Fatima Hassouna was born in March 2000 in Gaza City. The daughter of a taxi driver, she belonged to the middle class. A multimedia graduate of the University College of Applied Sciences in Gaza, she quickly gained recognition as a photographer and has collaborated with numerous local and international media outlets, including Untold Palestine, the Tamer Institute for Community Education (which has been working on children's issues in Palestine for thirty years and received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2009), and the American platform Mondoweiss. Her work has been published in the British daily The Guardian and featured in international exhibitions such as Gaza, My Beloved, and SAFE. Her fellow photographers have nicknamed Hassouna "the eye of Gaza."
She began professionally documenting life in the city after the Israeli bombardments following the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. As one of the few local journalists able to cover the war after foreign journalists were banned from entering Gaza, Hassouna documented the forced evacuations imposed by the Israeli army, the destruction of infrastructure by Israeli airstrikes, civilian casualties, funerals, and scenes of resilience, such as children playing in the ruins. Moreover, in addition to her journalistic activities, she organized writing workshops for children in a school in northern Gaza, which had become a shelter for displaced people.
On January 13, 2024, she survived an Israeli airstrike, which killed twelve members of her family. Her work appeared in The Guardian and other international media. On April 15, 2025, she posted her last Instagram story, showing a sunset in Gaza with the caption: "This is the first sunset in a long time."
In 2025, during the Cannes Film Festival, more than 350 stars and creators signed a letter condemning the assassination of Fatima Hassouna and her family and the genocide in Gaza.
