This autumn, Ishara Art Foundation is showing Prix Pictet: Storm — a photography exhibition that looks at the world we are all trying to make sense of right now. Prix Pictet has been around since 2008, using photography to talk about sustainability, but not in a dry or predictable way. Every cycle focuses on one idea, and this year it is Storm — not just the kind that comes from the sky, but the kind we are living through: political storms, environmental collapse, social tensions, everything that feels like it is always on the edge of breaking.

Twelve photographers were shortlisted, each approaching this idea from a completely different angle. One of them is Belal Khaled, a widely recognised Palestinian photojournalist working today — his work has been awarded the POY Award, the Lucie Impact Award, multiple Siena Photo Awards, and featured in TIME’s Top 100 Photos of the Year and CNN’s Year in Pictures. In 2024, he was also selected for the prestigious World Press Photo Masterclass.

His project “Hands Tell Stories” shows Gaza. He started this series while living in a tent outside the morgue at Nasser Hospital in Gaza, after his home was destroyed. Instead of turning his camera to the obvious scenes of devastation, he focused on hands — their scars, their stillness, the way they hold on to people and to life. These hands reveal stories that are often too heavy or too painful to say out loud.

Khaled wore a mask constantly, and from within that reality, he created a series that speaks through hands. Each photo captures a different moment of war, told not through faces or scenes, but through small gestures that hold entire stories.

The works will be on view until December 13. In our conversation with Belal, we went far beyond this series — we spoke about his own story, what he fears, what he chooses not to show, and how documenting war has changed him.

— Belal, we will get to your work very soon, but first, I would like to go back to where your path began. You were born in a refugee camp in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza. Your house was completely destroyed. Could you take me back to that time and share what your life was like?

— Sure. There were tiny houses, tiny streets, most people without electricity, and unstable water networks. The internet only reached our area around 2012. No one truly took care of the people.

So I spent most of my time on the streets — playing football with other kids, walking around, joining protests to support Palestine. Around that time, I also attended a calligraphy workshop because I needed to work. In a refugee family, everyone has to work to help.

So I started working after school when I was around 13. That is when I was introduced to art — the smell of spray paint, the techniques, how to make signs and how to write Arabic calligraphy. Our work was mostly for advertisements and signs, but also for protest banners during the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

By the time I was 16, I opened my own small workshop at home — we had an empty room, and I turned it into a studio. I started doing educational artworks for schools: diagrams of the human body for science, maps for geography, things like that. I was studying and working at the same time.

A lot of our work was political. In our camp, every week we had three or four martyrs. Families would invite me to write their names on the walls or paint their portraits. That made me feel like I was doing something meaningful — supporting my people, my country, delivering a message. I was still a child, and I didn’t fully understand the importance of it, but it came naturally. When you see what happens to your camp, your family, your country, even a child wants to do something — to defend their home, to express the pain.

I began doing graffiti calling for freedom for Palestine, for our right to education — things that mattered to us as children.

After high school, I started focusing more on photography. I always loved it, but I didn’t have the budget for a camera — not even to rent one. So I worked for three years to save money. I didn’t have enough in the end, so I borrowed from friends. It was a Canon 550D — it cost around $1,100. My parents told me I was too young and shouldn’t spend that much on equipment, that I should get a cheaper camera for $200. But I told them, “No — I want a professional camera. I know what I’m doing, and I know what I will become.”

I photographed everything. I wanted to explore myself and discover what I wanted to be. Every artist or photographer starts this way — exploring what they feel connected to.

After two years, I decided to focus on photojournalism. I had the chance to work as a photographer for the Anadolu Agency around 2012–2013. It was an amazing beginning for anyone who wants to be a photojournalist.

My first war coverage was in 2012, during the war in Gaza — that was the first war I ever documented.

— But it wasn’t the first war you lived through. So before we talk about that experience, may I ask — what do you remember from the day your house was bombed?

— Yes, my house was attacked three times. The first attack happened on October 26th, 2023. That morning, I was at the funeral of Wael al-Dahdouh’s family.

I left home at around 7:30 am to go to the hospital, and just 30 minutes after I left, Israel attacked our house. The rocket fell exactly where I had parked our car.

I received a message from my sister. She said, “Please come, we were attacked. They bombed our house.” And at that moment, I didn’t know what to do. We hadn’t even buried Wael’s family yet. We were in another city, and I knew that going from Deir el-Balah to Khan Yunis would take at least two hours. And two hours feels like forever. I was far away, and my own family had just been bombed.

