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Award-Winning Photo Shares Human Tragedy of Gaza War

Dalia Hatuqa tells the tragic story behind the World Press Award-winning photo of two dead children wrapped in white cloth during a funeral procession in Gaza last November.
Paul Hansen of Sweden, a photographer working for the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, poses holding his picture that won the World Press Photo of the year for 2012, at Dagens Nyheter's office in Stockholm February 15, 2013. The photograph, which Hansen took on November 20, 2012, shows a group of men carrying the bodies of two dead children, who were killed in an Israeli missile strike on Gaza City, and won the top World Press Photo prize on Friday.        REUTERS/Fredrik Sandberg/Scanpix    (SWEDEN - Tags: ME

On the evening of Nov. 19, a bomb dropped by an Israeli aircraft struck the Jabalya refugee camp home of the Hijazi family, tearing it down and killing Fouad Hijazi and two of his infant sons. This horror story was one of many told by neighbors and loved ones, and documented by Human Rights Watch (HRW) (among other groups) in the aftermath of the Israeli onslaught on Gaza last year. In addition to crushing Fouad and his two sons — Mohamed, 4, and 2-year-old Sohaib — the bomb that leveled the two-story cinderblock house wounded Fouad’s wife, Amna, and the rest of their children.

The aftermath of this tragedy was documented by Swedish photographer Paul Hansen, who captured the funeral procession taking the two toddlers to their burial site. The picture, which shows weeping men holding the children shrouded in white cloth with nothing showing but their listless faces, earned Hansen the 2012 World Press Photo award. Hansen’s picture, one of the many searing images of the eight-day war in Gaza, was taken just one day after the Hijazis were killed, as their bodies were marched through the neighborhood to the cemetery and as their mother lay in an intensive care unit, unable to receive or be consoled by mourners and now homeless.

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