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2026 Hinzpeter Awards Winners
The Gaza war broke out on October 7, 2023. The Israeli military imposed a total blockade on the free access and reporting of foreign correspondents inside the Gaza Strip. The people of Gaza were driven into the condition of "a war without witnesses," in which the world could not properly grasp the reality of the war unfolding on the ground where they lived.
Amid the daily barrage of indiscriminate Israeli missile strikes and drone attacks, the Palestinian land and people of Gaza—confined within a narrow strip cut off from Israeli territory by tall, long stretches of barbed wire, yet still striving to build a community worth living in and to dream of a future—were being ruthlessly destroyed. With outside media access completely sealed off, the only ones who could possibly bear witness to the horrors of this war and carry them to the world were the journalists of Gaza themselves.
Amid the terror of a war in which even their own lives and safety could not be guaranteed, and relying on nothing more than a handful of video cameras, still cameras, mobile phones, and wireless transmission devices, Gaza's journalists buried in their hearts the fear of death, the crushing lack of communications infrastructure, and the grief of repeated, devastating losses—family, friends, colleagues. And still they fought to document, and to tell the world of, the catastrophic destruction of an entire society.
'Inside Gaza', winner of the 2026 Hinzpeter Awards Grand Prize, tells the story of Gaza's journalists who, refusing to yield to the ever-present threat of death, have continued to fulfill their duty and mission as reporters in the very heart of the news. It has continued for more than two and a half years now: the Gaza war. The film delivers its vivid record through footage and photographs taken by Palestinian journalists of AFP's Gaza City bureau, together with interviews conducted with them.
Even before the war, journalists at AFP's Gaza City bureau had worked to record events on the ground neutrally and to report only confirmed facts, in the midst of an extreme conflict between the Israeli government and Hamas dominated by partisan narratives on both sides. As a result, they found themselves caught in a double bind: subjected to hostile surveillance, control, and repeated detention by Hamas within Gaza, while simultaneously being suspected by the Israeli side of acting as Hamas agents.
This distrust deepened further once the Gaza war broke out and the propaganda war between Israel and Hamas intensified. Major international news organizations, unable to enter the field themselves to verify facts firsthand, grew suspicious of the footage, photographs, and reporting that AFP's journalists had risked their lives to gather on the ground in Gaza. In the end, even as these journalists documented on the spot the catastrophic reality of civilians—including children—being killed in indiscriminate Israeli attacks, and even hospitals meant to treat the war's victims being destroyed, their footage, photographs, and reporting were not being fully conveyed through the Western press.
Beyond the professional anguish this caused them, AFP's journalists testify to an even deeper pain as journalists: that the international community's failure to properly learn of Israel's inhumane attacks on Gaza and the civilian suffering they caused has left the world unresponsive to the war. They bear witness, too, to the collapse of a belief once held by the people of Gaza—that if journalists reported and broadcast the truth of this war to the world, the international community would in turn pressure Israel to end the carnage. Further still, they speak out about a reality in which the Israeli military's operations targeting and killing journalists have bred both a fear that they themselves could become unjust victims and a growing distrust toward journalists more broadly—and in doing so, the film poses a profound question about how journalists themselves can overcome and break through a crisis of journalism brought on by the warring parties' strategy of manufacturing "a war without witnesses."
This project was conceived as a form of solidarity: journalists outside Gaza taking up, alongside the questions raised by journalists inside Gaza, the shared task of searching for answers together. It was produced by Yann Ollivier, a former AFP journalist turned producer, and independent documentary director Hélène Lam Trong, drawing on footage shot by four Palestinian journalists of AFP's Gaza City bureau—Mai Yaghi, Adel Zaanun, Mahmud Hams, and Mohammed Abed—together with fact-checked AFP wire reports and interviews conducted with the four journalists. The completed film was released to the world in September 2025.
