The photographs lining the walls at the Midtown Arts & Theater Center were of a place most of the room had never seen and its subjects would never see again: a Gaza fishing harbor scattered with birds, children in a hospital courtyard, a figure alone on a darkening beach. Beneath them, on the evening of May 22, 2025, a 91-year-old man in a keffiyeh settled into an inlaid armchair, set his father's century-old land deeds on the table in front of him, and began at the beginning — in 1948.

Dr. Ahmad Hasan Joudah is one of the last living witnesses to the Nakba, the mass displacement of Palestinians during the founding of Israel. He was a teenager in the coastal village of Isdood when his family fled toward Gaza in October 1948; he would go on to earn a doctorate in history at the University of Michigan and write the first comprehensive study of the 18th-century Palestinian ruler Zahir al-'Umar. On this night he was the headline speaker for “My Beloved City (Gaza Habibti),” the Palestinian American Cultural Center's exhibition of work by more than 20 photographers from Gaza — the first major U.S. showing of the collective's images, on view at MATCH from May 15 to 24.

Asked by an audience member what the Nakba meant to him, Joudah did not reach for the present.

It means that I lost my identity, I lost my home, my country, my people, my culture, anyway. By the way, the first Nakba to me is worse than what we are now living or experiencing… Because that Nakba made the Palestinians lose their homeland completely.

That framing — 1948 as the root of 2025 — was the exhibition's argument made flesh. Around him, the show was not only landscapes. A section titled “A Tribute to Colleagues” memorialized Palestinian journalists killed while covering the war in Gaza, pairing portraits of surviving reporters with first-person accounts of the friends they had lost.

The scale of that loss is, by the count of press-freedom monitors, without modern precedent. As of August 9, 2026, the Committee to Protect Journalists counted at least 263 journalists and media workers killed since the war began in October 2023 — a toll the organization says is the deadliest for the press since it began keeping records in 1992. CPJ notes the figure spans Gaza, Israel, Lebanon, Yemen and Iran, though the overwhelming majority were Palestinian journalists in Gaza.

Four of the journalists remembered on the walls are among those CPJ has documented by name. Samer Abu Daqqa, a 45-year-old Al Jazeera cameraman, bled for hours before he could be reached after an Israeli drone strike in Khan Younis on December 15, 2023, according to CPJ. Hamza Al-Dahdouh, an Al Jazeera journalist and the son of the network's Gaza bureau chief, was killed alongside freelance video journalist Mustafa Thuraya near Rafah on January 7, 2024. Ayat Khadoura, a freelance journalist, was killed with members of her family in a strike on her home in Beit Lahia on November 20, 2023. Other reporters and photographers named in the exhibition's tributes could not be independently confirmed and are described here as the exhibition remembers them.

For Joudah, the documentary photographs on the walls and the historian's papers on his table were the same testimony taken at two different moments. He lifted the yellowed pages he had brought.

These are the documents of my father's land in Isdud. This is the first passport I ever had. It's a piece of paper from the Egyptian administration in Gaza when we traveled to Egypt… in 1950.

The evening sat inside a wider circuit of coverage. The Houston radio program Arab Voices carried remarks Dr. Rola ElFarra delivered at the exhibition about losing some 170 family members in Gaza, and has featured Nora Barrows-Friedman of The Electronic Intifada and United Nations humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher on the deepening famine there. The show's featured photographer, Bilal Al-Hams — a 23-year-old physiotherapy graduate whose studio and home were destroyed — kept working while displaced in Rafah.

Joudah has spent a lifetime insisting that the record survives the erasure. He returned to the ruins of Isdood in 1974 and paced out, tree by tree, where his family's house had stood. He last entered Gaza in 2013. Near the end of the night, asked how he would describe the Palestinian spirit, he answered without hesitation.

As long as we have Palestinians on the surface of this earth… they have to believe that one day they will go back to Palestine. Just believe in us. We'll be there.

Reporter's reflection

The following is a personal reflection by the reporter — commentary, offered in the first person and set apart from the reporting above.

I came to MATCH that night to photograph an event. I left thinking about courage.

The photographers whose work lined those walls did the most dangerous thing a person can do under a bombardment: they refused to run, and they refused to go quiet. They stayed to tell the story, and many of them were killed for it — not despite doing journalism, but because of it. They chose to speak instead of being made fearful and silent, to bear witness instead of turning away. To stand in a room hung in their honor, with their images still speaking after they no longer can, is to feel the full weight of what it costs to keep the record.

Dr. Ahmad Hasan Joudah has carried that weight the longest. He lost his home, his village, his country, and at 91 he was still in a chair in Houston, teaching — insisting that the truth outlast the erasure. That is its own form of defiance, and it is of a piece with the young journalists memorialized a few feet from where he sat: the refusal to let the story die with the storyteller.

For those of us who get to keep working — who have the honor and the privilege of standing in the same room as that work — there is a mantle of responsibility being handed forward. The people who told these stories paid for them with their lives. The least the rest of us can do is grow into that duty, mature into it, and take it up on behalf of everyone whose story would otherwise go untold — for Dr. Joudah, for the colleagues who did not come home, and for the ones who will have to be brave next.

Photographs from the exhibition, and the colleagues it remembered

Several of the images with this article are photographs I made of the exhibition itself — of the framed prints and the printed “A Tribute to Colleagues” panels as they hung on the walls at MATCH. The photographs on those walls, and the words in their captions, are not mine. The exhibition “My Beloved City (Gaza Habibti)” was produced and curated by the Untold Palestine collective, a project of YURA — Visual Stories for Change; the tribute photographs are the work of Bilal Al-Hams, a member of the collective, and the exhibition's documentary prints are by its photographers, among them Haneen Salem and Amira Nassar. The testimonies quoted on the panels are the surviving journalists' own words, as displayed that evening. I photographed what was there.

The tribute panels paired Gaza journalists who are still alive — who wrote the testimonies — with the colleagues they lost. The surviving journalists whose accounts appear include Malak Abu Odeh, Saif Riad al-Suwaiti, the videographer Anas Fatiha, Ekhlas Al-Qenawi, Amal al-Wadia, Shorouq Shahin, Mohammed Bassem Daher, Abd al-Hakim Abu Rayash and Wissam Yassin.

Out of respect, the colleagues and loved ones memorialized in the exhibition's tributes, as named on its panels:

Names are reproduced as the exhibition presented them; four are independently documented by the Committee to Protect Journalists, as noted, and the others stand as the surviving journalists named them.

Ahmad Hasan Joudah, “A Nakba Survivor from Isdood,” May 22, 2025, at the “My Beloved City (Gaza Habibti)” exhibition presented by the Palestinian American Cultural Center at MATCH — Midtown Arts & Theater Center Houston. Photographs by Frankie Mohammed, of the event and of the exhibition on display; the exhibition’s works are credited above. The current CPJ death toll is cited as of August 9, 2026; figures are updated by the monitor over time.