GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Miki Kratsman is a Jewish Israeli photojournalist who was born in Argentina. On his Facebook page, “People I Met,” launched on Dec. 2, 2013, he posted Aug. 24 a photo that he offered to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, and which is part of his project focusing on images of Palestinians who have died and are identified as shahids, or martyrs. It is a photograph that he took 12 years ago of Abdel Rahman Skafi, a Palestinian child, in Shajaiya neighborhood in eastern Gaza City.
Above every photo that includes the date it was taken on his Facebook page, Kratsman, 56, asks the question of what happened to the people in the photograph. Skafi’s photo is one of the ones that got the attention of his friends after he was killed in an attack by the Israeli army that claimed the lives of 60 people and wounded more than 200 during the war on the Gaza Strip in 2014.
Eslam al-Halaq, a friend of Skafi, left a comment on Kratsman’s page, saying that Skafi was killed in the 2014 war. He told Al-Monitor that he cried when he saw his friend’s photo as a child, and wished he were still alive to share the photo and joke together.
The comments on the photos of those who were killed or imprisoned makes Kratsman feel sad. He has covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1986, and has met a lot of Palestinian civilians, taken thousands of pictures and documented the shootings and public and official events. Since November 2011, he has been trying to find out what has happened to the people in his photographs.
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