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The young Shani Louk, lifeless on a pickup truck, half naked and probably already dead, surrounded by Hamas militiamen screaming after having carried out the massacre at the rave party: the image of the 22-year-old girl, tattoo artist and influencer, immediately became one of the symbols more dramatic than the October 7 massacre.
The work of a Palestinian photographer from the Associated Press, Ali Mahmoud, won the prestigious Reynolds Award from the Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, one of the oldest photojournalism competitions in the world.
The shot won the Team Picture Story of the Year category. A recognition which, however, rekindled a furious controversy in Israel and its social networks which broke out just a few hours after its publication by the AP and Reuters: the first to protest were the relatives of the young woman with dual nationality, Israeli and German, who accused the photojournalist of being ’embedded’, following the Hamas militiamen in the Nagev desert during their massacre at the Nova festival, where 260 young people were killed.
And even today the reaction of the Jewish community is very harsh: “We are disgusted and shocked”, we read in the X account of the European Jewish Congress, an acronym that brings together 42 different Jewish organizations from the Old Continent.
“It is not only a lack of respect towards Louk’s family – the post reads – but also towards the over 1,200 citizens who were brutally murdered by Hamas on October 7. We ask the AP to say how and why their journalists were documenting Hamas’ crimes that day, and how they managed to get to the crime scene so quickly.”