The jury praised the film as "an outstanding feature-length documentary that weaves powerful testimony and world news together with empathy, accuracy, and exceptional journalism," and as a work that poses the fundamental question of "what is the role of a journalist in an age that has lost its moral compass." The jury further commended how the film honors the struggle of journalists who, even under threat to their own lives, continued to document and report from the field, fulfilling their mission as video journalists and reporters—and how it invites viewers to understand, and to deeply reflect upon, a journalism now in crisis.
In this way, the film—distinguished by the solidarity between Gaza's video journalists and other reporters, and the journalists outside Gaza working to fully convey their truth and their struggle to the world—calls to mind the spirit and dedication of the journalist Jürgen Hinzpeter, who gave everything to bring the truth of the May 1980 Gwangju Democratization Movement to light. Hinzpeter took on mortal risk to slip into the scene of the Gwangju Democratization Movement, record the truth there, and bring the footage he had captured to the world.
Nor did he stop at news reporting alone: together with colleagues at Germany's ARD network, including journalist Jürgen Bertram, he went on to produce the documentary South Korea at a Crossroads, so that the truth of the Gwangju Democratization Movement—which the Chun Doo-hwan military junta's control had prevented Korea's own press from covering and disclosing—could be properly told.
The footage he recorded and the documentary he made shattered the illusion of silence and denial constructed jointly by the military dictatorship and the Korean press of the time, becoming a force that allowed Korean citizens to bring the truth of Gwangju's May 1980 into the light themselves—and helped move Korean society one step further toward an era of democracy, human rights, and peace.
When the Gaza war began on October 7, 2023, one of the primary targets of Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip was the power plants and electricity-generating facilities that supplied the territory. Destroying the power plants and generating equipment that sustained the daily lives of Gaza's residents was, in effect, equivalent to forcing the people of Gaza back into a primitive state of existence. Thermal power plants, solar and wind generation facilities, and even individual solar panels installed on private homes all became targets of thorough destruction by the Israeli military. With electricity and energy sources—essential elements of modern life—wiped out entirely, the lives of Gaza's people were pushed into an unsustainable state. With the import of all fuel—gasoline, diesel, crude oil—blocked, the method the people of Gaza found to obtain the energy needed to survive was extracting gasoline and diesel by burning plastic.
The people of Gaza search through the rubble of their destroyed city for scraps of waste plastic. Across the territory, they seal these plastic fragments inside scrap-metal drums and apply intense heat to extract a condensed liquid. Through this process of heating and condensing plastic, the people of Gaza produce petroleum products such as gasoline, diesel, and grease. The toxic fumes generated in the process pose a lethal threat, further worsening the health of a population already wounded by war and the already-devastated urban environment of Gaza. Even so, the petroleum products the people of Gaza obtain through this grueling labor are essential and irreplaceable—used to run small generators, water pumps, vehicles, and heavy equipment for reconstruction, sustaining the shattered lives of individuals and enabling the recovery of the community, even as they remain fully aware of the harm involved.
The Israeli military has gone so far as to strike the very sites where the people of Gaza carry out this work to obtain energy, destroying them from the air. What began as grueling labor undertaken to preserve even a minimal standard of living—accepting risks to health and the environment along the way—has once again become work that threatens life itself.
The project was conceived by video journalists Mohammed Sawwaf and Salah Al Haw, who previously won the Grand Prize ('The World at a Crossroads' Award) with their entry Voice from Gaza, which captured the truth of the Gaza war through the activities of emergency rescue teams saving people injured in Israeli airstrikes in the early stages of the 2024 war, as well as through the eyes of a young girl living through the conflict. This work was reported and produced together with video journalists Hedaa Al-Dahdouh and Ahmad Abu Ajwa, who have continued to document the catastrophic realities of the Gaza war from within Gaza itself.
The jury remarked that the apocalyptic reality of Gaza—reduced to a primitive state by the war—conveys, with striking realism, how war can drive the whole of humanity toward catastrophe. The jury also noted that this report vividly demonstrates just how hollow the environmental rhetoric of developed nations—no matter how forcefully they pursue policies such as carbon neutrality—becomes the moment those very same nations become parties to war. The jury gave particular praise to the courage of the reporting team, who risked their lives under the threat of Israeli military attack to bring their cameras into exposed sites where petroleum products were being produced from waste plastic, as well as to the meticulous and deeply humane reflection the team brought to bear on the slow violence inflicted by war.
