Real Lives
Motaz Azaiza turned an UNRWA content job into global photojournalism
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
In early 2023 Motaz Azaiza's job was making social media content for a refugee agency. Within a year Time had named him one of the hundred most influential people alive.
Nothing about the photographer changed. The subject did.
Deir al-Balah#
Motaz Hilal Azaiza was born on 30 January 1999 in Deir al-Balah refugee camp, in the middle of the Gaza Strip, and grew up there.
He took a degree in English language and translation from Al-Azhar University in Gaza in 2021 — a translator's training, which is closer to what he ended up doing than it looks.
He wanted to photograph beautiful things. He has said as much, repeatedly and with some bitterness: the place he was born decided what kind of photographer he would be.
The apprenticeship nobody noticed#
Before October 2023 his feed was Gaza on an ordinary day. Fishermen at dawn, the sea at Deir al-Balah, children in narrow alleys, weddings, the light on concrete.
At the start of 2023 he joined UNRWA USA as a freelance photographer and content creator, and he managed online content for the UN refugee agency in Gaza. It was a communications job.
That work matters to what came later. He already knew the camps, the families and the geography, and he had spent years learning to compose a frame before he had to compose one under fire.
What the pictures did#
When the war began, foreign press could not enter Gaza. Azaiza's phone became one of the few windows out, and the pictures did something news bulletins had stopped doing: they made the dead into individuals.
He photographed children being carried, streets that had been streets that morning, the specific expression of a man who has just understood what he is looking at. He also, deliberately, kept photographing the other thing — a boy grinning, a kite, a cat, the sea still being the sea.
He has described the discipline as making art out of the pain, which is a harder brief than documentation and a more honest one.
He left Gaza in January 2024, among the very few able to.
The honours#
The recognition arrived from an unusual spread of institutions, which is itself the story:
- Time placed him on its 100 most influential people of 2024.
- GQ Middle East named him its man of the year.
- The regional council of Normandy awarded him its Freedom Prize in June 2024.
- Trinity College Dublin's Law Society gave him its Praeses Elit medal in February 2026.
He has since addressed the United Nations in Geneva, spoken at universities across Europe and America, and appeared at the international journalism festival in Perugia.
The part he finds difficult#
Azaiza has been candid that the fame is not a reward. He did not want to be famous; he wanted the pictures to work, and he is aware that his own survival and departure are the reason he can speak at all while colleagues cannot.
That awareness is what keeps the work from becoming a personal brand. He talks about Gaza rather than about himself, and he credits the photographers still inside it.
He is twenty-seven. The archive he made before the war — the fishermen, the alleys, the sea — is now the only surviving picture of much of what he grew up in, taken by someone who photographed it simply because it was beautiful.
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