Mohammed Fayez Abu Matar

Their life

Mohammed Fayez Abu Matar, a 28-year-old freelance photographer from Gaza's southernmost city of Rafah, spent his final hours doing what he did best—documenting the quiet moments of humanity amid war's chaos. Born into a family of tradesmen, the self-taught photographer first gained notice during the 2021 Gaza conflict with his haunting black-and-white portraits of children in rubble. By October 2023, his work had appeared in Reuters galleries and Al Jazeera Arabic, his signature style transforming even the most devastating scenes into poetic testaments of survival. On October 11, while photographing displaced families sheltering in a Rafah apartment building, an Israeli airstrike turned his lens into a permanent memorial—the strike that killed him simultaneously destroying his last memory card and preserving only the final images he'd transmitted moments earlier. These surviving photographs, showing wide-eyed toddlers clutching makeshift toys, became the foundation of the posthumous exhibition "Unfinished Light" that toured Istanbul and Beirut.

Mohammed Fayez Abu Matar, a 28-year-old freelance photographer from Gaza's southernmost city of Rafah, spent his final hours doing what he did best—documenting the quiet moments of humanity amid war's chaos. Born into a family of tradesmen, the self-taught photographer first gained notice during the 2021 Gaza conflict with his haunting black-and-white portraits of children in rubble. By October 2023, his work had appeared in Reuters galleries and Al Jazeera Arabic, his signature style transforming even the most devastating scenes into poetic testaments of survival. On October 11, while photographing displaced families sheltering in a Rafah apartment building, an Israeli airstrike turned his lens into a permanent memorial—the strike that killed him simultaneously destroying his last memory card and preserving only the final images he'd transmitted moments earlier. These surviving photographs, showing wide-eyed toddlers clutching makeshift toys, became the foundation of the posthumous exhibition "Unfinished Light" that toured Istanbul and Beirut.

Abu Matar's legacy persists through the photographers he mentored in Rafah's cramped press clubs, where trainees now study his recovered contact sheets to learn what colleagues call "the art of seeing through darkness." His family's ongoing battle to retrieve his camera from the rubble—now a symbolic quest for all of Gaza's silenced storytellers—was featured in the 2024 documentary "Framing the Unseen." The Palestinian Journalists' Syndicate records his death as the fourth in what would become the deadliest war for journalists in modern history, a grim milestone that began with his killing and has since claimed over 150 media workers. Today, his surviving brothers maintain an underground archive of his work in Rafah, determined that Israel's bombs won't have the final edit on Mohammed's vision.

Key Details:

Born: 1995, Rafah, Gaza

Died: October 11, 2023 (Israeli airstrike)

Last Known Work: "Rafah's Shadows" series on displacement

Posthumous Recognition: CPJ's 2023 Killed Journalists List, UNESCO Press Freedom Memorial

How they died

Israeli airstrikes

killed on October 11, 2023, when Israeli airstrikes obliterated the building where he was documenting Gaza’s unfolding humanitarian catastrophe.

A plea from the family

The surviving relatives of Mohammed Fayez Abu Matar—a 28-year-old freelance photographer killed in an Israeli airstrike on Rafah on October 11, 2023—have channeled their grief into a relentless pursuit of justice. His father, Yousef Abu Matar, a construction worker who once built homes in Gaza, now spends his days sifting through legal petitions instead of rubble, demanding the return of his son’s confiscated camera from the destroyed building. "They took his life, then stole the proof of their crime," he told a UN Human Rights Council session in 2024, holding up Mohammed’s press card—one of the few belongings recovered.

Why we remember them

This record exists so that Mohammed Fayez Abu Matar, and all who are named in this archive, are never reduced to a number.

References & sources