Sudan's government forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a Sudanese paramilitary militia, have been locked in a protracted civil war since 2021. Beginning in September 2025, the RSF launched a fierce offensive against Darfur, a region in western Sudan that had remained under government control. On October 26, the RSF finally captured El-Fasher, the capital of Darfur and the government's last remaining stronghold in the region. In the three days immediately following El-Fasher's fall, the RSF killed at least 6,000 civilians. Over the following months, the death toll from the RSF's massacres is estimated to have exceeded 60,000. The RSF's attacks targeted non-Arab ethnic minorities—the Fur, Zaghawa, and Berti peoples—as well as captured government soldiers, but ordinary civilians were also swept up as victims of the killing.
In February 2026, the UN's Independent International Fact-Finding Mission announced that the elements of genocide had been established in the case—killings targeting a specific ethnic group, the infliction of serious bodily and mental harm, and the deliberate imposition of living conditions calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction. Yet even as the massacre was unfolding, not a single independent foreign correspondent was able to enter Darfur or El-Fasher to document the truth of the killing, due to the severity of the information blackout. Communications were completely cut off, and of the roughly twenty Sudanese journalists who remained on the ground, many went missing or were detained, while some were subjected to sexual violence. The world learned of this atrocity belatedly—not through live testimony, but through footage the perpetrators filmed themselves and posted to social media, and through bloodstains visible in satellite imagery.
Against this backdrop, video journalist Olivier Jobard and journalist Charles Emptaz entered Sudan a month after the massacre to investigate the truth of what had happened in Darfur. Evading the close surveillance of Sudan's military intelligence service, the two reporters made their way—with great difficulty—to refugee camps in northern Sudan where survivors of the massacre had gathered, and to El-Obeid in central Sudan, where the fighting between government forces and the RSF was escalating and the tragedy of Darfur was being replicated in full. Their reporting, uncovering the hidden truth of the Sudan massacre, aired on Arte Reportage on June 2, 2026.
The testimony the two journalists gathered from survivors who had escaped the massacre is harrowing. Halima, who fled on foot for 750 kilometers, was forced to watch her daughter being raped in front of her. Fathiya's family went two days without a drop of water while crossing the desert, reduced to drinking car radiator coolant and their own urine. Thirteen-year-old Otour was orphaned, left with nothing but her mother's final words before she was killed by shellfire. In the village of Aluweib, a UAE-made drone struck funeral mourners and an ambulance, killing more than 52 people. In El-Obeid, children as young as eleven-year-old Manal are forced to work in the market for 40 to 50 cents a day instead of attending school.
The significance of the truth these two journalists brought to the world lies in the fact that it was the first time the reality of this "forgotten war" was testified to the international community through the vivid presence and voices of survivors themselves. Even after the UN Independent Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan released its report in February 2026, the massacre of 60,000 ordinary people last October went almost entirely unnoticed by the world. According to a study by the Media and Journalism Research Center (MJRC) analyzing 78,667 English-language news reports across ten humanitarian crises (including Sudan, Syria, Gaza, and Ukraine), the war in Gaza received an average of 58.5 English-language news reports per day, and the war in Ukraine an average of 19.4 per day—yet the Sudan massacre, in which an estimated 60,000 deaths occurred last October alongside massive displacement and sexual violence, received virtually no meaningful coverage in the English-language press, and almost none at all in the Korean press.
In a place where the interests of major world powers such as the United States, Russia, and China barely intersect, this crime against humanity drew almost no attention from the international community or the media. Against that backdrop, the two journalists' reporting reached beyond France's Arte network to draw the attention of international outlets including Newsweek in the United States, helping to shine a light on Sudan's forgotten conflict and the tragedy of the massacre it produced.