I tried calling them, but the network was almost impossible. So I called people who lived near us and asked them to go to my house and check. They went and told me my family was okay.

But for around 40 minutes to an hour, I knew nothing. And during that time, you feel completely helpless — nervous, shaking, trying to call everyone, wanting to do something, anything. But you can’t. You are stuck. You can’t reach them, and you can’t get there. You just wait in fear.

— Was that the attack where your mother and sister were injured?

— It was the second one. My mom and my sister were injured, and they were taken to the hospital. And again, I wasn’t at home.

There is something strange, a coincidence between the two attacks. During the first one, I was at the funeral of Wael al-Dahdouh’s family, with his son Hamza. During the second one, I was again with Wael — but this time at Hamza’s funeral.

And before I even got the call from my sister, something inside me told me that something bad was going to happen to my family. Then my sister called. She said, “They attacked our house.”

Alhamdulillah, they were almost okay. The injuries weren’t severe.

— And eventually your house was completely destroyed, right?

— Yes, it was the third attack. We finally left our house and went to Rafah. On the same day — just three hours after we left — they bombed it with three F-16 rockets. Three.

The house burned the entire night. It kept burning until the rain came and finally put out the fire.

Later, the tanks and bulldozers arrived in that area, and they destroyed everything — not only my house, but the houses of my family, my grandfather, my cousins, my neighbours. Around one kilometre of our neighbourhood… all of it vanished. It became a desert of destruction.

— Thank you for sharing all of this. Your first experience photographing a war was in 2012. How was that for you? Of course, you had lived your whole life in a conflict zone and had witnessed so much — but this time you were documenting it. Could you tell me what that was like?

— I would say, it didn’t surprise me. I had already witnessed the 2008 war, which was even harsher than the 2012 war. So I already knew what war means.

Even before I became a photographer, every time there was an attack on our neighbourhood, we would run out to help people. We survived with them, cleaned the streets, pulled people out from under the rubble, supported the civilians. All children in Gaza grow up in this reality — it is the same for everyone.

So when I started covering war in 2012, it didn’t feel like something new. The only difference was that now I was holding a camera. And my mission wasn’t only to help local people — it was to deliver their message to the world.

It was very difficult to separate my humanity from my profession. You have to stay standing, you have to capture the moment. You have to control your feelings. Because if you fall apart, you can’t take the photo, and then people outside will never see the crimes happening there.

During that time, all of us — Palestinian journalists — supported each other. If someone broke down, the others helped him stand again. We don’t have international journalists in Gaza; the occupation doesn’t allow foreign press to enter. So all the photographers and journalists are Palestinians, and we all know each other. We work side by side and help each other through the missions.

— In May 2021, you found an unexploded missile and covered it with calligraphy. Could you remember this day?

— This is the nature of Palestinians — we know how to turn pain into hope. We can create life from under the rubble, from under death. We are a people who love life. We actually teach the world what life means.

We don’t want to die. Nobody wants to die. But if we die, we want to die defending our country. Naturally, we have dreams, we have stories, we have lives we want to live.

So, as an artist and a photojournalist, during the 2020–2021 war, there was a day when a missile fell on a house full of people, but it didn’t explode. It was in the middle of Gaza. And I decided, during the war, to go there and paint on that missile.

I wanted to send a message that, whatever happens, we still choose life. We turn destruction into something meaningful. We want to show the world that we have dreams, that we had a life before the wars, that we still have a life.

Calligraphy is what I do outside of war. Now I had no canvas, no studio, no space to paint. So I turned the destruction — the ruins, the missiles — into my canvas.

Technically, the missile still had explosive powder inside, but they had removed the trigger, so it wouldn’t detonate. And for us, this is sadly “normal.” These same missiles fall on us every month, every war. Many of them don’t explode. We walk past them all the time.

I remember when I published the photos — they went viral. People around the world were shocked and impressed. They couldn’t believe that in the middle of a war, someone would paint on a missile. Usually, if this is ever done, it is after the war, when everything is secure. But we did it during the war — because nobody else can.

And that showed people how strong Gazans are, how Palestinians hold onto hope even in the darkest days.

