Photojournalist Ali Jadallah, who showed the world the terrible famine in Gaza with his photos during President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's speech to the 80th United Nations General Assembly, was deemed worthy of the Presidential Grand Prize for Culture and Arts.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced the names of the winners of the 2025 Presidential Arts and Culture Awards, awarded in the fields of science, culture, painting, music, Anatolian archeology and photography, at a ceremony held at the Presidential Complex.Anadolu Agency (AA) photojournalist Ali Jadallah, working in Gaza, was deemed worthy of the Presidential Grand Prize for Culture and Arts in the field of Photography.Jadallah, who has worked as a photojournalist at AA since 2015, has documented life in the Gaza Strip for more than 15 years and conveyed the humanitarian impact and reality of Israel's attacks on the region to the world public.Jadallah's family home was targeted in the first days of the attack launched by Israel on October 7, 2023. He lost his father, two siblings and three cousins in the attack, and his mother, a dialysis patient, was rescued from the rubble with serious injuries. Jadallah personally removed his family's bodies from the rubble in three days. Jadallah, whose wife, children and mother were evacuated from Gaza and brought to Türkiye, continued to document the city's destruction without leaving Gaza.In his speech at the 80th United Nations (UN) General Assembly held in New York, USA in September, President Erdoğan showed a photo titled “Food distributed to Palestinians struggling with famine in Gaza” taken by Ali Jadallah on July 22, 2025.These frames, used as evidence, were also included in the hearing at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where South Africa's demands for additional measures against Israel were discussed. Jadallah also won many prestigious photojournalism awards around the world for his work in Gaza.