The jury placed great weight on the fact that, in a conflict that had become essentially a blank page in international news, the reporters traveled into the field to record vivid testimony from survivors of the Sudan massacre, drawing the attention of the international community and the media to a forgotten war. The jury also highly commended the courage of the reporting team, who continued their coverage despite close surveillance by Sudanese intelligence authorities, repeated detentions, and the ongoing danger of combat and drone strikes. The jury further praised the strikingly cinematic visual approach the piece brought to such a heavy subject as genocide, and the strength of its editorial craftsmanship in supporting the story.
Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot and killed on May 11, 2022, becoming the first American journalist to be killed by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. The truth of the case was immediately obscured by a deliberate and sustained disinformation campaign, and no one was ever held accountable. Journalists Dion Nissenbaum, Fatima AbdulKarim, and Conor Powell set out to uncover one of Israel's most tightly guarded secrets—the identity of the soldier who killed Shireen—and to investigate why the U.S. government failed to hold anyone accountable.
The process this documentary follows in unraveling Shireen's death also carries deeply personal stories connected to its producers and subjects. Fatima AbdulKarim and Shireen were friends and colleagues. The fact that the U.S. government tolerated Israel's role in the killing of an American journalist without demanding accountability amounted to a kind of impunity for Israel—and within two years of Shireen's death, Israel had become the most dangerous country in the world for journalists.
The producers of this news documentary also showcase the legacy Shireen left behind as a mentor to young Palestinian women journalists across the Middle East, in the mold of figures like Christiane Amanpour. The production team conducted an extensive investigation spanning from Washington to the West Bank.
Drawing on his deep network of contacts among American officials, Dion Nissenbaum secured an on-camera interview with the only American to have investigated Shireen's death—a U.S. Army officer. Through this interview, the team concluded that Shireen had been deliberately targeted and killed by Israeli soldiers despite wearing a vest clearly marked "PRESS."
With the help of Canadian journalist Ari Flanzraich, the production team also succeeded in gaining access to a network of Israeli soldiers who knew the identity of the soldier who killed Shireen. As a result, the documentary confirms the identity of the soldier who killed Shireen and concludes that the U.S. government concealed evidence, allowing Israeli officials to effectively evade responsibility for the killing of an American journalist. To verify that they had correctly identified the soldier responsible for the killing, the production team worked with the Israeli military itself, and in the process obtained unofficial confirmation that the Israeli military's own information was accurate. Before releasing the film, the producers informed both Shireen's family and the soldier's family of their findings. Through this process, the documentary became the first to reveal the identity of the Israeli soldier who killed Shireen. It also achieved a further journalistic milestone by securing testimony from a senior Biden administration official who came forward, driven by a crisis of conscience over how the case had been handled.
The release of this news documentary drew enormous attention from the press. The New York Times published an exclusive story on the documentary, breaking the news that the soldier's identity had been confirmed. CNN, NPR, The Guardian, Democracy Now!, The Times of Israel, Al Jazeera, and journalists around the world rushed to report on the facts the documentary had exposed, and the film became the catalyst for the introduction of the "Justice for Shireen Act" in the U.S. Congress, which remains under deliberation.
The jury praised the documentary's achievement of a high standard of journalism through the solidarity and collaboration of fellow journalists in pursuit of both the killer and those seeking to cover up the case. The jury noted that this effort reflected not merely personal affection among colleagues, but an investigative report that expressed journalists' own determination to stand up against any and all attempts and forces that suppress the freedom to report and publish the truth—achieving significant results in public interest value, timeliness, impact, and overall craftsmanship.
The Hinzpeter Awards organizing committee has previously honored this same spirit: in 2022, to commemorate the journalistic integrity and achievements Shireen Abu Akleh had shown throughout her life before she was killed by Israeli forces while reporting, the committee dedicated the 2nd Hinzpeter Awards' non-competitive Achievement Award—the ‘May Gwangju Award’—to Al Jazeera video journalist Majdi Bannoura, who had worked alongside Shireen covering the West Bank and Israel for more than twenty years and who filmed the final moments of her life.