— Thank you. At the Prix Pictet: Storm exhibition, we see the war through hands. I would like to ask you about a photo that isn’t part of this project — the image of a child’s arm holding his mother’s hand. Could you tell me about it?

— This was at the beginning of the starvation in Gaza — around April 2024. It was in Rafah. People set up a tent to serve as an emergency medical point, because Abu Yusuf al-Najjar Hospital had been attacked and no one could reach it anymore.

I remember this photo so clearly. It was of a little boy — his name was Yazan Al-Kafarna, and he was seven years old. His mother was holding his hand, trying to warm him, trying to keep him alive, because she could literally see her son disappearing in front of her eyes. He was literally fading away. He had lost maybe 50%, even 70% of his body weight. His whole body was just skin and bone. He had lost his ability to speak.

And all of this happened because there was no food and no medicine. The only thing the medical team could give him was saline, just to keep his body hydrated. But of course, that is not food. That is not real treatment.

I took that photograph on March 2, 2024. Two weeks later, Yazan passed away.

— You also wrote a post on March 6, 2024, where you mentioned that your friend had died. If you feel comfortable, could you tell me who he was?

— I was writing about all of my friends — because I didn’t lose just one. I lost more than fifteen of my closest friends. I lost more than 150 of my colleagues. We worked together. Sometimes we slept in the same places, we ate together, we laughed together. We shared so many moments.

I remember writing that quote when I was in a tent in front of the Kuwaiti Hospital in Rafah. We lived in that tent after we left Khan Younis, and I stayed there until the day I left Gaza. It was the middle of the night. I could hear the drones above my head, and I started to remember everything that had happened to us — the whole timeline of the genocide.

And the painful thing is that there were people I had forgotten who had died. Not because they didn’t matter — but because the number was just so huge. Some were my relatives. Some were my neighbours. Many were colleagues. Every day we lost someone we knew.

This war erased our memories. Now we live with new ones, and all of them are filled with pain and loss. I can only remember the painful moments.

I can’t remember how life was before. I can’t remember what a clean street in Gaza looked like.

I can’t remember the Corniche, or eating clean food, or having a bathroom in our home, or having a ceiling above our heads. I simply cannot remember that life anymore.

— With your photos, you show everything that is happening. But is there anything even you choose not to show?

— We never showed our weakness. The Israeli occupation wants to break us as journalists. They target us deliberately. They attack anyone wearing a blue vest, anyone working as a photojournalist or reporter, anyone carrying a camera.

But instead, each journalist became stronger. Whatever happens to us — even if we lose our homes, our families, or our lives — we will not break.

— You made a documentary — a movie you are presenting in Doha. Could you tell me about it?

— The film is part of a series called “When the Camera Froze”. In each episode, we interview someone connected to a photograph I took during the war. Many people around the world know these photos — some of them became iconic — but they don’t know the stories behind them. They don’t know what happened before the moment, during it, or after it.

So we bring the witnesses in front of the camera. You hear the story from two perspectives: the photographer’s, and the survivor’s.

And this is important because it shows how complex the disaster really is. You may see just an image of a woman crying — but you don’t know what she lost before that moment, how she lived that morning, what changed in her life in a single second. You don’t know what happened to her afterwards — whether she survived another attack, whether she lost more family members. In this series, you finally hear all of that — told directly by the people who lived it.

— From this series, is there one story you could share?

— The story of Amina. Amina is the girl with the black-and-red eyes, wearing the blue mask — the whole world has seen her eyes. Everyone saw her face, but no one knew what had happened to her before that photo was taken. No one knew what this child went through when tanks drove over their neighbourhood again and again — when her home was crushed while she and her family were inside.

In the film, Amina tells everything: the night they were sleeping, the last conversation she had with her father, the moment she lost him and her sister.

— Are you ever scared for yourself?

— No.

— What are you afraid of?

— If I die without seeing my country free. We deserve to live like any other people in the world — to have the right to freedom, the right to good education, to clean food, to clean water, to our own state, our own currency. Until now, we have lived under Israeli occupation.

So, that is the only thing I am truly afraid of: to leave this world before seeing my country free.

— If you compare who you were when you first started photographing war to the person you are now, what would you say?

— I used to believe there was still some humanity left in this world. But over time, I became more hopeless. No one cares about us. And we have only ever asked for our basic rights — the right to live in our own country, the right to live in freedom. That is all we ever asked for.