Tsawwar… Rehaf Batniji
“I took this photograph in July 2023 from the top of Al-Montar Hill,
the highest point from which you can see the city of Gaza from above,
stretching from north to south while you stand to its east.
This hill holds the oldest sycamore fig tree, known and remembered by all previous generations.
Seeing the city from above has always given a sense of calm and reassurance.
The distance softens the details, allowing a kind of quiet relief,
and offers a fragile sense of hope, of something you are now far from,
no longer immersed in its overwhelming flow.
I was there on a trip with my students, and I took the photograph while watching their astonishment as they saw this view for the first time in their lives.”
Rehaf Al Batniji is a Palestinian visual artist and photographer from Gaza, now based in France. Self-taught, she explores memory, displacement, and the fragile links between personal and collective history. Her work—including Original Copy (2) and Fables of the Sea—transforms ordinary images into urgent documents of life under conflict. She has exhibited internationally at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Gulf Photo Plus Dubai, Farc Gallery in Metz, and Arles, and has been published in Le Monde diplomatique and Libération. Beyond her art, she mentors emerging creatives in Gaza, using photography as both resistance and preservation.
Tsawwar is an ongoing visual series in Daftar which explores the stories behind a photograph, taken in the region or by an Arab photographer, written in their own words.
