Motaz Azaiza has seen the horrors of war firsthand. Now he is trying to restore his faith in humanity. For 107 days, he worked as a photojournalist on the front lines of his home region’s conflict zone, documenting the carnage caused by relentless Israeli airstrikes in raw, unedited detail that was impossible to ignore.
As mainstream news organizations were unable to film inside the Gaza Strip, Azaiza, like other Palestinian journalists in the area, documented the early stages of the conflict.
Local health officials in the enclave say more than 68,000 people have been killed in the past two years, more than 90% of homes destroyed and most of the population internally displaced.
Azaiza knows she is lucky to be alive. “My life is worth more now than if I were dead,” he told CNN earlier this month. “Many Gazans were killed. No one speaks their names.”
It has been 21 months since Azaiza fled to Qatar with her immediate family. He now lives in New York. He is working with aid organizations to help the people of Gaza, and says he has raised $60 million so far and saved many lives. He recently launched a foundation to continue fundraising for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which he said will help provide food, pastries, tankers of clean water, blankets and shelter. “A candle in the darkness,” he describes the Motaz Foundation to his Instagram followers, encouraging those in need to personally ask for help.
When asked at a recent event at the Muslim Wellness Center in Roswell, Georgia, why he chose the name after himself, he said he simply couldn’t think of another name. But he takes pride in his work, which has given him purpose as he navigates life’s traumatic upheavals.
“Maybe this will help me forget the mental pain I’m in,” he thought, leaning against the back of a pickup truck behind a Yemeni coffee shop where a fundraising event for the foundation had just been held. “The moment you wire money to people and get help, support, food, you feel high!” Both his suffering and elation are evident as he rides through a maelstrom of emotions. “I have never been an unhelpful person. I always try to be helpful every step of the way,” he said.
More than 240 journalists have been killed in Gaza since the Hamas-led terrorist attack occurred on October 7, 2023, killing more than 1,200 people and taking approximately 250 hostages, prompting a fierce military response from Israel. Israel denies targeting journalists, but Gaza is Israel’s worst-ever conflict zone, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Azaiza said she received death threats in anonymous phone calls shortly before leaving the Strip, and knew her story could easily have ended there. Does being this close to death make him feel more alive? it’s complicated. “Well, because I have nothing to lose,” he answered.
He says he lost countless friends in Gaza. But he also feels dead inside. “My soul turned off,” he said. Like those who were able to escape the war or who watched it unfold from afar, he still grappled with survivor’s guilt, feeling at times that he was lucky to have survived, and that he was even luckier to have escaped. “This is the emotion that people want me to feel,” he explains. “Or that’s what Israel wants me to feel, because once Israel has defeated you internally, there’s nothing else to do. I have that, but I try not to let it control me.”
Azaiza says she has always wanted to be a photographer, but she would never have pursued it had violence not paved the way for her. He preferred to take artistic photographs of busy markets and children playing on beaches, and was exasperated that the outside world seemed interested in paying for his work only when he and other photojournalists in Gaza competed for images depicting the most graphic scenes after the bombing. His record documenting Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks has earned him a huge following on social media and professional success. His photo, taken on October 31, 2023, of a woman trapped in a pancake apartment in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza was recognized by Time magazine as one of the top 10 photos of the year. But unlike his peers in other countries, he was unable to celebrate his accomplishments. Because only the extreme suffering of the community gave him the opportunity to succeed.
Azaiza says she feels that somehow fate chose her to be the bridge between the Gaza massacre and the outside world, and now confesses that before the war, she had often predicted her future. Azaiza said she often had dreams of running through the streets wearing a press vest, the building next to hers being blown up, and her head hitting the ground before she woke up. The dream had no meaning to him. “Then the next thing I knew, I had my vest on, I had my helmet on, and I was in a car (passing) the building I had seen in my dream. The building was on fire. A lot of the things I had imagined were happening,” he said.
During a fundraiser in Georgia, a young woman stood up and spoke to him. “Thank you for opening my eyes,” she said, her voice shaking with emotion as she wiped a tear from her cheek. “Thank you so much for being alive and for being here.” Another man stood and hailed him as a hero. Azaiza deflected, saying, “I’m not a hero. I’m not Superman. I still have to wait in line for the bathroom.”
Azaiza said she never wanted to be famous and has more than 15 million followers on Instagram, but it’s just a burden on her shoulders and she’s still the same person she was on October 6, 2023. He learned the hard way that it is impossible to stay away from politics when it comes to Gaza. In Gaza, numerous competing factions each have their own policies to pursue. He said some people who used to admire him are now jealous of him and instead take to social media to badmouth and troll him. Words of hate are in some ways worse than bullets, he said, because at least people know how much bullets hurt.
“But this eats you up from the inside, tightens your heart, tightens your stomach, makes you unable to eat, makes you think too much. And it hurts everyone around you, it hurts your mother. Keyboard warriors, this is how Israel will win. They don’t need to divide us, we’re already divided.”
Although he is grateful for the ceasefire and the end to the killings, he doesn’t think it’s fair to Palestinians. “I just wanted to stop the genocide,” he explained. “We have been asking since October 9 to stop it. Give them (Israel) hostages. But no one listened to us until we lost everything.
“Now it sounds like peace is giving Israel more peace and more power. They got what they wanted after the genocide: the whole area. Maybe that will last, because there is nothing left.”
An independent United Nations investigation concluded in September that Israel committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, echoing findings by other genocide experts and human rights groups, all of which Israel rejects.
For now, Azaiza is concentrating on humanitarian work, but living a kind of ambiguous life. He dreams of returning to Gaza and building a house by the sea, but wonders what his life will be like when he returns. He says he wants to be Gaza’s youth minister one day, but he knows many politicians are corrupt. He also wants to start a family.
Most of all, he dreams of working with a camera in a simpler life. “Do you know Tarzan?” he asked rhetorically. “I want to be Tarzan with a camera. I want to go to Tanzania with a camera and photograph lions and animals. I don’t want to photograph humans anymore. Humans bring problems, they bring pain, they bring trouble. There are no more humans, there are only animals, that’s all.”