Stevan Labudović (1926–2017) was a video journalist with Filmske Novosti, the state newsreel production company of the former Yugoslavia. From 1959 to 1962, he spent three years reporting alone from the front lines of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), breaking through the information controls and propaganda imposed by the French colonial authorities to bring the Algerian people's perspective and struggle against French colonialism to the world.
The technology of motion pictures emerged in the nineteenth century. As a modern medium of communication capable of capturing and reproducing reality, allowing people to see it collectively, and enabling images to be reproduced and shared without limit, motion pictures rapidly spread throughout the world. As the public came to believe that "images record and show reality as it is," moving images began to serve as a powerful means of shaping public opinion and mobilizing political support, both within and beyond national borders. Beyond the boundaries of individual societies and states, the ability to create and distribute one's own images—what might be called "visual sovereignty"—and to exercise influence through them could even determine whether a society would become an empire or remain a colony.
Many societies and countries living under colonial or semi-colonial rule lacked cameras with which to record their own realities and voices, facilities to develop film, and channels through which to distribute their images to the world. For decades, they remained trapped in a structure in which their reality was recorded and represented through the perspectives and prejudices of empires and the institutions they controlled. Empires possessing the means of visual production and distribution used those capabilities to promote the legitimacy of colonial rule, portray independence movements resisting that rule as "mobs" or "terrorists," and conduct propaganda campaigns designed to obstruct their activities and shape international opinion and perceptions in their own favor.
Algeria, which after the French invasion of 1830 was incorporated into France as part of its metropolitan territory, divided into three départements, and transformed into a settler colony dominated by European settlers known as colons, was likewise unable to exert meaningful influence in this "war of images" with France. Even after the Second World War brought the decline of fascism and imperialism and many colonized nations began to achieve independence, Algeria remained locked into colonial rule, seemingly untouched by these transformations in the wider world. To break this deadlock, Algerians formed the National Liberation Front (FLN, Front de Libération Nationale) in November 1954 and launched an armed uprising, beginning the Algerian War of Independence (Guerre d'Algérie, 1954–1962).
The French government, drawing on its powerful influence over the global media, took the lead in controlling information and waging an information war over Algeria. French media, both at home and abroad, repeatedly portrayed the FLN as "terrorists" and "mobs," while the brutal realities of colonial rule—including torture, summary executions, and forced displacement by French forces—were systematically controlled and concealed. Algerians had virtually no independent capacity to produce or distribute their own visual records. They had no means of communicating their horrific reality, or their efforts to overcome it, to the world through their own images and voices. Instead, they remained trapped within the images and messages created by French propaganda.
Yugoslavia, which had developed a strong emotional and historical solidarity with Algeria's anti-colonial struggle, became the first European country to openly declare its support for the Algerian War of Independence in 1959. When an Algerian delegation seeking support for independence appealed for assistance, Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito—leader of a country at the forefront of the Non-Aligned movement and pursuing an independent position between the Western bloc led by the United States and the Eastern bloc led by the Soviet Union—promised weapons, uniforms, and medical assistance.
Drawing on his own experience as a partisan resistance leader who had fought for Yugoslavia's independence and unity against Nazi occupation during the Second World War, Tito recognized the historical parallels between the Yugoslav and Algerian struggles. He concluded that for the Algerian independence movement to succeed, it would also have to win the "war of images" against French propaganda by bringing the truth about Algeria to the world. He therefore dispatched his personal cameraman, Stevan Labudović, to the Algerian front.
During the Second World War, Labudović had worked as a photographer with the Yugoslav Partisans, documenting their struggle for independence. Following the establishment of Yugoslavia, he joined Filmske Novosti, the country's state newsreel production company, in 1948. Beginning in 1954, he covered President Tito and became known as "Tito's cameraman." In 1959, on Tito's personal orders, he was dispatched to the front lines of the Algerian War of Independence—a decision that marked a decisive turning point in his life.
