They Are Humans Too…

DATELINE: GAZA 1956 Text and Photographs by Per-Olow Anderson Human suffering is nothing new to me. As a photo-journalist I have encountered many times during the newspaper and magazine assignments that have taken me to seventy-four countries in the past twenty years. But none of my experiences was more shocking to me than my introduction to the plight of the more than one million Palestine Arab refugees in the Middle East, whom I first saw in April, 1956, on my arrival to Gaza on an assignment for a Swedish magazine. The Palestinian Arab refugee exists in misery and despair in crowded camps in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and the Gaza strip—in caves in Palestine, squatters’ rows near large Arab cities, and the slums of cities themselves. I have seen the squalor of their tents and mud huts sprawled on rocky hillsides and in bone-dry, dust-brown valleys. I have felt their grief and suffering, heard their bitter memories and frustrations, and their tense and emotional cry: [Read more...]