The Price of Occupation

On January 26, 2023, Israeli soldiers, hidden in the cargo hold of a dairy truck, rode into the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, where the Magnum photographer Sakir Khader was preparing to leave for his grandmother’s home in Nablus.

“Dying to Exist,” a recent collection of Khader’s photographs, opens with an account of what followed. WhatsApp messages between Khader and a friend allow us to reconstruct a time-stamped narrative of those hours as he experienced them:

6:23 A.M.: An alarm sounds in the camp, clashes between Israeli soldiers and locals begin.

7:40 A.M.: Bullets fly by.

8:13 A.M.: A boy is shot dead in front of Khader. His body lies on the street, and snipers shoot at anyone trying to remove it.

9:47 A.M.: Drones fly above.

10:58 A.M.: Combat helicopters soar overhead, Israeli forces fire rockets at a house.

11:14 A.M.: Reports say ten are dead.

While he sent messages to his friend, Khader was out taking photographs. The images that appear in Khader’s book draw from his archive and new images captured in 2019, 2023, and 2024, and form part of an ongoing series of photographs taken in Palestine. Images of massacres in Gaza have permeated public consciousness throughout the last two years; Khader shows a life in proximity to more insidious forms of violence in the West Bank that have recently become more frequent, more intense. “I’m visualizing an occupation,” he told me.