The assignment was initially planned to last three months. Instead, Labudović remained for three years in the Algerian front-line maquis, or guerrilla bases, vowing that he would not take off his uniform until Algeria had won its freedom. From the very first night after his arrival in Algeria, his work placed him directly in the dangers of war: the unit on the Tunisia–Algeria border where he was staying came under attack that very night.
Carrying a 35mm film camera, Labudović repeatedly crossed the electrified French border defenses known as the Ligne Challe and Ligne Morice, risking his life to document the daily lives, training, and combat of the moudjahidine, or freedom fighters, operating from the maquis of the Aurès Mountains (Massif des Aurès, Wilaya I) and northern Constantine (Wilaya II), as well as the realities of repression by the colonial forces. He shared the dangers of the fighters as they moved through mountainous terrain and sometimes accompanied them on sabotage operations. To raise their morale, he even screened footage of the Yugoslav Partisan resistance against the Nazis.
Over the course of those years, he filmed more than 50 hours of footage, amounting to roughly 18 kilometers of film—though other accounts put the total considerably higher, at around 83 kilometers. Unlike other foreign war correspondents, Labudović enjoyed the complete trust of the Algerian leadership. As the international impact of his footage grew, the French military reportedly identified him as a target for assassination. The FLN detected the plot in advance and evacuated him to safety.
With a single camera, Labudović captured the reality of colonial Algeria. The power of truth contained in his images rapidly undermined the manufactured images that the French colonial authorities had spent enormous resources and manpower creating over many years.
Footage shot by Labudović fed into the short documentary Djazaïrouna (Our Algeria), produced by the cinema service of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic and edited by Algerian filmmakers Djamel Chanderli and Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina. The film was screened at the 15th United Nations General Assembly in 1960 and played a decisive role in placing Algeria's struggle for independence firmly on the international agenda. It has been recounted that one official present at the time remarked:
"The sound of the guns they fired could not be heard at the United Nations, but the images captured by Stevan reached the General Assembly hall intact."
By exposing to the international community the horrors of the colonial war that France sought to conceal, as well as the Algerian people's legitimate aspiration for independence, these images helped generate sympathy and support for Algeria even within parts of the Western bloc. They are also regarded as having significantly influenced the emergence of diplomatic recognition and international pressure at the United Nations concerning Algerian independence.
After Algeria achieved independence, Labudović was honored as a "national hero" and "the cameraman of the Algerian Revolution's maquis." His contribution continues to be commemorated in Algerian textbooks and museum exhibitions, while his footage is regarded as an authoritative visual record of the history of the Algerian War of Independence.
When he died in Belgrade in 2017 at the age of 91, the Algerian Embassy in Serbia provided medical assistance and support with his funeral arrangements. In 2021, the Prime Minister of Algeria personally visited his family home during a visit to Serbia to express his gratitude. The recognition afforded to Labudović thus continues at the state level to this day.
Hundreds of film reels left by Labudović were rediscovered and brought back into public attention in the twenty-first century through Serbian documentary filmmaker Mila Turajlić's two-part documentary projects, Non-Aligned: Scenes from the Labudović Reels and Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes from the Labudović Reels (2022). Together, they demonstrate anew the power of truth captured by a video journalist in the field—and how images can challenge unjust structures of power and the realities they seek to preserve.
The jury recognized that Stevan Labudović remained faithful to the essential role of a video journalist: refusing to yield to the environment of media influence, manipulation, and control created by powerful authorities; using a single camera to document the reality of oppressed people and bring it to the world; and giving their voices a place in the international public sphere. In doing so, he ultimately contributed to changing international public opinion and building the solidarity that helped lead to Algerian independence.
The trajectory of his life as a video journalist is fundamentally in keeping with the spirit of journalist Jürgen Hinzpeter, who documented the truth of Gwangju in May 1980 and helped inspire international solidarity, as well as the spirit of the late Yu Young-gil, the first journalist to film the events of May 18.
In recognition of these achievements and this shared commitment to bearing witness to truth through images, the jury has selected the late video journalist Stevan Labudović as the recipient of the 2026 May Gwangju Award.
