DaysofPal- Two images, decades apart, yet hauntingly similar in their portrayal of human suffering. On one side, there’s Mahmoud Ajjour, a nine-year-old Palestinian boy who lost both his arms in an Israeli strike on Gaza City in March 2024. On the other hand, Kim Phuc, a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl running naked down a road after being burned by napalm during the Vietnam War in June 1972. Both became symbols of the devastating human cost of war, captured in photographs that shook the world.
This month, Palestinian photographer Samar Abu Elouf received the 2025 World Press Photo of the Year award for her poignant image of Mahmoud Ajjour. In the photograph, Ajjour’s head and armless torso are partially shrouded in shadow, his gaze hollow yet piercing. The image encapsulates the catastrophic toll of the ongoing Israeli genocide on Gaza—a campaign backed fully by the United States—which has claimed over 52,365 Palestinian lives since October 2023.
In a recent interview with Al Jazeera , Ajjour recounted the moment he learned he had lost his arms. “I started crying. I was very sad, and my mental state was very bad,” he said. His ordeal worsened when he underwent surgery without anesthesia, a grim reality in Gaza due to the Israeli blockade of essential medical supplies. “I couldn’t bear the pain, I was screaming very loud. My voice filled the hallways.” According to Abu Elouf, the first anguished question Ajjour asked his mother was, “How will I be able to hug you?”
The photograph of Ajjour is emblematic of the unimaginable suffering endured by children in Gaza. By mid-December 2023, just two months into the conflict, UNICEF reported that 1,000 children had already lost one or both legs. Today, the UN warns that at least 100 children are being killed or injured daily in the besieged territory. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words—but how many pictures must we see before we truly confront the reality of genocide?
Meanwhile, April 30 marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, another chapter of U.S.-backed devastation. Kim Phuc, immortalized in Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph The Terror of War , became the face of that conflict. The image shows her fleeing a napalm attack, her skin charred and her face etched with apocalyptic agony. Reflecting on the day of the attack in a 2022 CNN interview, Phuc recalled, “Suddenly, there was fire everywhere, and my clothes were burned up by the fire … I thought: ‘Oh my goodness, I got burned, I will be ugly, and people will see me [in a] different way.’”
Phuc endured 14 months in the hospital, followed by years of excruciating pain, suicidal thoughts, and shame over the exposure of her mutilated body to the world. Napalm was just one tool in the U.S. arsenal designed to impose capitalist dominance through destruction. To this day, unexploded ordnance and the toxic legacy of Agent Orange continue to claim lives and cause birth defects in Vietnam, half a century after the war ended.
Susan Sontag, in her 1977 book On Photography, reflected on the power of images like Ut’s: “Photographs like the one that made the front page of most newspapers in the world in 1972 – a naked South Vietnamese child just sprayed by American napalm, running down a highway toward the camera, her arms open, screaming with pain—probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred hours of televised barbarities.”
Yet, despite the global outcry sparked by such images, the Vietnam War dragged on for three more years after Ut’s photo was published. Similarly, today, the endless stream of harrowing images from Gaza—each worthy of the title The Terror of War —demonstrates that barbarity remains as rampant as ever.
In the age of social media, where images and videos are consumed rapidly and fleetingly, the desensitizing effect on audiences cannot be overstated. Even photos of children like Mahmoud Ajjour, whose arms were blown off, risk being reduced to fleeting visuals rather than calls to action.
In an Instagram post on April 18, Abu Elouf expressed her frustration: “I always have, and still do, wish to capture the photo that would stop this war—that would stop the killing, the death, the starvation.” She then posed a poignant question: “But if our photos can’t stop all this tragedy and horror, then what is the value of a photo? What is the image you’re waiting to see to understand what’s happening inside Gaza?”
Her words resonate deeply, leaving us to ponder a similar question: In the face of such relentless suffering, what is the value of an opinion article—or any form of expression—if it fails to spur meaningful change?
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