Mrs. Abu Mustafah and her children grieve during a funeral for another one of her sons who was shot and killed while sleeping one night in the family’s home in Khan Younis in the occupied Palestinian territory of the Gaza Strip, May 2004. (Photographer: Bénédicte Kurzen)
In 2004, Bénédicte Kurzen traveled to the Gaza Strip to contribute to a documentary photography project on violence against women. Many of her photographs center women mourning the loss of husbands and children, a kind of physical and psychological violence that is rarely described or captured by casualty counts and other statistics. Sadly, these images remain familiar today, as though mothers and wives in Gaza are forced to bear a monopoly on grief they never asked for.
Kurzen is a French photojournalist whose professional career effectively began in Gaza with these photographs after first traveling to the West Bank and Jerusalem one year earlier to attempt to document the harsh realities of military occupation.