Save the Children in Gaza. Their images have been collected again for Ten Days in Gaza, a new book that the photographers crowdfunded after the recent Israeli offensive, following Hamas’s 7 October terror attack, with all funds from sales again going to FQMS: Al Quds Foundation for Medical Schools in Palestine.
It took six months to arrange permissions for their 2010 trip, the three men entering from Israel via the Erez crossing. “The destruction was intense,” says Aquili. “It was evident everywhere we went: people trying to rebuild or places still literally falling apart. The invasion had levelled so many buildings. People were dejected.”
Currently, 2 million people live on 365 square kilometres of land in Gaza, which contains eight refugee camps. “It was dreadful to see the conditions people were living in,” Dawton tells me. “Even the houses that were still standing had nothing you could call a modern convenience. People lived on nothing but they were kind and hospitable. All they were left with was education. We went to a girls’ school that had been bombed. The teachers were still teaching in the rubble. They were reading Charles Dickens – they asked me to take the class for 10 minutes. Moments like those uplifted me.”
Photographers working together is unusual, but the trio found benefits in their partnership. “It gave me freedom and safety,” explains Aquili. “When you work on your own, you worry about missing the moment – you’re trying to capture everything. But as there were two other photographers, I knew I could open my eyes, look around more, and maybe listen to a story, instead of taking pictures of everything.”
Since Gaza, Dawton and McFarlane have collaborated on other projects, including Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, Palestinian camps in Lebanon, and the city of Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, home to more than 1 million Rohingya Muslims who fled Myanmar. Aquili now works as a pastry chef in Italy.
Their experiences in Gaza made a lasting impact. “It made me realise how alike we all are,” says Aquili. “If you take away the regional and cultural differences, and look at the kids and families, they’re just people trying to make the best with what they have. Even among all the destruction and sacrifices they have to make, that was what the parents were thinking about: to try to better their lives and give their children hope for the future.
Five more photographs from the book
Anthony Dawton
“We were taken to a shelled building on the edge of Beit Hanoun. Apart from this boy, his sister and baby brother, the house seemed deserted. The boy took me to this shell hole in the wall and said the shell only just missed him. He adopted a look that made him seem older. I realised, belatedly, that I was looking at shellshock.”
Giuseppe Aquili
“I found this scene just outside Beit Lahiya. This Gaza road laid bare the contrast between the two countries, with smooth tarmacked roads and modern cars in Israel set against the scene here: donkeys pulling makeshift carts, no pavements and the piled-up steel wire evidence of severe bomb damage.”
Anthony Dawton
“We came across this street in Gaza City and saw a bunch of kids on our first day. It’s the cliche for photographers in conflict zones to show children reflecting the environment they have known since birth: the “Kalashnikov”, the stone-thrower, and the already traumatised child. Although some of that was true, we were to find the effect of growing up in Gaza was more complex and surprising.”
Giuseppe Aquili
“At this bombed playground, the destroyed slide looked like a stretcher. Had children been playing when the bomb fell? Would the strongest photograph involve children? After all, we had come to Gaza to photograph the children who lived there. I compromised. The children are walking in the middle distance, ghost-like.”
Anthony Dawton
“I observed this young girl in what turned out to be the ruins of her family house in Gaza City. She had a toy mobile phone hanging around her neck. I was told her mother had been killed when the house was bombed, and that the girl had tried to call her on her ‘phone’. It was one of those photographs I felt bad about taking, about intruding, even though it was taken using my longest lens, but I knew it had to be taken.”
Main image: Jim McFarlane
“The photograph was taken in Rafah in the south of Gaza, where the tunnels were. This was an area we were asked to avoid on safety grounds but the tunnels are such an important part of the Gaza story. The boy running across my frame gave the image scale and contrast to the destroyed building, and his energy gave poignancy to the photograph, or even hope.”
Ten Days in Gaza is published on 12 March (Hood Hood Books, £40). An exhibition is also planned for a London venue (TBC) in March. More of Dawton and McFarlane’s work.
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