Depicting Gaza from Fifteen Thousand Feet

Diego Ibarra Sánchez only had about a minute to capture the photos of the besieged landscape below. It was Thursday, July 31, and he was aboard a Jordanian military aircraft that was air-dropping aid into Gaza, when the plane’s rear cargo door briefly opened to dispense pallets of food for the enclave’s starving population. In that moment, Ibarra, a Spanish freelancer on assignment for the New York Times, relied on his instincts. “I’m not feeling, I’m just acting. I’m just focusing on my work,” he said.

The photos Ibarra took were among a handful of similarly stark images and videos published over the past week by various news outlets that laid bare what two years of bombardment and urban conflict have done to the enclave of two million people. Entire neighborhoods appear reduced to rubble, their former structures virtually indistinguishable from the dirt of the surrounding landscape. In one photograph, taken by the Washington Post’s Heidi Levine, smoke rises from several areas of dense urban terrain; hardly a single building appears unscathed. “I’m trying to portray the consequences of war,” Ibarra said. “Without pictures, there is no memory.”