AP teams show Palestinians working to salvage Gaza’s history

By Marian Fam, Wafaa Shurafa, Mohammad Jahjouh, Abdel Kareem Hana, Jehad Alshrafi, Phil Holm, Dario Lopez and Oded Balilty

In a multiformat collaboration with compelling visuals, AP journalists from several teams told the story of how Palestinians are working to salvage Gaza’s history from the ruins of Israel’s military offensive.
The team in Gaza — Wafaa Shurafa, Mohammad Jahjouh, Abdel Kareem Hana and Jehad Alshrafi — spent months amid warfare and a fragile ceasefire filming and interviewing those racing to rescue heavily damaged sites and worshippers confronting the destruction of the beloved Great Omari Mosque.

Religion writer Marian Fam interviewed people in Gaza, the West Bank and the United States to explore the emotional, religious and cultural toll of the damage. Fam spoke with specialists scrambling to preserve what they could under extraordinarily difficult circumstances and detailed the major challenges they face.

Oded Balilty, AP’s chief photographer in Jerusalem, scoured hundreds of AP archive photos to find comparative images of the sites before the war and paired them with recent photographs taken from similar angles, revealing how dramatically the landscape has changed.

Dario Lopez, a strategy newsperson on the Digital team based in Arizona, created an intuitive presentation that allows audiences to move seamlessly between before-and-after images.

Phil Holm of the Graphics team produced a map pinpointing key sites and incorporated a satellite image of the historic Great Omari Mosque.
Judges praised the storytelling for focusing on an aspect of the war that has received limited coverage, as well as the strong interactive presentation that enabled audiences to clearly see the transformation of landmark sites.

For an engaging multiformat package that brought together journalists from the Religion, Middle East, Graphics and Digital teams, Marian Fam, Wafaa Shurafa, Mohammad Jahjouh, Abdel Kareem Hana, Jehad Alshrafi, Phil Holm, Dario Lopez and Oded Balilty earn this week’s Best of AP — First Winner.