Portrait of a Siege This interview appears in our Spring 2021 issue. Subscribe now to receive a copy in your mailbox. Jehad al-Saftawi has spent years photographing the gruesome human toll of the war in Gaza, but some of the most searing images gathered in his new book are everyday encounters that the photographer captured in his wanderings through the city. One image in My Gaza: A City in Photographs shows a boy in a classroom smiling into the camera while his classmates laugh at their desks in the background. The peaceful scene is marred by the long scar stretching across the child’s face, the trace of an Israeli bomb attack that killed 48 members of his family in 2008. In another, a young boy bikes past the bright blue front door of someone’s house, which still stands on its hinges even though the building it once opened into has been reduced to rubble. Al-Saftawi’s photographs, like the landscape of the city, are indelibly marked by brutality, even when the violence remains out of the frame.