Photographer wins prize for photo of Gazans taking Shani Louk’s corpse
Freelance photojournalist for the Associated Press, Ali Mahmud, won the Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Photo of the Year (POY) award for documenting what occurred on Oct. 7, including a photo of Shani Louk’s half-naked corpse as Hamas terrorists lean over it in the back of a truck, driving it away to Gaza.
The category “recognizes the collaborative effort of a photography staff covering a single topic or news story. It is a narrative picture story that consists of images taken as part of a team effort to cover a single issue or news story,” according to the website.
Other photos, mostly attributed to other photographers on behalf of the Associated Press, were snapped of destroyed or damaged buildings in Gaza, injured or dead Palestinians, and Israelis mourning at funerals or fleeing from rocket attacks. However, the ability of the photographers to capture these moments so close to the time of the attacks and the crimes
committed raises questions as to their morality at best, and knowledge of the attacks before they occurred at worst.
The program posted news
about the AP’s victory, alongside Mahmoud’s photo of Louk on Instagram, where they came under immense criticism from users. Louk’s
name is not mentioned anywhere in the program’s Instagram post.
“There is a dead body of a partially unclothed human being, a young woman who was brutally murdered and probably raped. This cannot be real. Please remove this photo,” one user wrote, while another said “She has a name. Shani Louk. Her family specifically requested that we remember her laughing and living. Take this down and show some respect. If you want to post our Shani, find a photo she consented to.”
Mahmud, who took the photo of her, had his name mentioned in an earlier report when parents of Louk and other Nova massacre victims sued AP and Reuters last month for their employment of photojournalists who accompanied the terrorists on their pogrom, charging that AP ignored close connections the photographers had to terrorist organizations, to which the news agency responded: “we have not seen any evidence – including in the lawsuit – that the freelance journalists who contributed to our coverage did” have such connections.