Samar Abu Elouf


Samar Abu Elouf, sometimes romanized as Samar Abu Ouf, is a Palestinian photojournalist whose work documents life in Palestine. She has worked for Reuters and The New York Times.
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Career

Abu Elouf is from Gaza. Abu Elouf was 26 when she began seeking a career, desiring more purpose beyond being a housewife. She was drawn to photography and began taking photos despite the reprimands of her then-husband and her family. In 2010, she enrolled in photography classes and taught herself with online tutorials. In 2012, she won a prize in UNRWA's "Change the Picture" contest for one of her photos of children celebrating a birthday. She began freelance work with Reuters, Middle East Eye, and local magazine Al Ghaidaa. While covering a border protest in Gaza in 2015, Elouf improvised a helmet from a cooking pot and made a vest with "press" written on it to make it clear that she was a photographer documenting the events.
After the onset of the Gaza war, she began living out of her Jeep and traveled between cities to report and document the aftermath of airstrikes. Her home in Gaza City was destroyed in an airstrike. She won the 2023 George Polk Award for Photojournalism, jointly with Yousef Masoud, for her photographs for The New York Times of the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip in late 2023. In December 2024, Abu Elouf and Israeli photographer jointly won the UNICEF Photo of the Year award for their portraits of child survivors of the Gaza war and October 7 attacks, 2023, respectively.
In December 2023, she and her children evacuated to Doha in Qatar with assistance from The New York Times. Since leaving Gaza, Abu Elouf's photography has documented the lives of other displaced people. While in Doha, Abu Elouf lived near Mahmoud Ajjour, a child who lost both his arms due to an Israeli airstrike; Elouf took a portrait photograph of Ajjour, with permission from his mother, as part of a news report on people wounded during the war in Gaza receiving medical treatment in Qatar. The picture was recognised as the 2025 World Press Photo of the Year.

Awards and honours

Personal life

Abu Elouf has four children; she and her children are based in Doha, Qatar as of 2024. During the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis 14 of Elouf's family members were killed in an explosion.